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other counts. less Barry Bonds waves to a supporter while his attorney Allen Ruby speaks after Bonds was convicted on one count of obstruction of justice at his perjury trial at the Phillip Burton Federal Courthouse in San... more Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 22 Caption Close Barry Bonds guilty of obstruction of justice 1 / 22 Back to Gallery
Bonds' answer was obstruction of justice, the jury ruled, a deliberate attempt to interfere with the grand jury's probe.
Bonds, 46, showed no reaction to the verdict. He left court without saying anything. A sentencing date was not set, and Bonds remains free. He could be sentenced to two years in prison under federal guidelines, although some legal experts say he is likely to receive no more than house arrest.
U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag said the trial was about truth and justice.
"In the United States, taking an oath and promising to testify truthfully is a serious matter," she said in a statement. "We cannot ignore those who choose instead to obstruct justice."
Outside court, jurors said they unanimously believed Bonds was deliberately evasive in response to questions about whether he had ever been injected with banned drugs.
They deadlocked 11-1 in favor of convicting Bonds on a perjury charge based on Bonds' claims that he had never received an injection from anyone other than his physician.
Jurors said they deadlocked in favor of acquittal on the other two perjury charges, which were based on Bonds' denials that he had knowingly used steroids and human growth hormone.
Original testimony
The charges stemmed from Bonds' testimony Dec. 4, 2003, before the grand jury that investigated steroid dealing at the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative in Burlingame, in which the Giants outfielder denied that he had knowingly used steroids.
He said his trainer, confessed steroid dealer Greg Anderson, had supplied him only with flaxseed oil and arthritis cream - not the BALCO designer steroids "the clear" and "the cream."
Bonds was indicted in 2007, two months after he set baseball's career home run mark at age 43. He hasn't played baseball since the charges were filed.
In the trial, prosecutors called more than two dozen witnesses to prove their case that Bonds was a secret steroid user who simply couldn't bear to confess his use of multiple banned drugs.
In his final argument, prosecutor Jeff Nedrow catalogued the government's evidence of Bonds' drug use.
A test of a urine sample that Bonds gave to baseball's steroid control program in 2003 showed that the ballplayer was using "the clear" and other drugs. On a secret recording made in the Giants' clubhouse, Anderson described the banned drugs he said he was giving Bonds.
Kathy Hoskins, Bonds' former personal shopper, testified that she saw Anderson inject Bonds in the stomach in 2002 with what prosecutors said was human growth hormone.
Two other former confidants of Bonds - Steve Hoskins, Kathy Hoskins' brother and Bonds' longtime business manager, and Kimberly Bell, the ballplayer's girlfriend for nine years - said he told them about his steroid use.
Former Giants trainer Stan Conte testified that Bonds had told him in 2003 that he was aware Anderson was selling steroids. Former Oakland A's and New York Yankees player Jason Giambi, now with the Colorado Rockies, and three former baseball players testified that Anderson had sold them banned drugs, including "the cream" and "the clear."
Aggressive questioning
Bonds himself didn't testify and the defense didn't call any witnesses. But his legal team, led by Ruby, put on a determined defense, repeatedly persuading the judge to pare back the evidence that prosecutors could use in the trial. And they aggressively cross-examined the government's witnesses, claiming that Bonds was being framed.
Defense lawyer Cristina Arguedas kept Bell on the witness stand for more than four hours. She portrayed Bell as a jilted lover who tried to profit from her broken relationship with Bonds by posing nude for Playboy and pitching a tell-all book about him.
Ruby cross-examined Steve Hoskins for nearly as long. He accused the business manager of selling fake Bonds memorabilia and keeping the money, and charged that Hoskins had trumped up the steroid accusations to deflect an FBI probe of the alleged fraud.
The defense made little headway in cross-examining Kathy Hoskins about an incident in Bonds' bedroom in 2002: She said she saw Anderson inject Bonds in the abdomen with what prosecutors said was human growth hormone.
Bonds told her the shot was "undetectable," a "little something-something" for an upcoming Giants road trip, she testified.
Anderson refused to testify against Bonds and spent the trial in federal prison for contempt of court, the fourth time he had been imprisoned in connection with BALCO.
In a ruling that helped Bonds, Illston decreed that without the trainer's testimony, the government could not use what it characterized as significant additional evidence of Bonds' drug use, including doping calendars and private steroid screens that allegedly showed he was using banned drugs for years.
The trial itself was as much about how Bonds will be regarded in baseball history as it was about basic questions of crime and punishment.
Experts say it is not certain that he will serve any prison time. In 2008, juries convicted an Olympic track coach and an elite bicycle racer of lying about steroids, and Illston sentenced them to house arrest.
But the guilty verdict damages Bonds' place in baseball history and his chances of being elected to the Hall of Fame. One of the greatest hitters of all time, Bonds holds baseball's single season and career records for home runs, and he won the Most Valuable Player award an unprecedented seven times. The verdict brings down the curtain on the wide-ranging federal investigation into performance-enhancing drugs and elite sports that centered on BALCO, which began in 2002.
The probe started when federal agents received tips that Anderson and Victor Conte, BALCO's founder, were dealing steroids. It became public in 2003, when Internal Revenue Service agents raided BALCO and Anderson's Burlingame condominium.
In the years that followed, six steroid dealers and four sports figures, including Olympic sprinter Marion Jones, were convicted of BALCO-related crimes. The case led Congress to convene televised hearings on steroids in baseball and toughen anti-steroid laws.The results of a Social Weather Stations survey show that as of September, 47% of Filipino families rated themselves as poor, up by 3 percentage points from June
Published 5:01 PM, December 02, 2017
MANILA, Philippines – More Filipino households consider themselves poor in the third quarter of the year compared to the previous quarter, according to the results of a Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey released on Friday, December 1.
The results of the 3rd Quarter 2017 SWS survey, done from September 23 to 27 but released only on December 1, showed that 47% or an estimated 10.9 million families tagged themselves as poor.
This is 3 percentage points higher than the findings in June 2017, when 10.1 million Filipino families perceived themselves as poor. (READ: No poor Filipino by 2040: Can Duterte gov't set the stage?)
This means that between June and September, 800,000 more families considered themselves to be poor.
Balance Luzon vs Mindanao
The SWS said the 3-percentage point rise was due to a “sharp” increase in Balance Luzon and a “slight” increase in Manila, which were offset by decreases in self-rated poverty among families in the Visayas and Mindanao.
In Balance Luzon, self-rated poverty rose by 16 percentage points to 50% in September from 34% in June. In Metro Manila, the rating increased to 31% from 28%.
Meanwhile, self-rated poverty decreased by 12 percentage points in Mindanao to 45% from 57% in June, the lowest in the region since December 2011. (READ: FAST FACTS: Poverty in Mindanao)
Self-rated poverty also went down in the Visayas to 56% from 64%.
The survey results also showed that Filipino families said they need a budget of at least P10,000 to not consider themselves poor. This is self-rated poverty threshold.
Self-rated food poverty at 32%
Families said they need at least P5,000 in food expenses so they will not consider themselves "food-poor."
The survey showed that 32% or 7.4 million families rate themselves as food-poor, the same rating in June 2017.
Self-rated food poverty rose in Balance Luzon by 5 percentage points to 32% in September from 27% in June.
The rating also increased in Metro Manila to 20% from 16%. Self-rated food poverty in Mindanao declined by 7 percentage points to 34% from 41%, and also in the Visayas where it fell by 6 percentage points, or to 38% from 44%.
The Third Quarter 2017 Social Weather Survey was conducted among 1,500 adults: 600 in Balance Luzon, and 300 each in Metro Manila, Visayas, and Mindanao. The survey has sampling error margins of ±2.5% for national percentages, ±4% for Balance Luzon, and ±6% each for Metro Manila, Visayas, and Mindanao.[Stage - Vertex - Halberd]
I think this stage is a bit overdue, here's halberd without the annoying combo cannon!
No more annoying lazers or bombs to get in the way! The only problem is that when on the ship the camera slightly zooms outward, but it only happens for a few moments and doesn't obstruct anyone's view when playing.
Also, this is a quick side note for any admins that see this. I use a proxy to access the site while at school, the proxy used a banned IP address and now my account is permabanned from doing anything besides submitting/browsing the vault, I'd really appreciate it if you could lift it as I'm unable to use the site to the fullest as I am currently. :/When Republican leaders chose Representative Paul Ryan to give the response to President Obama's State of the Union speech, they bestowed their blessing on this fast-rising star from Wisconsin's First District.
His is the boyishly handsome face and cheery demeanor of free market fundamentalism -- a philosophy that has devastated his own district with particularly acute suffering. And now, as the new chair of the House Budget Committee, Ryan promises more devastation for the rest of the nation.
"Paul Ryan is a phony and a disaster," says John Dohner, president of Local 95 of the United Auto Workers in Janesville, Ryan's hometown. "The people I know aren't fooled by his smile or surprised by his votes. They see him as a slickster, not a friend."
But a huge majority of voters in Ryan's district seem to be fooled, or at least fail to see any credible alternative. They keep sending him back to Washington. Last fall, Ryan's opponents were frustrated yet again as he skated to victory with 68 percent of the vote over barely funded -- and thus barely visible -- Democrat John Heckenlively. Ryan pulled this off even though on Election Day, cities in his district had jobless rates between 10.3 percent and 13.4 percent.
Despite the hardship in his district, Ryan voted against extending unemployment benefits in November on the pretext that it would add more than "one dime to the deficit."
"This is something that really got talked about at union meetings," says Dohner.
Ryan then turned around and voted for the benefits when they were coupled with an extension of the Bush tax cuts, which would add seven trillion dimes to the deficit.
Ryan is a devotee of Ayn Rand, the literary icon of pure and ruthless free market policies. He has even made Atlas Shrugged required reading for his staff.
He accuses President Obama of favoring a "European-style welfare state" and, after the election, he all but called those who receive unemployment benefits lazy. "We have an incentive-based system where people want to get up and make the most of their lives, for themselves and their kids," he stated. "We don't want to turn this safety net into a hammock that ends up lulling people in their lives into dependency and complacency. That's the big debate we're having right now."
On the day of the House vote on Obama's stimulus bill, Ryan said: "This is not a crisis we can spend and borrow our way out of -- that is how we got here in the first place. Yet this is precisely the path the majority chose today. We're repeating the mistakes of a flawed economic doctrine that deepened our Depression in the 1930s."
He thus gives a peculiar interpretation to the economic events of the 1930s.
Almost all economists and historians credit Roosevelt for lowering unemployment from about 25 percent to just under 10 percent through public spending. But Ryan is all about tax cuts and deficit reduction, entirely ignoring the central problem of weak consumer buying power -- brought on by high unemployment and widespread wage-cutting -- that has been worsening the recession. As he said in his response to the State of the Union, "Spending cuts have to come first."
Sometimes he sounds like Ronald Reagan, circa 1965, as when the Wisconsin legislator denounced Social Security and Medicare as part of a "collectivist system."
In his much-ballyhooed "Road map for America," touted as a cure for excessive spending, Ryan advocates partial privatization of Social Security and turning Medicaid and Medicare into voucher programs with limited benefits. He also would give more tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans, including an elimination of all taxes on corporate profits, capital gains, and dividends.
UAW member Diane Hrovaiten, who was among 3,800 workers who lost their jobs when the Delphi auto-parts plant in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, relocated work to Mexico, is not fond of Ryan's plan. "Ryan's 'Road map' protects the fortunes of the rich," she says, "but for the rest of us, it's an eight-lane expressway to destruction."
Ryan, forty, was born and raised in Janesville before graduating from Miami University of Ohio. He spent time as an aide to rightists such as Senators Robert Kasten of Wisconsin and Sam Brownback of Kansas and then learned valuable skills from the late Representative Jack Kemp of New York, whose populist style enabled him to win race after race in blue collar Buffalo.
Ryan's personal charm has won over a large portion of First District voters. Joe Knilans, a former member of UAW Local 95 just elected to the state legislature as a Republican, cites Ryan's common touch.
"With the voters in Janesville, you see him at a store or at a playground with his kids, you can walk right up and talk to him even if you disagree with him," says Knilans. "When I watch him interact from afar, he treats everyone like a neighbor."
While voting against the district's most urgent needs, Ryan remains a smiling, respectful presence as he continues to meet with senior citizens groups and even unions who fiercely oppose his policies.
"For whatever reason, Ryan is courteous and thoughtful," says Chris Townsend, the national political director of the distinctly left-of-center United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers. "Just wrong on most things."
At a Martin Luther King holiday event in Kenosha I attended this year, Ryan spoke briefly and smoothly, cognizant of his audience of African Americans, liberals, and a scattering of labor folks. He bonded easily, referring to the deep impression that reading Letter from a Birmingham Jail left on him as a high school student. He praised the work of community activists being honored, saying that they were, in King's words, making a "down payment on the promissory note" America had given to African Americans.
Following his remarks, Ryan politely declined to answer any of my questions, although there was an interlude where he was waiting for photographs to be set up. He referred me to an aide -- I responded that I had already spoken to his staff -- and then claimed that he was late for his next engagement.
Ryan has seduced much of the mainstream media corps, which frequently praises him for his "intellectual audacity" and portrays him as "the thinker." The Washington Post labeled him the "GOP's leading intellectual in Congress."
Even President Obama has praised Ryan's anti-deficit plan as "a serious proposal" and singled out Ryan as "someone who is absolutely sincere about wanting to reduce the deficit."
Ryan didn't return the favor. "I do believe President Obama does believe more in economic redistribution," he told Fox TV. "He's clearly a class warfare guy."
But the class that's winning the war in his district is not made up of working people.
The district is pockmarked with ghostly factories from one end to the other.
Just before Christmas of 2008, General Motors closed its gigantic assembly plant in Janesville, ending the jobs of 2,800 GM workers and those of about 3,000 in supplier plants.
Last fall, Chrysler -- with the help of a taxpayer bailout -- relocated 850 engine jobs from Kenosha to its new plant in Saltillo, Mexico.
The three major industrial counties in Ryan's district have endured devastating manufacturing job losses since 2000, with Kenosha County losing 30 percent, Racine County 33 percent, and Rock County an astonishing 54 percent.
With so many First District jobs relocated by U.S. firms to low-wage nations, Ryan felt obligated to run a TV ad in 2008 expressing his opposition to the export of jobs.
"But Ryan consistently supported free trade agreements which send our jobs overseas," notes Andy Gussert, the director of the Citizens Trade Campaign. "There was a total disconnect between his ads and his record."
The wave of plant closings and relocations has created dangerous ripples, including a tripling of home foreclosures since 2000. Health care needs have also exploded as thousands of families saw their coverage evaporate with a layoff or an employer decision to terminate health coverage. "Over the past two years, we've seen a 77 percent increase in the number of patients," reports Traci Rogers, executive director of the HealthNet free clinic in Ryan's district.
Ryan is a good friend of Wall Street. He backed repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, thereby removing limits on the risks that commercial banks could undertake. He followed that up by voting for the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which blocked regulation of derivatives. A federal report on the causes of the Great Recession cited both pieces of legislation as big factors.
Wall Street butters Ryan's bread. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, his largest set of contributions from 1998 to 2010 came from the financial, real estate, and insurance sector, clocking in at $2,127,115. While Ryan complained in an interview at the time that the 2008 bank bailout "sucks," he gave a much more forceful endorsement for bailing out his benefactors in a speech to the House: "If we fail to do the right thing, heaven help us -- if we fail to pass this, I fear the worst is yet to come." He defended the vote as necessary to "save the free enterprise system."
Ryan voted against new regulations on the banking industry in 2007. He voted against monitoring TARP funds. And he voted against modifying bankruptcy rules to avoid foreclosures.
In the meantime, he has opposed federal programs designed to provide immediate relief for people who are suffering -- including those in his district.
Despite looming layoffs of teachers and other vital public employees in the First District, Ryan voted against a $26 billion emergency aid package passed by Congress. The funds helped to prevent layoffs in the school systems by providing $4.5 million to Racine and $4.3 million in Kenosha.
Ryan also voted against the SCHIP child health care expansion despite the huge growth of childhood poverty. The percentage of children eligible for free or reduced-cost lunches ranges from 43 percent to 69 percent in the major cities of his district.
But Ryan has had little reason to fear electoral punishment for his extreme stands, even while representing a deeply suffering district. Before his latest triumph, Ryan had previously trounced ill-funded, relatively unknown Democratic candidates in fundraising by a 31-1 margin, thereby scaring away better-known Democrats. In 2010, Ryan's $3.9 million in funds gave him an astounding 325 times as much as his hopelessly outgunned Democratic opponent, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
"What you're seeing in the First District is not all that uncommon," says David Levinthal, communications director of the Center for Responsive Politics. "Incumbents are so powerful that they can't really be challenged."
His last Democratic opponent, John Heckenlively, a bespectacled forty-six-year-old journalist, calls Ryan's impact on his district "appalling." Heckenlively notes that there are "somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 jobless in his district, and he's voting against extending unemployment benefits. He's been supporting trade policies and tax policies encouraging companies to ship jobs overseas. You can credit Ryan with a lot of these people losing their jobs."
But with his overstuffed campaign war chest -- coupled with his handsome face, congenial style, and intellectual image -- Ryan remains formidable.
"There are two Paul Ryans," explains Heckenlively. "The Wisconsin Ryan, who glad-hands everyone and tells them what they want to hear. And the Washington Ryan, who votes against people of his district. The problem is that people just aren't paying attention to what he's doing back in Washington."
Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based journalist whose work has appeared in, among others, The Progressive, Z Magazine, Progressive Populist, Extra!, American Prospect, Isthmus, and In These Times, for whom he blogs twice a week on labor issues at workinginthesetimes.com. Bybee edited the weekly Racine Labor for fourteen years.GOP operatives in Medina County, Ohio recently sent around the Spring 2010 edition (.pdf link) of their newsletter which encouraged their constituents to help "take Betty Sutton out of the House and put her back in the kitchen."
"I'm not sure that it was intended -- in fact I'm positive that it was not in intended to be sexist," Medina County Bill Heck told Talking Points Memo.
"We are just trying to get the attention of the voters," Heck continued. "It is rhetoric that I think is very common in all elections, of sending people somewhere -- either to the House or back from the House. And we certainly apologize for any offense that anyone would take from this."
But EMILY's List disagreed, and on Thursday the group launched a fundraising campaign to tell Republicans that a "woman's place is in the House." (That's "House" with a capital "H").
As Think Progress points out, this isn't the first time that the GOP has been accused of exhibiting behavior that is offensive to women.
Last year, a 2009 National Republican Congressional Committee press release encouraged Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal to put Speaker Pelosi "in her place," to which Pelosi shot back ""I'm in my place. I'm the speaker of the House -- the first woman speaker of the House."
And Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy (D-Ohio) directly accused a number of Republican members of Congress of being "sexist" last year after they shouted down members of the Democratic Women's Caucus during a House debate on women's issues in the health care reform bill.
UPDATE:
Rep. Sutton responded to the mailer Friday, calling the wording "an insult to all women regardless of whether they work within the home raising families and managing households or work beyond the home, providing for themselves and others."
"The comment made in the flyer not only devalues women and all that they contribute to the strength of our nation, but it is also an unconscionable statement of belief about the potential of our girls and young women," Sutton said in the statement.My wife Anne and I have lived in the Kensington section of Philadelphia for the past couple years. When I first started making work in this neighborhood, I was incredibly timid. Initially, I was shocked by what I saw going on: drugs, sex and violence were openly sold and exchanged on the streets, and while the police had no apparent interest, I was curious about all of it. But I was afraid to get close. I was afraid to engage with the people in the neighborhood. I’d show the work to my friends, and one friend in particular who was very good at pushing me. He encouraged me to find my “limit” and test my boundaries. What was too much? What was too close? What made me uncomfortable? How did that affect the work? All excellent questions. But inevitably they lead to others: What happens when you do cross that threshold? How far is too far?
I kept these questions in mind while I worked in and around the neighborhood. I’d photograph a hooker. Was this past my comfort zone? No. Move on. I’d pay a drug dealer to send me one of his most desperate female customers so I could photograph her naked for drug money, intentionally participating in the street economy. Was this past my comfort zone? No. Move on. I photographed some guy f****** a hooker in an open field next to abandoned train tracks. Was this past my comfort zone? No. Move on.
I’ve run towards gunfire, nearly been mugged, and almost shot people in self-defense. I’ve seen beaten, raped, and left-for-dead hookers, and I've seen junkies run off while I stopped one of their friends from aspirating due to an overdose. I’ve made all these photos and with each frame I would ask myself what my friend asked me, “Had I gone too far?” Each time I answered myself, “No. Move on.” In fact, each time I didn’t lose my sh*t after one of these episodes, I rewarded myself with water ice on the walk home. As far as I was concerned, I had no limit. I kept daring myself to go further and prided myself on my newfound ability. I could handle anything.
In August of 2014, I was out making work and I met a woman collecting trash and debris off the street for an art project. We got to talking about the neighborhood, as she gingerly swung her bag back and forth. Soon enough, the bag struck my hand; I felt a sharp pain, and I began bleeding immediately. It turns out that she was collecting used heroin needles, and one of them had pierced the bag and stabbed me. I immediately went to the hospital, on the verge of vomiting every time I realized the enormity of what had happened and what that might mean for my future.
The ER doctors gave me Immunoglobulin for Hepatitis B and started me on two HIV anti-retrovirals. I started going to an Infectious Disease Specialist and had to remain on the HIV anti-retrovirals for two months. I still have to get tested every two months, and each time, I can barely sleep until I get the results. To top it all off, the HIV meds may have permanently damaged my kidneys. All of the sadness and desperation I was pointing my camera at was finally dumped on me, and I was terrified. Not only was I becoming a part of that narrative, but that narrative had consequences. That narrative became real in a way that photography can only attempt. My limit had found me.
I've been in a place of transition for the past ten months. Since the incident with the heroin needle, I’ve almost stopped making work in my neighborhood. I pulled back. I felt scared. I felt stupid. But, most importantly, I felt selfish. I’m lucky to have the support of an amazing wife, but had I taken advantage of that? Was I so focused on making this work and how it affected me that I had completely disregarded how it might affect her? I was out there taking risks and handing my life over to chance in a way that a person only living for himself might. But I shouldn’t have, because I’m not. I’m connected to another person and she now has recurring nightmares that I die. That isn’t right; it shouldn’t be that way. I want to be a better husband for her. I want to be a better source of support for her, not the source of late-night torment and daily anxiety.
In January, a dear friend and mentor’s wife passed away after a long battle with cancer. Anne and I looked at each other nearly the entire memorial service. We held hands all the way back to Philadelphia. We got home, laid in bed, and held each other for the rest of the evening. What would we do without one another? No photograph is worth putting her through that. No sought-after experience is worth making her a widow.
About a month ago, and I’m really not sure why, I decided to try my hand at making some work in the neighborhood again. An interesting thing happened: I almost took a photo. This is unusual, because I usually always take the photo. I don’t allow anything to stop me. But, this time, rather than think about the image, I thought about the repercussions of making that image. The potential subject of the photo, a guy f****** a hooker outside, surely would have gotten angry and come after me. This could have ended one of two ways: I get my a** beat or I shoot him to save myself from imminent death. What is the point of knowingly and willingly creating a violent and aggressive confrontation? Is this the reason I make work?
So I walked away. I went home. I went home to my wife and dog where things are beautiful. I went home where things are beautiful and I feel love. I felt that love and I cried. The armor that I developed to walk around and guard against all the horrifying sh*t I exposed myself to and conditioned myself against – that armor became too heavy. The ghosts I carry around with me, of things I've seen, photographed, or participated in, became overwhelming. I realized that I couldn’t keep walking around like that. What does it prove? What does it accomplish?
I can’t help but think, the farther I tried to push past my limit, the farther I strayed from the person I used to be. I grew a thick skin, necessary for survival, but I lost my compassion – compassion that was previously integral to my work. (When I was younger, I spent time in Kentucky documenting rural poverty in a former patch town. I photographed hundreds of foreclosed homes during the 2008 housing crisis.) The person who made that work didn’t exist anymore. Searching for my “limit” turned out to be a f****** up game, each step deeper represented nothing more than a notch in my belt. I learned that I want my work, and my life, to be about more than that.
I walked around making these photos like they made me tough, like they gave me some sort of warped street cred. At the heart of it, that’s not the person I am. True bravery, I’m learning, is about embracing emotional vulnerability. I have so much love and I need to allow that to take over. I need to reteach myself how to be more loving with my work, through my work.
Reevaluating my priorities has taught me that there are other ways to put myself out there that has nothing to do with exposing myself to the actual, physical harm that comes from what amounts to self-destruction. It wasn’t about allowing the work to evolve; it was about allowing myself to evolve. With that, for the first time, I feel as though I’m honestly able to answer that obnoxious grad school crit question of, “What’s at risk here?”
This article has been republished with permission from TIS Books, which you can visit here.BRAZIL’S GDP shrank by 1.9% in the second quarter of 2015 compared with the previous quarter, the biggest decline by that measure since 2009. Compared with the same quarter last year, the economy contracted by 2.6%. This continues a sequence of dismal numbers. The unemployment rate rose to 7.5% in July, from 4.9% a year earlier—the fastest annual rise on record. Inflation remains high. GDP will continue shrinking in 2016, economists forecast.
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Despite the gloom, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s beleaguered president, has scored a few political victories. She pushed curbs on payroll-tax breaks through Congress, which will help cut the fiscal deficit; the government also said it would close ten of its 39 ministries. And a powerful foe was isolated when the chief prosecutor charged the speaker of Congress’s lower house with corruption. Even protests this month, which drew nearly 1m people angry about graft in Ms Rousseff’s Workers’ Party, were smaller than she had feared.
But the respite could be brief. Analysts are worried by recent reports that her vice-president, Michel Temer, a member of the PMDB, is giving up the job of co-ordinating the government’s dealings with Congress. They fear that his successor will be a less effective backer of fiscal austerity. And as the economy sinks, the ranks of disgruntled Brazilians will grow.
Dig deeper:
Brazil's economic mess, in charts (August 2015)
Why Brazil risks becoming stuck in an economic rut (February 2015)You’re flipping through your Instagram feed, killing time in line at the grocery store, and suddenly you’re doing double takes. Your attention is snagged by a series of incredible - or incredulous - pictures. They’re unbelievable.
...A baby deer standing knock-kneed in the middle of Times Square.
...Your best friend having dinner with three clones of herself.
...Or a human face melting into a building, and it looks too real.
All of these can be accurately called Composite Images. They’re some of the most compelling visuals you can incorporate into your website and social media accounts, and they’re…
Well, to put it bluntly, they’re fake.
Composite images are made up of two or more photographs, which are combined to create one image. Even if the term is new to you, you’ve absolutely seen composite images every day - in ads, on websites, in the news, even on your friend’s Instagram.
In fact, you probably have already dabbled in CREATING composite images yourself. One of the first (and classic) things most people try when they get their mitts on some design software as a kid is swapping heads on a family portrait, right?
Perhaps not your best work.
Judging a “good” or well done composite image depends on a lot of criteria. In some cases, the best composite images will LOOK real, while others will look intentionally surreal. Consider the difference between adding additional Koi fish to make a pond look more lush and vibrant, vs making a woman’s chestnut hair transform into tree branches above her head.
Digital composite images are like a collage.
A composite combines two (or more) photographs to create one - rather convincing - final image. This is rendered significantly less complicated thanks to the advent of digital photography, digital editing, and an ever expanding set of features and tools available with modern software and apps.
This photographic sorcery didn’t start with the advent of Photoshop - in fact, quite the opposite. Before digital photography was even a twinkle in Steven Sasson’s eye, composite portraiture was already being practiced in the 1880’s when Sir Francis Galton invented a technique to take multiple exposures on the same photographic plate.
In 2017, rather than using multiple exposures on the same piece of film, photographers and designers generally take separate images and blend them seamlessly using layers, masks and blurs.
Why use composite images?
Composite images can be incredibly useful when you’re looking for a way to editorialize your visual content on everything from blog articles to products to art projects. There are many reasons for this. Firstly, composite images tend to be very compelling.
Often, the final composite image juxtaposes objects or living things in unlikely (or impossible) combinations. Sometimes, the scene depicted is plausible, but would be too difficult to capture in a candid moment. Other times, composite images are used to blend several still shots of landscapes and cityscapes to make use of the best lighting, combining them to make a stunning but technically impossible photo.
Composite images can also evoke and imply the passing of time in a clear, quantum physics kind of way that long exposure simply cannot achieve.
Classic Composite Images
The “Clone Wars” Image
Copy or “clone” yourself to create a time-lapse style image, or to portray the different emotional states or “sides” of yourself. This style of composite image can be funny, dramatic, or subtle, depending on what you’re trying to achieve.
Set up your camera in one spot. It will be important to take as many different poses within the scene as possible while the lighting is the same. Make sure not to move or disturb main elements in the scene (like the placement of a chair, a vehicle or other large elements).
The “We Were The Only Ones Here” Image
Using a timer on vacation to take shots means everyone can get in the picture - but that doesn’t mean you actually want EVERYONE in the picture. Remove pesky tourists, photobombers and pedestrians from your vacation photographs by creating a composite image.
Again, set up your camera in a fixed spot. You’ll shoot several takes of say, the World’s Largest Ball of String. When it comes time to grab a shot with you or your loved ones, even if someone else happens to veer into your frame, you can simply remove them using the other shots you took to mask them out of the image.
The “What A Coincidence I Snapped This At The Perfect Time” Image
This will come in handy when you’ve shot several pictures (say, at your kid’s birthday party) but there are “perfect” elements spread across several frames, you can take steps to amalgamate and create that perfect picture.
If your Aunt Rose has her eyes closed in every frame EXCEPT the one where everyone else is poised perfectly for that candid shot you were aiming for, you can replace her with the better version for a perfect image. Just cut her (or her surroundings) out, paste, and blend.
The “Surreal, Magic Is Real” Image
Another type of composite image will inspire imagination.
Combining impossible elements to create dreamscapes, pigs that fly, or outfits that seem to be made of a fabric of a physical landscape are all examples of what you can achieve when you’re mixing different images. These composites will feel surreal, artistic, and maybe even magical.
Tips while you shoot
Try to make sure the lighting in both images you intend to use have the same type and style of lighting. A cat photographed indoors with dim lighting will not integrate with a photograph of a mouse taken outside in the sun. By matching your lighting conditions, you’re already a step ahead of the game.
Consider using a green screen or a solid, high contrast background behind your subject. It becomes a complicated |
than social constructs. This stops significant technology of getting widespread, demotivates excellent developers and proliferates cargo-cult programming.
As a Lua developer and advocate, this article resonated with me on a deep level. Lua is a very successful programming language on some specific domains, such as embedded systems and game scripting, but still fairly unknown by people outside those niches. I'm often asked why don't I use a "real language" with features such as classes by uneducated programmers who have never touched Lua's powerful metamechanisms. Even some professors think that's "hilarious", which just makes me sigh. Reading that article, my frustration just built up until I started ranting on twitter, of course, because that's my thing when I'm frustrated with something. So I'd like to elucidate some points...
Lua is not a domain specific language. It was created with some purposes in mind, of course, just like everything else in computer science. It is still just a regular dynamic script language which means it is in the same family as other popular languages such as Python, Ruby, Javascript, Perl and PHP, for example. I have worked with many of these languages and Lua is still the best language in this category I know. It is elegant, powerful, ridiculously fast, portable, readable, fun to work with and I have yet to see something better than Lua come up. I wouldn't dare to compare it in absolute terms with languages that do not belong to this family since it doesn't make sense at all, but Lua would still score many points overall.
The fact that Lua is the top #1 language for game scripting does not mean it is a "toy language". On the contrary, World of Warcraft uses Lua exactly because this kind of quality and performance is what it needs. Gaming is one of the main domains for performance freaks. If Lua is popular there, this is a GOOD sign, not the opposite.
It still baffles me every time experienced developers tell me they just have never heard about it and keep shrugging it off in a conservative attitude. And this reminds me that, unfortunately, like almost everything else in the world, programming languages can also benefit from good marketing tactics. In the developer world, those marketing tactics may include regular tactics but also community & ecosystem growing.
During my rant, a group of other Lua developers that had similar feelings started engaging on what we could do to contribute to Lua in terms of community and how we could show our appreciation for the language. That's when the idea for the blog came up. After a long list of tweets, a secret chat and some exchange of ideas, I started building this blog (in Lua, of course! ^_^). You may check the source here.
Yay, awesome, but what is this blog for?
Yes, that's an important question! Please notice that we don't have any affilitation with the official Lua team, but we intend to be a central hub for distributing news, technical posts and general discussions on everything related to Lua. Or, as the name says, a Lua space. Subscribe to our RSS feed if you wish to be notified when there's new content.
Share your knowledge
I am super excited! Are you super excited? Share your knowledge by contributing with Lua related posts!
All posts are written in markdown and are contained in our git repository. Inside the posts directory you'll find one or multiple other directories which are the categories of our posts. This one, for example, is in general.
Steps to writing a blog post:
Fork our git repository
Write your post using the markdown syntax
Put it in one of the category directories inside posts or create a new one The md file should be named in the same way you wish the url to be +.md The convention is all lower case separating words by hyphens Ex.: blog-opening-and-contribution-guide.md
or create a new one Edit the file posts_meta.lua adding an entry for your post and your author details Just follow the pattern of the other entries already there :)
adding an entry for your post and your author details Commit and make a pull request
By making a pull request you certify that you are sharing your post and allowing it to be published here We will never modify your original post unless for typo fixes or if you require to do so You'll still own all the copyrights of your post
This blogs support syntax highlight provided by highlight.js. Highlight.js auto-detects the programming language. Code blocks should be written in markdown using 4 spaces or a tab (+ the regular code indentation). Example:
local function welcome_to_luaspace() print("You are awesome!") end
Awesome people
Special thanks go to Pierre Chapuis (Lua Toolbox), for the domain name, undef (quadrant) for the initial engagement and next contributions as a writer, Bogdan Marinescu (eLua), Mathäus Mendel (OpenTibia) and Elihu Garret (Moonlet) for exchanging ideas and helping this come to reality, and every future writer of this blog!
Cheers!
About Etiene Dalcol
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Etiene is a Software Engineer at Red Badger. She is also the Lead developer of Sailor and an organiser of LuaConf.According to computer security specialist ESET, attackers were able to infiltrate power station computers by using malware-laden Microsoft Office documents. Using social engineering techniques, the files were activated by power station employees, who unwittingly deployed the BlackEnergy trojan. The malware can "plant a KillDisk component" that makes key terminals unbootable or open backdoors that allow external access.
It's believed that Russian hackers known as The Sandworm Team are behind the attack, who have targeted Ukrainian energy suppliers in the past and successfully infected providers in the US and Europe. The Financial Times reports that Ukraine's energy ministry is still conducting a probe into what caused the shutdown. "So far the most likely version is interference in the workings of the automated control systems," said Prykarpattyaoblenergo technical director Oleg Senik. He also said engineers are also having to "manually" fix each substation to restore power in the area.This person's surname is Lloyd Webber, not Webber.
Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber (born 22 March 1948)[2] is an English composer and impresario of musical theatre.[3] Several of his musicals have run for more than a decade both in the West End and on Broadway. He has composed 13 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass. Several of his songs have been widely recorded and were hits outside of their parent musicals, notably "The Music of the Night" and "All I Ask of You" from The Phantom of the Opera, "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar, "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" from Evita, "Any Dream Will Do" from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and "Memory" from Cats. In 2001 The New York Times referred to him as "the most commercially successful composer in history".[4] Ranked the "fifth most powerful person in British culture" by The Daily Telegraph in 2008, the lyricist Don Black stated "Andrew more or less single-handedly reinvented the musical."[5]
He has received a number of awards, including a knighthood in 1992, followed by a peerage from Queen Elizabeth II for services to Music, six Tonys, three Grammys (as well as the Grammy Legend Award), an Academy Award, fourteen Ivor Novello Awards, seven Olivier Awards, a Golden Globe, a Brit Award, the 2006 Kennedy Center Honors, and the 2008 Classic Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music.[6][7][8] He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, is an inductee into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame, and is a fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors.[9] He is one of only fifteen people to have won an Emmy, Oscar, Grammy and Tony.
His company, the Really Useful Group, is one of the largest theatre operators in London. Producers in several parts of the UK have staged productions, including national tours, of the Lloyd Webber musicals under licence from the Really Useful Group. Lloyd Webber is also the president of the Arts Educational Schools London, a performing arts school located in Chiswick, West London. He is involved in a number of charitable activities, including the Elton John AIDS Foundation, Nordoff Robbins, Prostate Cancer UK and War Child. In 1992 he set up the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation which supports the arts, culture and heritage in the UK.[10]
Early life [ edit ]
Westminster School
Andrew Lloyd Webber was born in Kensington, London, the elder son of William Lloyd Webber (1914–1982), a composer and organist, and Jean Hermione Johnstone (1921–1993), a violinist and pianist.[11] His younger brother, Julian Lloyd Webber, has had a notable career as a solo cellist.
Lloyd Webber started writing his own music at a young age, a suite of six pieces at the age of nine. He also put on "productions" with Julian and his Aunt Viola in his toy theatre (which he built at Viola's suggestion). His aunt Viola, an actress, took him to see many of her shows and through the stage door into the world of the theatre. He also had originally set music to Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats at the age of 15.
In 1965, Lloyd Webber was a Queen's Scholar at Westminster School and studied history for a term at Magdalen College, Oxford, although he abandoned the course in the winter of 1965 to study at the Royal College of Music and pursue his interest in musical theatre.[12][13]
Professional career [ edit ]
Early years [ edit ]
In 1965, when Lloyd Webber was a 17-year-old budding musical-theatre composer, he was introduced to the 20-year-old aspiring pop-song writer Tim Rice.[14][15] Their first collaboration was The Likes of Us, a musical based on the true story of Thomas John Barnardo. They produced a demo tape of that work in 1966,[14] but the project failed to gain a backer.[15]
Although composed in 1965, The Likes of Us was not publicly performed until 2005, when a production was staged at Lloyd Webber's Sydmonton Festival. In 2008, amateur rights were released by the National Operatic and Dramatic Association (NODA) in association with the Really Useful Group. The first amateur performance was by a children's theatre group in Cornwall called "Kidz R Us". Stylistically, The Likes of Us is fashioned after the Broadway musical of the 1940s and 1950s; it opens with a traditional overture comprising a medley of tunes from the show, and the score reflects some of Lloyd Webber's early influences, particularly Richard Rodgers, Frederick Loewe, and Lionel Bart. In this respect, it is markedly different from the composer's later work, which tends to be either predominantly or wholly through-composed, and closer in form to opera than to the Broadway musical.
In the summer of 1967 Alan Doggett, a family friend of the Lloyd Webbers who had assisted on The Likes of Us and who was the music teacher at the Colet Court school in London, commissioned Lloyd Webber and Rice to write a piece for the school's choir.[14][16][15] Doggett requested a "pop cantata" along the lines of Herbert Chappell's The Daniel Jazz (1963) and Michael Hurd's Jonah-Man Jazz (1966), both of which had been published by Novello and were based on the Old Testament.[14] The request for the new piece came with a 100-guinea advance from Novello.[14] This resulted in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, a retelling of the biblical story of Joseph, in which Lloyd Webber and Rice humorously pastiched a number of pop-music styles such as Elvis-style rock'n'roll, Calypso and country music. Joseph began life as a short cantata that gained some recognition on its second staging with a favourable review in The Times. For its subsequent performances, Rice and Lloyd Webber revised the show and added new songs to expand it to a more substantial length. Continued expansion eventually culminated in a 1972 stage musical and then a two-hour-long production being staged in the West End in 1973 on the back of the success of Jesus Christ Superstar.
In 1969, Rice and Lloyd Webber wrote a song for the Eurovision Song Contest called "Try It and See", which was not selected. With rewritten lyrics it became "King Herod's Song" in their third musical, Jesus Christ Superstar (1970).
The planned follow-up to Jesus Christ Superstar was a musical comedy based on the Jeeves and Wooster novels by P. G. Wodehouse. Tim Rice was uncertain about this venture, partly because of his concern that he might not be able to do justice to the novels that he and Lloyd Webber so admired.[17] After doing some initial work on the lyrics, he pulled out of the project[when?] and Lloyd Webber subsequently wrote the musical Jeeves with Alan Ayckbourn, who provided the book and lyrics. Jeeves failed to make any impact at the box office and closed after a run of only three weeks in 1975.[citation needed] Many years later, Lloyd Webber and Ayckbourn revisited this project, producing a thoroughly reworked and more successful version entitled By Jeeves (1996). Only two of the songs from the original production remained ("Half a Moment" and "Banjo Boy").[citation needed]
Lloyd Webber collaborated with Rice once again to write Evita (1978 in London/1979 in U.S.), a musical based on the life of Eva Perón. As with Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita was released first as a concept album (1976) and featured Julie Covington singing the part of Eva Perón. The song "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" became a hit single and the musical was staged at the Prince Edward Theatre in a production directed by Harold Prince and starring Elaine Paige in the title role.
Patti LuPone created the role of Eva on Broadway for which she won a Tony. Evita was a highly successful show that ran for ten years in the West End. It transferred to Broadway in 1979. Rice and Lloyd Webber parted ways soon after Evita. In an interview in 2011, LuPone commented, "He writes crap music... Evita was his best score, Evita in its bizarreness - when I first heard it I thought 'I swear to God, he hated women' [...] There are some very romantic moments in his music, and there is some real...trash that he doesn't even think about parting with. He's not a very good editor of his own stuff."[18]
In 1978, Lloyd Webber embarked on a solo project, the Variations, with his cellist brother Julian based on the 24th Caprice by Paganini, which reached number two in the pop album chart in the United Kingdom. The main theme was used as the theme tune for ITV's long-running South Bank Show throughout its 32-year run. The same year, Lloyd Webber also composed a new theme tune for the long-running documentary series Whicker's World, which was used from 1978 to 1980.
1980s [ edit ]
Lloyd Webber was the subject of This Is Your Life in November 1980 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews in the foyer of Thames Television's Euston Road Studios. He would be honoured a second time by the television programme in November 1994 when Michael Aspel surprised him at the Adelphi Theatre.
Lloyd Webber embarked on his next project without a lyricist, turning instead to the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Cats (1981) was to become the longest running musical in London, where it ran for 21 years before closing. On Broadway, Cats ran for 18 years, a record which would ultimately be broken by another Lloyd Webber musical, The Phantom of the Opera.[19][20]
Starlight Express (1984) was a commercial hit, but received negative reviews from the critics. It enjoyed a record run in the West End, but ran for less than two years on Broadway. The show has also seen two tours of the US, as well as an Australian/Japanese production, a three-year UK touring production, which transferred to New Zealand later in 2009. The show also runs full-time in a custom-built theatre in Bochum, Germany, where it has been running since 1988.
Lloyd Webber wrote a Requiem Mass dedicated to his father, William, who had died in 1982. It premiered at St. Thomas Church in New York on 24 February 1985. Church music had been a part of the composer's upbringing and the composition was inspired by an article he had read about the plight of Cambodian orphans. Lloyd Webber had on a number of occasions written sacred music for the annual Sydmonton Festival.[21] Lloyd Webber received a Grammy Award in 1986 for Requiem in the category of best classical composition. Pie Jesu from Requiem achieved a high placing on the UK pop charts. Perhaps because of its large orchestration, live performances of the Requiem are rare.
Cricket (1986), also called Cricket (Hearts and Wickets), reunited Lloyd Webber with Tim Rice to create this short musical for Queen Elizabeth's 60th birthday, first performed at Windsor Castle. Several of the tunes were later used for Aspects of Love and Sunset Boulevard.
Lloyd Webber also premiered The Phantom of the Opera in 1986, inspired by the 1911 Gaston Leroux novel. He wrote the part of Christine for his then-wife, Sarah Brightman, who played the role in the original London and Broadway productions alongside Michael Crawford as the Phantom. The production was directed by Harold Prince, who had also earlier directed Evita. Charles Hart wrote the lyrics for Phantom with some additional material provided by Richard Stilgoe, with whom Lloyd Webber co-wrote the book of the musical. It became a hit and is still running in both the West End and on Broadway; in January 2006 it overtook Cats as the longest-running musical on Broadway. On 11 February 2012, Phantom of the Opera played its 10,000th show on Broadway.[20]
Aspects of Love followed in 1989, a musical based on the story by David Garnett. The lyrics were by Don Black and Charles Hart and the original production was directed by Trevor Nunn. Aspects had a run of four years in London, but closed after less than a year on Broadway. It has since gone on a tour of the UK.
1990s [ edit ]
Lloyd Webber was asked to write a song for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and composed "Amigos Para Siempre — Friends for Life" with Don Black providing the lyrics. This song was performed by Sarah Brightman and José Carreras.
Lloyd Webber was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1993 for his contribution to live theatre
Lloyd Webber had toyed with the idea of writing a musical based on Billy Wilder's critically acclaimed movie, Sunset Boulevard, since the early 1970s when he saw the film, but the project didn't come to fruition until after the completion of Aspects of Love when the composer finally managed to secure the rights from Paramount Pictures,[22] The composer worked with two collaborators, as he had done on Aspects of Love; this time Christopher Hampton and Don Black shared equal credit for the book and lyrics. The show opened at the Adelphi Theatre in London on 12 July 1993, and ran for 1,529 performances. In spite of the show's popularity and extensive run in London's West End, it lost money due to the sheer expense of the production.
In 1994, Sunset Boulevard became a successful Broadway show, opening with the largest advance in Broadway history, and winning seven Tony Awards that year. Even so, by its closing in 1997, "it had not recouped its reported $13 million investment."[23] From 1995-2000, Lloyd Webber wrote the Matters of Taste column in The Daily Telegraph where he reviewed restaurants and hotels, and these were illustrated by Lucinda Rogers.[24]
In 1998, Lloyd Webber released a film version of Cats, which was filmed at the Adelphi Theatre in London. David Mallet directed the film, and Gillian Lynne choreographed it. The cast consisted of performers who had been in the show before, including Ken Page (the original Old Deuteronomy on Broadway), Elaine Paige (original Grizabella in London) and Sir John Mills as Gus: the Theatre Cat.
In 1998, Whistle Down the Wind made its debut, a musical written with lyrics supplied by Jim Steinman. Originally opening in Washington, Lloyd Webber was reportedly not happy with the casting or Harold Prince's production and the show was subsequently revised for a London staging directed by Gale Edwards. The production included the Boyzone number-one hit "No Matter What", which only left the UK charts when the price of the CD single was changed to drop it out of the official top ten. His The Beautiful Game opened in London and has never been seen on Broadway. The show had a respectable run at The Cambridge Theatre in London. The show has been re-worked into a new musical, The Boys in the Photograph, which had its world première at The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in April 2008.
2000s [ edit ]
Having achieved great popular success in musical theatre, Lloyd Webber was referred to by The New York Times in 2001 as "the most commercially successful composer in history."[4]
In 2002 he turned producer, bringing the musical Bombay Dreams to London. With music by Indian Music composer A.R. Rahman and lyrics by Don Black, it ran for two years at the Apollo Victoria Theatre. A revised Broadway production at the Broadway Theatre two years later ran for only 284 performances.
On 16 September 2004, his production of The Woman in White opened at the Palace Theatre in London. It ran for 19 months and 500 performances. A revised production opened on Broadway at the Marquis Theatre on 17 November 2005. Garnering mixed reviews from critics, due in part to the frequent absences of the show's star Maria Friedman due to breast cancer treatment, it closed only a brief three months later on 19 February 2006.
Lloyd Webber produced a staging of The Sound of Music, which débuted November 2006. He made the controversial decision to choose an unknown to play leading lady Maria, who was found through the BBC's reality television show How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria?, in which he was a judge.[25] The winner of the show was Connie Fisher.
It was announced on 25 August 2006, on his personal website, that his next project would be The Master and Margarita; however, it was announced in late March 2007 that he had abandoned the project.[26]
In September 2006, Lloyd Webber was named to be a recipient of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors with Zubin Mehta, Dolly Parton, Steven Spielberg, and Smokey Robinson. He was recognised for his outstanding contribution to American performing arts.[27] He attended the ceremony on 3 December 2006; it aired on 26 December 2006. On 11 February 2007, Lloyd Webber was featured as a guest judge on the reality television show Grease: You're the One that I Want![28] The contestants all sang "The Phantom of the Opera".
Between April and June 2007, he appeared in BBC One's Any Dream Will Do!, which followed the same format as How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?. Its aim was to find a new Joseph for his revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Lee Mead won the contest after quitting his part in the ensemble – and as understudy in The Phantom of the Opera – to compete for the role. Viewers' telephone voting during the series raised more than £500,000 for the BBC's annual Children in Need charity appeal, according to host Graham Norton on air during the final.
In 2007, Lloyd Webber's cat, Otto, leaped onto his Clavinova piano and "destroyed the entire score for the new 'Phantom' in one fell swoop." The Phantom in question was The Phantom of Manhattan, a planned sequel to Phantom of the Opera.[29]
On 1 July 2007, Lloyd Webber presented excerpts from his musicals as part of the Concert for Diana held at Wembley Stadium, London, an event organised to celebrate the life of Princess Diana almost 10 years after her death.[30][31] BBC Radio 2 broadcast a concert of music from the Lloyd Webber musicals on 24 August 2007.[32] Denise Van Outen introduced songs from Whistle Down the Wind, The Beautiful Game, Tell Me on a Sunday, The Woman in White, Evita and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat – as well as Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music, which Lloyd Webber revived in 2006 at the London Palladium, and the 2002 musical Bombay Dreams.
In April 2008, Lloyd Webber reprised his role as judge, this time in the BBC musical talent show I'd Do Anything. The show followed a similar format to its Maria and Joseph predecessors, this time involving a search for an actress to play the role of Nancy in an upcoming West End production of the Lionel Bart musical Oliver! The show also featured a search for three young actors to play and share the title character's role, but the show's main focus was on the search for Nancy. The role was won by Jodie Prenger despite Lloyd Webber's stated preference for one of the other contestants; the winners of the Oliver role were Harry Stott, Gwion Wyn-Jones and Laurence Jeffcoate. Also in April 2008. Lloyd Webber was featured on the U.S. talent show American Idol, acting as a mentor when the 6 finalists had to select one of his songs to perform for the judges that week.[33]
Lloyd Webber accepted the challenge of managing the UK's entry for the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest, to be held in Moscow. In early 2009 a series, called Eurovision: Your Country Needs You, was broadcast to find a performer for a song that he would compose for the competition. Jade Ewen won the right to represent Britain, winning with It's My Time, by Lloyd Webber and Diane Warren. At the contest, Lloyd Webber accompanied her on the piano during the performance. The United Kingdom finished 5th in the contest. The winner was Norway's Alexander Rybak with his composition "Fairytale".[34]
On 8 October 2009, Lloyd Webber launched the musical Love Never Dies at a press conference held at Her Majesty's Theatre, where the original Phantom has been running since 1986. Also present were Sierra Boggess, who had been cast as Christine Daaé, and Ramin Karimloo, who portrayed Phantom, a role he had recently played in the West End.
2010s [ edit ]
Following the opening of Love Never Dies, Lloyd Webber again began a search for a new musical theatre performer in the BBC One series Over the Rainbow. He cast the winner, Danielle Hope, in the role of Dorothy, and a dog to play Toto in his forthcoming stage production of The Wizard of Oz. He and lyricist and composer Tim Rice wrote a number of new songs for the production to supplement the songs from the film.[35]
On 1 March 2011, The Wizard of Oz opened at The Palladium Theatre, starring Danielle Hope as Dorothy and Michael Crawford as the Wizard.
In 2012, Lloyd Webber fronted a new ITV primetime show Superstar which gave the UK public the chance to decide who would play the starring role of Jesus in an upcoming arena tour of Jesus Christ Superstar. The arena tour started in September 2012 and also starred comedian Tim Minchin as Judas Iscariot, former Spice Girl Melanie C as Mary Magdalene and BBC Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles as King Herod.[36] Tickets for most venues went on sale on 18 May 2012.
Lloyd Webber created media attention with a series of comments about Eurovision in a Radio Times interview.[clarification needed] He said: "I don't think there's any point in beating around the bush. I saw no black faces on the programme Eurovision 2012. I was questioned by the press over Jade Ewen's race, and I think we would have placed second, but there is a problem when you go further east. If you're talking about Western Europe it's fine, but Ukraine, not so good."[clarification needed] The EBU denied racism in its show, telling Lloyd Webber that Ukraine's singer Gaitana was black, that year's winner Loreen for Sweden was of North African background and accompanied by a black backing dancer, and France's contestant Anggun was Indonesian. The contest organisers also told Webber that black singer Dave Benton won for Estonia in 2001. The EBU said it unites Europe for three nights in a year.[citation needed]
In 2013, Lloyd Webber reunited with Christopher Hampton and Don Black on Stephen Ward the Musical.[37]
In 2014, it was announced that Webber's next project would be a musical adaptation of the 2003 film School of Rock.[38] On 19 January 2015 auditions opened for children aged nine to fifteen in cooperation with the School of Rock music education program, which predated the film by several years.[39][40]
Lloyd Webber's memoir, Unmasked, was published in March 2018.[41]
On 9 September 2018, Webber, along with Tim Rice and John Legend each won an Emmy for Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert. With this win, Webber, Rice and Legend joined the list of people who have won Academy, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Awards.
Accusations of plagiarism [ edit ]
Lloyd Webber has been accused of plagiarism in his works. The Dutch composer Louis Andriessen commented that: "Andrew Lloyd Webber has yet to think up a single note; in fact, the poor guy's never invented one note by himself. That's rather poor".[42]
Lloyd Webber's biographer, John Snelson, countered such accusations. He acknowledged a similarity between the Andante movement of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor and the Jesus Christ Superstar song "I Don't Know How to Love Him", but wrote that Lloyd Webber:
...brings a new dramatic tension to Mendelssohn's original melody through the confused emotions of Mary Magdalene. The opening theme may be Mendelssohn, but the rhythmic and harmonic treatment along with new lines of highly effective melodic development are Lloyd Webber's. The song works in its own right as its many performers and audiences can witness.[42]
The songwriter Ray Repp claimed in a court case that Lloyd Webber had stolen a melody from his own song "Till You", but the court ruled in Lloyd Webber's favour.[43]
There was another accusation of plagiarism regarding Pink Floyd. The band released their sixth studio album, Meddle, in 1971, and the sixth track of the album, "Echoes", has a riff on which Lloyd Webber allegedly based the opening organ riff in "The Phantom of the Opera". The two riffs share very similar notes and the order of the notes played. Lloyd Webber's pipe organ riff from "Phantom of the Opera" plays D, C#, C, B, A#, then ascending A#, B, C, C#, D. Pink Floyd's "Echoes" plays C#, C, B, A#, A, then ascending A, A#, B, C, C#. Pink Floyd bassist and co-lead vocalist Roger Waters pointed this out and said it was "probably actionable", but stated he did not care to take it to court.[44]
Personal life [ edit ]
Lloyd Webber in 2008
Lloyd Webber has been married three times. He married first Sarah Hugill on 24 July 1971 and they divorced on 14 November 1983. Together they had two children: a daughter and a son:
He then married singer Sarah Brightman on 22 March 1984 in Hampshire. He cast Brightman in the lead role in his musical The Phantom of the Opera, among other notable roles. They divorced on 3 January 1990.
Thirdly, he married Madeleine Gurdon in Westminster on 9 February 1991. They have three children, two sons and one daughter, all of whom were born in Westminster:
Alastair Adam Lloyd Webber (born 3 May 1992)
William Richard Lloyd Webber (born 24 August 1993)
Isabella Aurora Lloyd Webber (born 30 April 1996).
Lloyd Webber and his third wife Madeleine founded the Watership Down Stud in 1992. In 1996, they expanded their equestrian holdings by purchasing Kiltinan Castle Stud near Fethard in County Tipperary, Ireland.[45]
The Sunday Times Rich List 2006 ranked him the 87th-richest man in Britain with an estimated fortune of £700 million. His wealth increased to £750 million in 2007, but the publication ranked him 101st in 2008.[46] He lives at Sydmonton Court, Hampshire, and owns much of nearby Watership Down.
Lloyd Webber is an art collector, with a passion for Victorian painting. An exhibition of works from his collection was presented at the Royal Academy in 2003 under the title Pre-Raphaelite and Other Masters – The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection. In 2006, Lloyd Webber planned to sell Portrait of Angel Fernández de Soto by Pablo Picasso to benefit the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation.[47] In November 2006, he withdrew the painting from auction after a claim that the previous owner had been forced to sell it under duress in Nazi Germany.[48] An out-of-court settlement was reached, where the foundation retained ownership rights.[49] On 23 June 2010, the painting was sold at auction for £34.7 million to an anonymous telephone bidder.[50]
Lloyd Webber was made a Conservative life peer in 1997,[51] however by the end of 2015, he had voted only 33 times.[52] Politically, Lloyd Webber has supported the UK's Conservative Party, allowing his song "Take That Look Off Your Face" to be used on a party promotional film seen by an estimated 1 million people before the 2005 general election.[53] In August 2014, Lloyd Webber was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue.[54]
In October 2015, Lloyd Webber was involved in a contentious House of Lords vote over proposed cuts to tax credits, voting with the Government in favour of the plan. Lloyd Webber was denounced by his critics because he flew in from abroad on his personal plane to vote, when his voting record was scant.[55][56] In October 2017, Webber retired from the House of Lords, stating that his busy schedule was incompatible with the demands of Parliament considering the upcoming crucial Brexit legislation.[57]
In late 2009, Lloyd Webber had surgery for early-stage prostate cancer,[58] but had to be readmitted to hospital with post-operative infection in November. In January 2010, he declared he was cancer-free.[59] He had his prostate completely removed as a preventative measure.[60]
Honours and styles of address [ edit ]
Honours [ edit ]
Lloyd Webber was appointed Knight Bachelor in the 1992 Birthday Honours for services to the Arts.[61] In the 1997 New Year Honours he was created a life peer as Baron Lloyd-Webber, of Sydmonton in the County of Hampshire.[51] He is properly styled as The Lord Lloyd-Webber; the title is hyphenated, although his surname is not.[2] He sat as a Conservative member of the House of Lords until his retirement from the House on 17 October 2017.
Styles of address [ edit ]
1948–1992: Mr Andrew Lloyd Webber
Andrew Lloyd Webber 1992–1997: Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber
Andrew Lloyd Webber 1997–present: The Right Honourable The Lord Lloyd-Webber, Kt
Awards [ edit ]
Academy Awards [ edit ]
One nomination for Best Original Song Score and Adaptation: 1973 motion picture Jesus Christ Superstar
One nomination for Best Original Song: "Learn to Be Lonely" from the 2004 motion picture The Phantom of the Opera.
Golden Globes [ edit ]
1997 – Best Original Song for "You Must Love Me" from Evita (award shared with Sir Tim Rice)
Plus one nomination for Best Original Song: "Learn to Be Lonely" from the 2004 motion picture The Phantom of the Opera.
Emmy Awards [ edit ]
Grammy Awards [ edit ]
Tony Awards [ edit ]
Olivier Awards [ edit ]
Other awards [ edit ]
Shows [ edit ]
Note: Music composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber unless otherwise noted.
Film adaptations [ edit ]
There have been a number of film adaptations of the Lloyd Webber musicals. Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) was directed by Norman Jewison; Evita (1996) was directed by Alan Parker; and The Phantom of the Opera (2004) was directed by Joel Schumacher and co-produced by Lloyd Webber. Cats, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar and By Jeeves have been adapted into made-for-television films that have been released on DVD and VHS and often air on BBC.
A special performance of The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall for the 25th anniversary was broadcast live to cinemas in early October 2011 and later released on DVD and Blu-ray in February 2012. The same was also done with a reworked version of Love Never Dies. Filmed in Melbourne, Australia, it received a limited cinema release in the US and Canada in 2012, to see if it would be viable to bring the show to Broadway. It received positive reviews[by whom?] and was No.1 on DVD charts in the |
releasing a robotics kit for kids. Since then, though, the venerable Mindstorms and Mindstorms NXT kits have made their way into all sorts of creations. Mindstorms wheelchair? Check. A robotics competition league for kids based entirely around Mindstorms kits? Yep. It even made its way into serious scientific research.
Not content with all that, Lego announced Sunday night a new generation of Mindstorms kits that features more modern technology and added flexibility for your next DIY project.
The Lego Mindstorms EV3 platform replaces the Mindstorms NXT 2.0 line, which came out in 2009. Like previous Mindstorms kits, the EV3 line is based around what Lego calls a programmable brick that acts as the brains of your creations. The EV3 Intelligent brick, as it's called, includes a number of new features, like an infrared sensor, new Linux-based firmware, a USB port, and an SD card slot.
The Lego Group
The new brick also comes with Bluetooth support, and it lets you program the brick without having to connect it to your PC thanks to improved on-brick programming capabilities. The new brick also works with iOS and Android, so you can use your smartphone to remotely control your Mindstorms EV3 creations. The programming software kit itself works on both Windows and Mac OS X.
Also new are 3D building instructions that you'll be able to view on your tablet. The new app will let you zoom in and rotate around every step in the instructions, so you can more clearly see what you're building.
The new EV3 sets will be backwards compatible with NXT kits, so if you have a Mindstorms set at home, you'll be able to use it with this new generation of Mindstorms.
If you want a Mindstorms EV3 kit, you'll have to wait a little bit: The new kit won't come out until the second half of this year, and it'll cost $349.
For more blogs, stories, photos, and video from the nation's largest consumer electronics show, check out our complete coverage of CES 2013.
This story, "New Lego Mindstorms will bring better robotics to kids and grown-ups alike" was originally published by TechHive.Government school efforts to indoctrinate and corrupt innocent children have gone into overdrive:
Children attending middle schools in the Cherry Creek School District in suburban Denver, CO are now being given access to extremely graphic sexual and homosexual pornography, material encouraging them to become sexually and homosexually active, descriptions of “sex toys,” and much more. Moreover, parents at the Fox Ridge Middle School in that district who have complained and protested have been rebuked, intimidated, and even threatened by school officials – and ignored by elected school board members.
It’s not as if the educrats responsible are too kooky to know they are doing wrong. See how they attempt to hide their crimes against decency from the children’s parents:
The children are given access to this depraved material through special Internet portals set up for the district’s middle schools. (Other portals have also been set up for the high schools.) These ostensibly include regular library material and legitimate health knowledge, science, and similar topics. However, children are given one password, and their parents are given a different password. The material is omitted from the parents’ accounts and is only available through the childrens’ accounts.
Mixed in with pornographic materials are “a range of extremely left-wing political articles.” Those responsible may be attempting to condition adolescents by causing them to associate leftism with the dopamine release set off by porn — a sort of Clockwork Orange experiment in reverse.
To view the depravity that serves as educational materials in public schools, follow the links from Mass Resistance. An example that is not too obscene to reproduce here:
Taken from a public school website.
On a tip from seaoh.In this post I present a workflow I use to help me efficiently go through Git merge conflicts and correct them. It eliminates some of the typing and tedium involved in this process.
It starts with a shell alias, conflicts. The alias is defined as:
alias conflicts = "git ls-files --unmerged | cut -f2 | uniq"
In Git, unmerged means a file that couldn’t be merged because of a conflict. So this Git command lists all of the objects containing conflicts. I pipe that command’s output to cut -f2 to get the second column of its output, the filenames. I then remove repeat entries using uniq, since this ls-files command outputs multiple objects for each conflict.
When I want to start resolving conflicts, I issue the command conflicts | xargs mvim. xargs is a powerful tool that takes its standard input – in this case, a list of files – and and provides that to a command as arguments. So, MacVim receives the list of conflicting files as arguments and loads the files into its buffer list.
I then fix the first conflict. If I’m dealing with a particularly long file, I use / to search for <<<< or other such conflict markers that Git places in the file.
When I’m done fixing the conflict, I execute :Git add % to add the file to the Git index. fugitive.vim, Time Pope’s essential Git intergation tool for Vim, provides the :Git command which passes through your command to the git command line. On the Vim command line % refers to the current file.
Having fixed a conflict and added a file to the Git index, I’m ready to deal with the next conflict. To get to the next conflicted file I use :bdelete, or :bd for short. Since we started Vim with a series of files as command line arguments, the buffer list is loaded with all the files we need to edit. :bdelete discards the current one and loads the next one. I repeat this process until there are no buffers left.
Once there are no remaining conflicts, I close my Vim window, go back to a terminal, and complete the merge using gc. What is gc? It’s an alias for git commit --verbose. Verbose commit output is awesome because it shows exactly what you’re about to commit. It saves me the step of doing git diff before each commit. I never want to commit without --verbose.Image copyright Youtube Image caption The videos have been removed and the users' accounts have been suspended
YouTube has moved to take down pornographic videos after it was discovered that some users had disguised them by giving them Irish language titles.
Until last week, anyone who searched for the Irish word for film would have presented with a series of explicit videos.
The issue was highlighted by Maitíú Ó Coimín, who is a journalist with the Irish language website Tuairisc.
"My flatmate is a media student in Galway who was looking up [the Irish word for film] on YouTube for a project," he said.
"I looked a bit further into it, and there were about 15 to 20 films of a questionable nature."
The films were uploaded by four different accounts that were all registered on the same day last October, he said.
"The accounts all have an Asian woman as a profile picture," he said.
"These were real pornographic films."
The phrasing of the videos' descriptions suggests that the account holders were not Irish speakers but used an online translation tool.
A YouTube spokesperson said when the issue was flagged, "our team was quick to take action".
"YouTube's community guidelines clearly state that sexually explicit content is not allowed on our site.
"We remove videos and channels that violate our policies when flagged for our attention.
"YouTube staff review flagged videos 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to determine whether they violate our community guidelines."CLOSE James River Church pastor John Lindell encourages his congregation to vote yes to repeal SOGI during a sermon on "a biblical look at human sexuality."
Buy Photo Pastor John Lindell leads a prayer service at James River Assembly in Ozark in 2013. (Photo: News-Leader file photo)Buy Photo
The Rev. John Lindell has spoken. He did it from one of the most powerful places in Southwest Missouri — the pulpit of James River Church, where he leads an Assemblies of God congregation that often tops 9,000 worshipers on Sundays.
In a March 15 sermon, Lindell urged congregants to repeal Springfield's sexual orientation and gender identity law on April 7.
"It is possible for someone who has practiced a life of adultery to stop," he said in the sermon. "It is possible for someone who has been a life-long alcoholic to stop. It is possible for somebody who has a cutting tongue and a big mouth to stop. It is possible for someone who is engaged in homosexual behavior to stop."
He urged Christians living in the city limits of Springfield to vote to repeal the law and to leave church with a Yes-On-Repeal yard sign. Lindell hit two main points: the Bible is clear in its condemnation of homosexuality as sin and the ordinance is an infringement on the religious rights of Christians who believe so.
"This ordinance reduces freedom of religion to freedom of worship," he said. "In other words, you can believe what you want within the confines of the four walls of the church as long as you don't live it outside of the church."
Lindell has expressed his views on the topic before. I am not surprised he is mobilizing his church, which packs a powerful political punch through the sheer number of members and, I believe, their commitment to vote.
But I am surprised he delivered his message from on high — the pulpit.
I have met Pastor Lindell once, months ago. He was engaging, funny and gracious.
He told me Tuesday that he has every right to campaign for repeal in a sermon. Years ago, he spoke from the pulpit against the expansion of casino gambling in Missouri.
"We cannot endorse a candidate and we cannot endorse a party," he said. "But we can speak and encourage people to vote in terms of the morality of the issue."
Over the next two Sundays he will continue to remind people to vote Yes and to take a Yes sign for their yard.
"Addressing this topic or the subject of the upcoming vote from the pulpit is not against the law in this country, although it may be in the future," Lindell said in the sermon. "Nor is it outside the parameters of a gospel ministry.
"Martin Luther, the great reformer, said this: 'If you preach the gospel in all aspects — with the exception of the issues which deal specifically with your time — you are not preaching the gospel at all.' "
A matter of free speech
How far can a pastor go in preaching the gospel when it comes to a political issue?
Churches are tax-exempt. As a result, the IRS has guidelines on their political activity. An IRS spokesman in St. Louis would not comment when asked if a pastor could speak from the pulpit to encourage congregants to vote a particular way on an issue.
But I did find this on the IRS website: A tax-exempt organization "may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities and it may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates."
That seems to leave a lot of gray area.
Lindell's sermon is further entwined with politics because he mentions Springfield Mayor Bob Stephens.
"The mayor was not in favor of this ordinance," Lindell told his congregation. "He saw it for what it was. He saw it as bad government."
Stephens, in my opinion, has gone to great lengths to keep his position on the ordinance incomprehensible. He faces re-election April 7. I called Stephens and informed him Lindell had mentioned him in a sermon.
"Oh goodie," Stephens said.
I asked the mayor, specifically, how he will vote on the matter April 7.
"I do not think, frankly, it is a matter of your business or Mr. Lindell's business or even my wife's business," Stephens told me.
He repeated what he has said in the past: He believes if the issue is to be addressed it should be done at the federal level.
Steven Reed, Stephens' opponent, had an easier time answering. He told me he will vote against repeal.
Homosexuality is sinful
In his sermon, Lindell cites several verses to make his No. 1 point: homosexuality is a sin, according to the Bible, and Christians should vote for repeal.
"We all have desires that are warped as a result of our fallen nature: pride, selfishness, greed, anger, bitterness, unforgiveness, lust, envy, covetousness, chemical addiction," Lindell said.
"Our desire for things God has forbidden is a reflection of how sin has distorted us, rather than a reflection of how Christ has made us."
Active homosexuals will not make it into heaven, Lindell said in the sermon.
"Homosexual activity will lead to destruction. A lot of people will say, 'I got that. I'm in on that. I believe that.' But you need to make sure you hear the second truth.
"Homosexual sin is not the only serious sin. Adultery, stealing, cheating, being abusive, being a drunkard can also keep you out of heaven."
I'm not sure I find that expansion of "serious sin" — cheating? — helpful or even hopeful in terms of my eternal afterlife. I take it to mean: Don't feel so bad, there are whole lot of other people hell-bound, too.
Obviously, I disagree with Lindell on the upcoming vote. I told him that.
I also told him that before I wrote this story, I transcribed his sermon. All 6,115 words of it.
It was titled "A Biblical Look at Human Sexuality." I find it telling that it contains 41 mentions of "sin," "sinners" and "sinfulness."
The words "love" or "loving"?
They appear eight times.
I gave Lindell a chance to respond to that tally. He said it makes sense that the word "sin" would appear multiple times in a Biblical discussion of homosexuality. The word "love" appears, Lindell said, because it would be unloving not to tell someone that when salvation is at stake.
Lindell then got personal with me. He told me he appreciated my column and my work at the News-Leader. "Although I don't think I'm going to 'love' this column."
These are the views of Steve Pokin, the News-Leader's columnist. Pokin has been at the paper three years and over the course of his career has covered just about everything — from courts and cops to features and fitness. He can be reached at 836-1253, spokin@gannett.com, on Twitter @stevepokinNL or by mail at 651 N. Boonville, Springfield, MO 65806.
Read or Share this story: http://sgfnow.co/1br2GRpThe Sun Devils will look to dial up some blitzes and crank up the heat on WSU on Saturday. Luke Falk showed great decision making under pressure versus Oregon State, and he’ll likely need to be even more on his game (if that’s even possible) in Tempe.
We showed a lot of love toward Falk postgame, and it was well deserved, but the key for me this week is the WSU wide receivers -- in particular the return of River Cracraft. With the amount of pressure the ASU defense creates, Isiah Myers, Dom Williams and company will need to continue to provide openings for Falk throughout the game, particularly on 3rd down.
Against Oregon State the Cougs had their best game since week one on 3rd down, converting 57 percent of the time, yet the game still went down to the wire. This further highlights how near perfect the offense has to play to keep WSU in the game and I don’t foresee that being any different this week.
On the topic of 3rd downs and our wide receiving corps, I have a question for you: Which receiver on the WSU roster do you think has the best 3rd down conversion rate (percent of catches on 3rd down that result in a first down)?
I was surprised to find out that it is not River Cracraft (83 percent), but Vince Mayle (92 percent) who leads the Cougs in that category (although River has more total catches for first downs). Those two players make up 32% of WSU’s 3rd down conversions through the air. It will be huge to have them both on the field, and this further complicates whether my wife and I are naming our son River or Vince when he arrives next month.
On paper it looks like the ASU pass defense (7th in YPA and 6th in TD% in the Pac-12) may not be as tough as Falk’s previous match-ups with USC and OSU; however, ASU ranks 3rd in passing first downs allowed and 2nd in passes over 15+ yards allowed, which shows their speed and ability to tackle in space.
The Sun Devil defense is also very good at stopping the pass in the red zone, ranking 2nd in completion percentage (42.9 percent) and 3rd in touchdowns given up (8). This leads me to one huge shout out to Connor Halliday and a hope that Falk can keep this streak alive.
So far in 2014, the Cougs have thrown 30 touchdowns in the red zone and 0, yes 0 interceptions. In 2013 WSU threw 5 picks in the red zone to only 20 touchdowns. It’s a massive improvement and one that needs to continue to give WSU a shot.
Looking at the ASU offense, Taylor Kelly’s 2nd favorite target on 3rd down is DJ Foster, but he only moves the chains on 57 percent of his 3rd down catches. This is big because Jaelen Strong is possibly out with a concussion, so the Cougar defense could have some success in stopping ASU if they can keep them in passing situations on 3rd down.
In order to do that they’ll need to stop both Kelly and Foster in the running game, which has been a tall task in WSU’s previous two meetings vs a Kelly led offense.
ASU feel asleep during #Pac12afterdark last week, hopefully the early start has them sleep walking again and the Cougs can pull off a win for the second consecutive year in the state of Arizona.
What do you think are the keys for the Cougs on Saturday?
Quick note on the graphics:
*I used the top 100 national dataset for the view on 3rd down catch conversions, which is why DJ Foster and others are not in the view. When you hover over a logo, all the stats are for receptions on 3rd down.
*The axis looking at 3rd down conversions do not start at zero, I did this to cut down on white space in the views
<script type='text/javascript' src='https://public.tableausoftware.com/javascripts/api/viz_v1.js'></script><div class='tableauPlaceholder' style='width: 1020px; height: 1060px;'><noscript><a href='#'><img alt=''src='http://publicrevizit.tableausoftware.com/static/images/W8/W8665T9XW/1_rss.png' style='border: none' /></a></noscript><object class='tableauViz' width='1020' height='1060' style='display:none;'><param name='host_url' value='https%3A%2F%2Fpublic.tableausoftware.com%2F' /> <param name='path' value='shared/W8665T9XW' /> <param name='toolbar' value='yes' /><param name='static_image' value='http://publicrevizit.tableausoftware.com/static/images/W8/W8665T9XW/1.png' /> <param name='animate_transition' value='yes' /><param name='display_static_image' value='yes' /><param name='display_spinner' value='yes' /><param name='display_overlay' value='yes' /><param name='display_count' value='yes' /><param name='showVizHome' value='no' /><param name='showTabs' value='y' /></object></div><div style='width:1020px;height:22px;padding:0px 10px 0px 0px;color:black;font:normal 8pt verdana,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;'><div style='float:right; padding-right:8px;'><a href='http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/about-tableau-products?ref=http://public.tableausoftware.com/shared/W8665T9XW' target='_blank'>Learn About Tableau</a></div></div>That said, the 910 is just long enough that it won't comfortably fit into a standard 13-inch laptop sleeve; you'll want to size up to one designed for 14- or 15-inch systems. Unfortunately, too, another cost of that bigger screen is some blank space at the bottom -- a thick black bar where instead of pixels you'll find the 720p webcam. This isn't the first laptop we've seen with a camera on the lower bezel, so I can say from experience that a setup like this could make for some potentially unflattering angles.
Those drawbacks notwithstanding, it's a fine screen, with good contrast and viewing angles. Though higher-end configurations have 4K, 3,840 x 2,160 resolution, I tested the entry-level model, which has a lower-res full-HD screen and promises even longer battery life as a result. (More on that in just a moment.)
Instead of a Windows Hello webcam, you'll find a fingerprint reader at the right end of the palm rest. Unfortunately, the setup process wasn't nearly as seamless as the Windows Hello cameras I've tested -- I fought through repeated error messages saying the sensor couldn't detect my finger. Worse, this fingerprint reader wasn't nearly as reliable. More often than not, I was forced to enter a PIN instead.
Fortunately, the keyboard itself is mostly enjoyable to use. The buttons here are well-spaced and offer a surprising amount of travel, especially compared to competing laptops. The Control and Function buttons on the left are undersize, but this only occasionally tripped me up while attempting keyboard shortcuts. Speaking of the Function key, I appreciate that the Function row up top is home to things like brightness and volume controls, all of which you can control without having to hold down the Fn button. Having recently tested the MacBook Pro, which eschews the Function row entirely, I no longer take this for granted.
Sadly, the touchpad needs work. It's spacious, which seemed like an auspicious enough start, but alas, even basic stuff like single-finger tracking feels like a chore. As on some other Windows laptops I've tested, the trackpad has a tendency to latch onto stuff it wasn't supposed to, causing me to do things like reorder my pinned browser tabs. In this case, though, when I did want to click and drag objects around on screen, the touchpad didn't always register my left click on my first choice, leaving me no choice but try try again (and maybe again). I'd say a firmware update is definitely in order here.
Like so many other new laptops, the 910 offers USB Type-C ports, though Lenovo mercifully left one full-size one to complement the two smaller USB-C sockets. Weirdly, though, the USB-C ports don't work the same way: The one toward the back is a USB 2.0 connection meant for charging only, while the port next to it follows the USB 3.0 standard and is intended for video output. Neither supports Thunderbolt 3. Again, the mix of ports isn't bad, but ideally, those USB-C ports would be interchangeable, as they are on competing machines, like the new MacBook Pro.
Performance and battery life
I hadn't been doing much on the computer. I woke the morning after my birthday with one immediate goal in mind: Like and respond to all the nice Facebook posts people had left on my special day. And I did just that, occasionally stopping to check email and Twitter, but otherwise focused on the task at hand. To my surprise, even that was enough to get the fans spinning, with the noise loud enough for me to hear over my TV. The whirring persisted even after I took a break and walked away from the machine.
To their credit, at least, the fans do their stated job: The laptop never got hot on the underside -- unlike some other systems I've tested recently. Speaking of the underbelly, the two JBL speakers deliver serviceable quality (for a laptop) and pretty robust volume; when sitting alone in my apartment, I could get away with keeping the sound set at 30-something out of 100.
If all you wanted was to check email, Facebook and Twitter, you could spend half or a third of the price for a Chromebook or budget Windows machine, and possibly get less fan noise, too. But the Yoga 910 is powerful enough for more than just basic use, which I'd assume is a requirement for most people willing to spend $1,180-plus on a new laptop.
Indeed, that loud fan noise aside, the 910 is a fast machine. It boots in just seven seconds, and the NVMe-made SSD delivers average max read speeds of 1.59 gigabytes per second, according to the ATTO benchmark, though write speeds came in at a less remarkable 313 MB/s. The model I tested had the same 2.7GHz Core i7-7500U CPU and integrated Intel HD 620 graphics as the other available configurations, though my unit has 8GB of RAM and a full HD screen, whereas higher-end SKUs have 16 gigs of memory and 4K screen resolution.
It's worth emphasizing that the 910 packs one of Intel's new seventh-generation Core processors. What's more, the 910 remains one of the few machines to date that actually offers it (many rival systems are still stuck on older sixth-gen CPUs). You can see the edge in our benchmark results, listed above.
The 802.11ac wireless radio was mostly reliable, but on one occasion I was the only one in AOL's office not able to connect to the usually-fast network. I had to disconnect the network and then toggle WiFi on and off before getting it to work. In general, too, the machine seemed slightly slower than its peers to reconnect to known networks after waking from sleep. Again, though, once connected, wireless speeds were consistently fast.
Battery life Lenovo Yoga 910 16:13 Surface Book with Performance Base (2016) 16:15 Apple MacBook Pro 2016 (13-inch, no Touch Bar) 11:42 HP Spectre x360 (13-inch, 2015) 11:34 Apple MacBook Pro with Retina display (13-inch, 2015) 11:23 Apple MacBook Pro 2016 (15-inch) 11:00 iPad Pro (12.9-inch, 2015) 10:47 HP Spectre x360 15t 10:17 Apple MacBook Pro 2016 (13-inch, Touch Bar) 9:55 ASUS ZenBook 3 9:45 Apple MacBook (2016) 8:45 Samsung Notebook 9 8:16 Microsoft Surface Pro 4 7:15 HP Spectre 13 7:07 Razer Blade Stealth (Spring 2016) 5:48 Razer Blade Stealth (Fall 2016) 5:36 Dell XPS 15 (2016) 5:25 (7:40 with the mobile charger) Razer Blade Pro (2016) 3:48 ASUS ROG Strix GL502VS 3:03
Spoiler alert: I saw much, much better battery life on the 910 than I did on last year's Yoga 900. There are two reasons for that. One, Lenovo stepped up to a larger battery: 78Wh, up from 66Wh. Second, whereas last year's flagship was sold exclusively with a 3,200 x 1,800 display, the 910 is available with a lower-res (and more power-efficient) full HD screen option, which is the one I tested. All told, I got an average of 16 hours and 13 minutes on Engadget's video rundown test -- even more than the 15.5 hours Lenovo promises on the full HD model. (The company promises 10.5 hours with a 4K display and 16GB of RAM.)
Weirdly, early on in my testing I got one result in the 19-hour range and another around 17 hours, but neither of these stellar outcomes was reproducible; it was only in the 16-hour range that I ended up seeing consistent results, so it's from that batch of scores that I calculated the official score presented in the above table.
That's obviously a big improvement over the nine hours and 36 minutes I logged on last year's Yoga 900. Sixteen-hour runtime is also good enough to best most of its rivals, including the HP Spectre x360 and the new MacBook Pro.
Configuration options and the competition
The Yoga 910 starts at $1,180 on Lenovo's website, though $1,330 is presented as the original price. This is the configuration we tested, which comes with a Core i7-7500U processor, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB solid-state drive and full HD display. For $1,280 (usually $1,430) you get the same specs, but with a 4K display. Moving on, $1,630 nets you 16GB of memory and a 512GB SSD. Finally, for $1,650 you get the same processor, 16GB of RAM and 4K display, plus a terabyte of storage.
HP's recently refreshed 13-inch Spectre x360 is remarkably similar, in everything from price to specs. The machine starts at $1,150 and weighs 2.85 pounds, also with a 360-degree hinge and metal body. It, too, packs Intel's seventh-generation Core processors and up to 16GB of RAM and a terabyte of storage. The battery life is long, though not as quite as epic as the 910's, and there's no 4K screen option. The touchpad is also stubborn, but still better than the one Lenovo used. Also similar to the 910, the x360 can get loud, and it runs warmer, too. Still, I prefer it to the 910, partly because of the touchpad, and because it offers a Windows Hello webcam that performs far more reliably than the fingerprint reader on Lenovo's laptop.
You should also check out Microsoft's recently updated Surface Book thanks to its well-built design, 16-hour battery life and comfortable keyboard and trackpad, though the heavier weight (3.68 pounds) and high price ($1,499-plus) might be a turnoff to some.
The 2.7-pound Dell XPS 13 ($800-plus) is also a perennial Engadget favorite, thanks to its small footprint, nearly bezel-less display, comfortable keyboard and well-constructed build. Though it's had the same design for nearly two years now, Dell has done a good job updating the internals, with the maxed-out model offering the same seventh-generation Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage as the competition. Problem is, that model will set you back a whopping $2,250, which doesn't seem reasonable given what Lenovo et al. are charging.A total of 49 cars are set to take part in next weekend’s Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring, with the entry list for the second round of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship having been released.
The race will also double as the second leg of the Tequila Patron North American Endurance Cup.
ENTRY LIST: Twelve Hours of Sebring
Defending race winners Action Express Racing headline the Prototype class, which features 12 entries. Filipe Albuquerque rejoins Joao Barbosa and Christian Fittipaldi in the No. 5 car, with Scott Pruett moving over to the No. 31 car alongside Dane Cameron and Eric Curran.
Tequila Patron ESM heads to Sebring with an identical lineup that took the Florida-based team to overall victory in the Rolex 24 at Daytona; they’ll be joined by four other P2 cars, including the similarly prepared Ligier JS P2 Honda from Michael Shank Racing.
The big news, however, has come with a performance cut for the Honda and Nissan-powered P2 cars, which had set the pace in last month’s IMSA-sanctioned test at Sebring.
The P class sees two new entries for Sebring, with the race debut of the DragonSpeed Oreca 05 Nissan of Nicolas Lapierre, Nic Minassian and Henrik Hedman, as well as the Alegra Motorsports Riley BMW DP.
Dominik Farnbacher is set for his P class debut in the Alegra entry alongside Cameron Lawrence, Daniel Morad and Carlos de Quesada.
Rubens Barrichello, meanwhile, is again listed in the No. 10 Wayne Taylor Racing Corvette DP as a fourth driver.
Seven cars are entered in Prototype Challenge, which will see the debut of new electronics and an upgraded electronics package to the spec Oreca FLM09s.
There are no major surprises in terms of entries, with BAR1 Motorsports focusing on a single entry, with Michael Lyons set for his class debut in one of the Starworks entries.
There will be a full field of ten GT Le Mans class cars, featuring a mix of Corvettes, BMWs, Ford, Ferraris and Porsches.
Corvette Racing will be seeking back-to-back WeatherTech Championship class wins, while also defending their class win at Sebring one year ago. The team remains with an unchanged driver lineup from Daytona.
Of note, Ferrari factory driver Andrea Bertolini joins the No. 68 Scuderia Corsa Ferrari 488 GTE alongside Alessandro Pier Guidi and Daniel Serra.
With 20 cars, the GT Daytona class is again the most represented, and with seven manufacturers set to do battle for class honors.
It includes Audi, which will have four entries between Stevenson Motorsports, Flying Lizard Motorsports and Rolex 24 class winners Magnus Racing.
The new Ferrari 488 GT3 will debut in the hands of Scuderia Corsa with drivers Alessandro Balzan, Christina Nielsen and Jeff Segal, while there will be six Lamborghini Huracan GT3s on the grid.
Among the Lamborghini contingent is the new second Change Racing entry, which will be driven by Bill Sweedler, Townsend Bell and Richard Antinucci, as revealed by Sportscar365 on Tuesday.
Dream Racing, meanwhile, will make its series debut, also in a Huracan GT3, along with two Konrad Motorsport entries.
Of note, TRG-AMR is not entered, marking the first time in recent history a Kevin Buckler-entered car will not be on the grid in Florida endurance classic.
The Twelve Hours of Sebring is set for March 19.Press Release:
(Boston, MA) – For much of the Spoetzl Brewery’s 105-year history, you couldn’t get one of their Shiner Beers if you lived more than 100 miles from the town of Shiner, Texas, where German and Czech immigrants first opened the brewery in 1909.
Even as the brewery’s iconic Shiner Bock gained popularity, availability remained limited, mostly in Texas and a few surrounding states.
But in its second century of brewing, Shiner has been making a steady march across the country. That march reaches Massachusetts this month. Expatriate Texans, craft beer fans and Bay Staters who discovered Shiner in other states no longer have to travel to find it.
Boston was the largest city in the U.S. where Shiner Beers weren’t available. That changes soon. But you’ll also be able to find our beers all across the state, from Pittsfield to Provincetown.
In addition to the flagship Bock, craft beer lovers can also try Shiner White Wing, a Belgian-style white ale brewed with orange and coriander, our seasonal beer (currently Ruby Red Bird, made with Texas Ruby Red grapefruit and ginger) plus our Family Reunion, a sampling of several different Shiner styles including Bohemian Black Lager, Wild Hare Pale Ale, Shiner Premium (our original recipe) and two limited editions – Kosmos Reserve and our current Brewer’s Pride selection, Shiner Kölsch.
Distributors in Massachusetts will be Atlas Distributing, Inc., Burke Distributing Corporation, Girardi Distributors LLC, L. Knife & Son, Inc., Merrimack Valley Distributing Company, Inc., Quality Beverage Limited Partnership, and Williams Distributing Company, Inc.Deb 'Spoons' Perry on travelling the world with cutlery in hand being Forever Young
Posted
A West Australian musical grandmother has again created international buzz with her unique spoon-playing act.
The world first got a glimpse of the Deb "Spoons" Perry's ability in 2012 when a YouTube clip of her performing to a Black Keys song went viral, quickly amassing over one million views.
The performance was later aired on Ellen DeGeneres' TV show and she was recently invited back to the US to perform on a variety show hosted by comedian Steve Harvey.
"I was down in Tasmania when I got the email inviting me to the US," Ms Perry told the ABC from her Augusta home in WA's south-west.
"To tell you the truth, I didn't really know who Steve Harvey was. But I did a bit of Googling and quickly realised this might be a bigger deal than I thought it was."
The performance and humorous banter between Ms Perry and the high profile host proved a hit and has since been viewed by over three million times worldwide.
"The lead-up to the show was quite an overwhelming experience," Ms Perry said.
"Once I got up on stage and the music kicked in, it all came together. I even got Steve up and rocking with a set of spoons. Looking back on it, it really couldn't have gone any better."
Though a drummer since her early childhood, Ms Perry was introduced to spoon playing in 1972 while watching a band at a bar in Fremantle.
She said it was initially a way of "keeping my rhythm in check while rearing my three kids".
Ms Perry, now 68, quickly developed a love for the method and began developing her style and act.
Her first big break came as a finalist on variety show Australia's Got Talent in 2008 before the YouTube clip, set on farmland and surrounded by kangaroos, went viral.
"I had no idea what 'going viral' meant but I had all these people saying 'Your clip's gone viral, your clip's gone viral', and I started to understand what that meant as I watched the views click over," Ms Perry said.
"That led to all sorts of invitations to perform and it's gone from there, really. Not bad for a little granny from Augusta."
Ms Perry, a keen surfer and bird-watcher, uses her fame to inspire young kids to |
anti-inflammatory cytokines, have more bad bacteria in their gut. This means a strong immune response ensures bad bacteria do not overpopulate our guts.
These mice are also more susceptible to bowel cancer than those with sufficient numbers of anti-inflammatory cytokines. The heightened cancer risk can be transferred to normal mice through their faeces (poo). This involves collecting the poo from a donor mouse, in this case mice lacking anti-inflammatory cytokines, and feeding it to a recipient mouse.
Poo from the donor mouse is rich in bacteria that reflects their gut microbiota. The high-risk mice have a lot of bad bacteria in their poo. Once transferred to the recipient mouse, these new bacteria flourish in the gut changing the composition of the microbiota.
Research has shown when the new gut microbiota is established in the recipient mice, their risk of developing bowel cancer increases.
A recent study conducted in humans paralleled these results. It showed long-term antibiotic use increased the risk of bowel cancer.
Antibiotics are well known to disrupt the composition of the gut microbiota, just like the mice lacking anti-inflammatory cytokines, leading to more bad bacteria in the gut and an increased risk of bowel cancer.
Microbiota and chemotherapy
A review of research published in the journal Nature also points to the gut microbiota playing a role in how patients respond to chemotherapy. The review suggests the gut microbiota determines the effectiveness of chemotherapy in two ways: through activating chemotherapy drugs, and through its interaction with the immune system.
These mechanisms have been best described in mice that lack a gut microbiota. Such mice, termed “germ-free” mice, are bred in completely sterile conditions. They are exposed to no external sources of bacteria and have no bacteria in any part of their body.
Research has shown that chemotherapy in germ-free mice is less effective than in normal mice, and their tumours grow at higher rates.
This may be because many chemotherapy drugs initiate an immune response that kills tumour cells through a process called inflammation. In this study, germ-free mice had lower levels of inflammatory markers in their tumours following chemotherapy, compared to normal mice.
This indicates that the communication between the gut bacteria and immune system is critical for cancer treatment.
Many chemotherapy drugs are delivered to the patient in an inactive form, which is then activated by special enzymes in the liver and directly by gut bacteria. Different levels of these liver enzymes determine how effective chemotherapy will be at killing tumour cells.
Germ-free mice have more liver enzymes responsible for detoxifying chemotherapy drugs compared to normal mice. They are therefore able to eliminate the chemotherapy from their system very quickly. This leaves less time for the chemotherapy to kill tumour cells and therefore regulates the efficacy of treatment.
Once again, these effects were reversed by faecal transfer from mice with a normal gut microbiota.
In contrast, mice that have high levels of bad bacteria in their gut have also been shown to over-activate some chemotherapy drugs. Although this is thought to increase the ability of chemotherapy drugs to kill tumour cells, it can also cause unnecessary side effects as many chemotherapy drugs are unable to differentiate between healthy and tumour cells.
Gut microbiota and diarrhoea
The most common side effect of chemotherapy is diarrhoea. Chemotherapy-induced diarrhoea is acutely life threatening as it starves people of vital nutrients, making them susceptible to serious infection and death.
Like cancer development and treatment, diarrhoea is associated with changes in the gut microbiota. Our yet-to-be published research found high levels of Proteobacteria in the gut before chemotherapy resulted in worsened diarrhoea and exacerbated weight loss in mice.
This research supports growing evidence in human trials showing that the levels of gut bacteria in the poo of patients before they start cancer treatment predicts their likelihood of developing diarrhoea. Similar findings have also been shown in patients treated with radiotherapy.
Can we change things?
This research provides an opportunity to modify gut bacteria to optimise cancer treatment outcomes. This could be in the form of poo transfer, probiotics or even something as simple as changing someone’s diet.
And the ability to understand someone’s risk, and modify it before chemotherapy starts, can ensure the perfect balance between chemotherapy response and toxicity is achieved.
Work is currently being performed in Adelaide to identify the specific bacteria that are critical in determining chemotherapy response. Once this has been achieved, methods of mitigating risk can be evaluated and translated to patients.Seeking applause from a right-wing audience in Michigan, Mitt Romney vowed on Saturday: “I will cut spending, I will cap spending and I will finally balance the budget,” saying that he will end federal funding for all the usual Republican budgetary scapegoats — the Public Broadcasting System, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has said much the same thing many times in recent months, hoping to woo the tea party extremists who keep rejecting his candidacy.
But Romney must think these “conservatives” very stupid if he’s promising to balance the federal budget by eliminating nominal amounts spent on the nation’s cultural programs. And he must think they’re even dumber if they believe he can do that while delivering the massive tax cuts and defense increases he has also promised. As a former corporate investor and state governor, he certainly knows that his numbers simply don’t work.
Or at least not in the foreseeable future, as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget explained in a study of Romney’s latest tax plan. Rather than bringing the budget into balance, as he has repeatedly promised, that plan would substantially increase the national debt over the coming decade by reducing taxes on people like Romney himself — the wealthiest 1 percent.
“Estimated roughly, ignoring interactions and microdynamic effects, we find that without offsets Gov. Romney’s plan on the whole would increase the debt by about $2.6 trillion,” according to the nonpartisan committee. The roughness of that estimate was unavoidable because Romney’s plan leaves out most of the vital details — such as which tax loopholes he would close and which vital programs and entitlements he would cut. It is full of tax cuts pleasing to gullible Republican audiences, but not much else.
So far, the hints that Romney has offered about proposed changes to the budget would increase rather than reduce deficits. Aside from his tax cuts — which represent an even bigger orgy of irresponsibility than the George W. Bush cuts — Romney often insists that he will substantially increase rather than reduce the defense budget, raising the total spent as a percentage of gross domestic product from 3.8 to 4 percent. That doesn’t sound like much until someone does the math, which results in an additional $40 billion or so annually. Again, there are few substantive details so far, except his promise to build another 15 Navy warships annually, at a cost of roughly $21 billion alone.
Eventually all the unbridled spending that Romney wants to enact on tax breaks for his rich donors and yet more Pentagon waste will add up to real money — unlike the cuts he has loudly aimed at the country’s cultural programs. Total annual spending on the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — all hated by “conservatives” who behave like vandals intent on sacking the national heritage — amounts to less than $700 million, with an “m.”
In a national budget of nearly $4 trillion, with a “t,” $700 million is a truly meaningless amount, representing some minuscule fraction of military cost overruns. And Romney — our new Spartan leader who avoided the draft in France — surely knows that too.
So why does he talk about those cuts and avoid discussing the real tax increases and spending reductions that would be required to balance the budget? He seems to think that his tea party audiences can’t do simple arithmetic. He may well be right.
Joe Conason is the editor in chief of NationalMemo.com.According to the State Department definition, a Palestinian student claiming the right to return to her homeland could be considered to be "denying Israel's right to exist," given the demographic implications of the Palestinian right of return for the Jewish state. A professor daring to suggest that Israel should be, like the U.S., the state of all its citizens — liberal, secular and multicultural — rather than that of just one ethnicity could be similarly censured. And anyone calling for a boycott of Israel could be accused of "demonizing" it by singling it out (as though all the world's problems have to be addressed before we can focus on Israel). Rather than constituting positions with which one might agree or disagree, these ideas could be marked for censorship and punishment.Recently I saw the news of Soylent 2.0 coming out. That reminded me that I wanted to try out this future food a while ago but it wasn’t available in EU and with that in Slovenia. There are DIY ways but that was a step too far for me.
The main reason I want to try this is that sometimes there is just no time to prepare food. So in that cases I go for fast food, order in, or eat something prepackaged. Not great for hunger nor for body needs.
So I started googling around and found that there are now a ton of soylents out there. There’s even a website to compare soylents. Amazingly I also found a Slovenian soylent reseller website. What I discovered is that now there are EU soylents as well - most notable being Joylent, Queal and Jake.
There are upsides and downsides to all but I decided to go with Jake. The reason mainly being their packaging - one meal per one bag. Their website is also better looking than the other two (Déformation professionnelle). I have no intention in going 100% soylent anytime soon, I just want to replace shitty meals with healthier alternative. So opening and discarding one bag seems way more convenient than opening a big bag, measuring, and keeping an open bag around for a while.
Joylent, Queal, and Jake.
So I ordered 20 bags and they arrived 2 days later. I was eager to try it so I replaced my lunch that day with Jake. I like their honest FAQ on taste:
In the words of the community: “Pretty much nobody likes it the first try. It’s weird, texture is odd (make sure you follow the directions!!), and the flavor is so hard to pin down that the brain gives up. However, (…) people not only get used to it by the second sip, but end up craving it, within a day to a week.”
And I have to agree 100%. I almost couldn’t make it through first glass:
Jake is…interesting. Not sure if I can actually do this :D — Miha Rekar (@mr_foto) August 6, 2015
But the one next day was better. And the day after that I almost didn’t notice the taste. Today it still tasted a bit too sweet but it’s not a bad taste at all anymore. I’m not in the craving it phase yet, but I don’t dislike the taste anymore. It sure takes some getting used to, on the other hand - none of us liked wine/beer/coffee/tea on the first sip either.
What I really like about it is that it actually makes me feel full. After I drink the whole glass I’m good for at least 4 hours. This was the main thing I was worried about. If I’d crave food after soylent then I’d go back to my old ways of eating. That plus soylent would double my food intake and do no good.
5 days into the experiment I’m liking this way more than I anticipated. I’ll definitely finish this batch and then order some Joylent and Queal as well just so I can compare the taste.Yesterday, Brian Shea published an opinion piece about the ways in which Nintendo is letting its fan base down. In response to that story, a reader reached out to us to share his interactions with a Nintendo customer-service representative.
Brian Nelson contacted us with a text transcript of his conversation. He begins by expressing his disappointment with the handling of the Amiibo shortage.
I would just like to express my disappointment with your handling of amiibo support, instead of taking preorders and making a supply to match, you have purposely created a shortage of characters and now games with features large amounts of players will never be able to access. Disney and activision have no problem assuring their customers get their toys to life figures.
There's no reason I should have had to wait in line for hours at gamestop yesterday, been the only customer in line and still have to walk away without the amiibo I wanted, you've known of the demand since wave one and still refuse to keep up with the demand for products. Why even make a product you have no desire to make sure people who want can get. You advertise compatible amiibo feature with games, yet don't produce enough for people to even use them in the compatibile software. I hope you see the error of you production currently and offer some sort of solution soon.
The Nintendo customer service representative apologizes for the trouble Brian has had in obtaining the figures he wants. As expected though, he doesn't have much actionable information to share.
Thank you for writing. I apologize for the delay in our reply. I’m sorry to hear of your disappointment with the availability and distribution of amiibo, and would like you to know that we have documented and shared your concerns with the relevant departments here at Nintendo.
Additionally, I’d like to convey that we are aware of the popularity of amiibo and continually aim to always have a regular supply of amiibo in the marketplace. As stated previously, certain sold-out amiibo may return to your local retailer at a later stage. We apologize for any inconvenience you are experiencing now, and thank you in advance for your continued patience in this matter.
That isn’t good enough for Brian, though. He tells the representative that his complaints were “glossed over.”
If you guys are aware of the popularity of amiibo from past waves, why have you not stepped up production of the newer figures. Especially seeing how you are promoting them with newer games such as Kirby and code name steam.
Short of Kirby, you can not purchase a single figure compatible with either game. All of the fire emblem characters are unavailable, many of which aren't even released and are sold out already. Why promote using fire emblem characters in code name steam if the majority of players will never have the opportunity. If your company is aware of the demand, it would only reason you are purposely failing to meet supply.
Brian makes a hefty accusation here about Nintendo’s manipulation of demand via the supply chain. He does however make a clear point about features locked away (perhaps permanently) because Amiibo figures are impossible to find with any reliability.
Where things start to fall apart is when the representative takes it upon him or herself to explain how the supply chain works. This person, who likely does not speak for corporate public relations, abdicates all responsibility on behalf of Nintendo of America.
While this may not be the answer you were hoping for, all of the issues you're describing are retailer related. Nintendo has no input on when or how retailers sell our products, if or when new products are stocked, or when and how the retailer takes pre-orders. These decisions are made by retailers at the administration level. If you have concerns about these kinds of issues, we can only recommend contacting your retailer.
It may interest you to learn that Nintendo doesn't ship products directly to retail locations. We take orders from distributors (who sell our products and products from other companies), and ship our products to their distribution centers. The distributors then take orders from retailers and ship these orders to the retailers' merchandise centers. Once there, the retailers make all decisions about how to best sell this merchandise. They divide this merchandise up into smaller units and send them to retailers based on sales data.
Please also note that no amiibo have been discontinued at this time. We plan to have different amiibo available throughout the year, and characters which seem to disappear at one time will suddenly reappear in the future. This means that amiibo which are hard to find now will be back in stores.
In order to verify Brian’s story, we were able to call the Nintendo support line and use the ticket number. The representative we spoke with verified the content of the messages we were provided.
We reached out to Nintendo yesterday, giving the publisher nearly a full day in order to provide comment for this story. Unfortunately, we did not hear back by the time of publication. We’ll update if Nintendo decides to comment.
Our Take
It’s important to note that Nintendo corporate PR will likely disown this CSR’s comment placing the blame on retailers. Regardless, this is what at least one customer is being told. Given the detail provided, we have to wonder how many other customers like Brian have been told something similar.
With the gray market swopping in to snatch up as many Amiibo figures as it can, how long will it be before the only place we can get them is eBay and Amazon's Marketplace? That's not a good look for Nintendo and it needs to improve quickly.It today's preview, we take a look at one of the best parts of being the Dungeon Master—the distribution of treasure!
It’s good to be the dungeon master! Not only do you get to tell fantastic stories about heroes, villains, monsters, and magic, but you also get to create the world in which these stories live. Whether you’re running a D&D game already or you think it’s something you want to try, the Dungeon Master’s Guide is the book for you.
Adventurers strive for many things, including glory, knowledge, and justice. Many adventurers also seek something more tangible: fortune. Strands of golden chains, stacks of platinum coins, bejeweled crowns, enameled scepters, bolts of silk cloth, and powerful magic items all wait to be seized or unearthed by intrepid, treasure-seeking adventurers. Chapter 7 of the DMG details magic items and the placement of treasure in an adventure, as well as special rewards that can be granted instead of or in addition to magic items and mundane treasure.
When you use a Treasure Hoard table to randomly determine the contents of a treasure hoard and your roll indicates the presence of one or more magic items, you can determine the specific magic items by rolling on the appropriate table(s) here. Treasure hoards are more fully described in the DMG (pg. 133); here’s a sample treasure hoard table for your perusal.
The Dungeon Master's Guide
The Dungeon Master’s Guide provides the inspiration and the guidance you need to spark your imagination and create worlds of adventure for your players to explore and enjoy. Inside you’ll find world-building tools, tips and tricks for creating memorable dungeons and adventures, optional game rules, hundreds of classic D&D magic items, and much more!
Magic Items TableMOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia and the United States are still discussing the timing of the first face-to-face encounter between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, expected to take place at a G20 summit in Germany later this week, a Kremlin aide said on Monday.
FILE PHOTO: Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a news conference at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, on January 17, 2017 and U.S. President Donald Trump seen at a reception ceremony in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 20, 2017, as seen in this combination photo. Sputnik/Alexei Druzhinin/Kremlin via REUTERS and Bandar Algaloud/Courtesy of Saudi Royal Court/Handout/File photos via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THESE PICTURES WERE PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY
Since Trump was elected U.S. president, Russian has been keenly anticipating his first meeting with Putin, hoping it would trigger a reset in U.S.-Russia relations that plunged to post-Cold War lows under Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama.
But with Trump embroiled in a row at home over his associates’ links to Moscow, the encounter with Putin has become a minefield. Too warm a meeting would allow Trump’s domestic opponents to accuse him of being a Kremlin stooge.
Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters the Trump-Putin meeting would happen on the sidelines of the G20 summit, in Hamburg, but it was not yet finalised how it would fit into the summit’s schedule.
“We will be looking for certain breaks, windows to hold this, the most important, meeting,” Ushakov said.
“We have a lot of issues, which should be discussed at the highest level... That’s why this meeting, this first personal contact, is so important.”
Asked about the agenda for the meeting, Ushakov said: “I’ve heard the Americans want to raise the issues of terrorism and Syria. It seems to me that would be pretty reasonable.”
Ushakov said that ties between Russia and the United States were at “zero level.”
The Kremlin aide urged the United States “to save us from the need to retaliate” against Washington for expelling Russian diplomats and seizing two Russian diplomatic compounds on U.S. soil, one in Maryland and the other on Long Island.
Barack Obama ordered the expulsion of the 35 Russians in late December last year, seized the compounds, and imposed sanctions on two Russian intelligence agencies over what he said was their involvement in hacking political groups in the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election.
Russian has denied interfering in the U.S. election. Putin said at the time he would not retaliate immediately, in the expectation that relations would improve under Trump.
With no thaw materialising yet, Russian officials have said this month that they may now have to take “symmetrical” steps in retaliation.Soldiers declare coup in Mali
Updated
Renegade Malian soldiers have appeared on state television to declare they had seized power in a coup following the government's failure to quell a nomad-led rebellion in the north.
Former colonial power France said it was suspending security cooperation with Mali and urged constitutional order to be reestablished promptly, a call echoed by the European Union.
The coup has been fronted by soldiers of the rank of captain or lower and, if successful, will add a new layer of insecurity to a Saharan region battling Al Qaeda agents and a flood of weapons trafficked from Libya since the fall of Moamar Gaddafi.
The army has for weeks appealed to the government for better weapons to fight the northern Tuareg rebels, now bolstered by heavily armed ethnic allies who fought on Gaddafi's side last year but have returned to Mali.
Members of the newly formed National Committee for the Return of Democracy and the Restoration of the State (CNRDR) read a statement after heavy weapons fire rang out around the presidential palace in the capital Bamako throughout the night.
"The CNRDR... has decided to assume its responsibilities by putting an end to the incompetent regime of Amadou Toumani Toure," said the group's spokesman, Amadou Konare, who was flanked by about two dozen soldiers.
"We promise to hand power back to a democratically elected president as soon as the country is reunified and its integrity is no longer threatened."
A subsequent statement by Captain Amadou Sanogo, described as president of the CNRDR, declared an immediate curfew "until further notice". Little is known about Captain Sanogo except that he is an instructor at a military training college.
The CNRDR declared all land and air borders shut, but it was impossible to verify whether the mutiny had sufficient support to seal off a country twice the size of France and with seven neighbours. Earlier a reporter said Bamako airport had been shut down by local police rather than renegade soldiers.
While no deaths were reported, an official at the Gabriel Toure hospital in central Bamako said around 20 people had been admitted with bullet wounds, with some in a serious condition.
Government and military sources said the mutineers entered the presidential palace overnight after it was vacated by Toure and his entourage.
A defence ministry source said Toure - a 63-year-old former coup leader due to step down after April polls - was in a safe location but his whereabouts were unknown.
UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon called for calm and for grievances to be settled democratically in a statement hours before the soldiers said they had seized power.
Jean Ping, head of the commission of the African Union, said he was "deeply concerned by the reprehensible acts currently being perpetrated by some elements of the Malian army".
Reuters
Topics: world-politics, unrest-conflict-and-war, mali
First posted[A SotA Public Forum post by Starr Long]
Greetings Avatars,
Please read this entire message, as well as the linked instructions and known issues.
Thank you for being a loyal backer and follower of Shroud of the Avatar. Release 21 access for all backers at First Responder level and above begins this Thursday, August 27 at 10:30 AM Central Time (16:30 UTC).
It has been a truly amazing and humbling month. Our community believes in us so much that we have managed to raise over seven million dollars to date! To celebrate, we are having an all-day telethon on Monday August 31 from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM Central Time (16:00 UTC to 04:00 UTC). The telethon will be hosted by members of our community and include deep dives, Devs vs. Players PVP, Devs vs. Players Gustball, and hourly prize giveaways! We will be posting a detailed schedule this Friday, so stay tuned.
Release 21 contains a lot of new content, but the largest change is a fundamental shift in how advancement works. After many hours of gameplay, more hours of internal discussions, even more hours of digesting player feedback, and even more hours of design, we have decided to move to a Use-Based System for advancement; which replaces our current leveling and skill point allocation system. Trainers must still be visited to unlock abilities, and abilities are still arranged in skill trees, but all skill advancement now comes from use. The more you mine, the better you become at mining… and the more you swing your sword, the better you become at sword swinging. We did not make this decision lightly and it came at the cost of slightly delaying some other features, but we firmly believe this makes the game fundamentally better and more in line with our statements of this game being a spiritual successor to the Ultima games. Please note that the next several releases will involve a lot of rework and balancing to get this working properly with all of our skills. Also expect us to rearrange skill trees multiple times to make them work better with this new system. For now, expect some oddness and skill arrangements that might not make sense in the current system (although they made sense previously). Also we know that we need to better deliver information in the game about the way the system is working. You can find and discuss more details about our current design thinking about the Use-Based System implementation in this forum topic here.
While we are getting closer to launch, we are still in a constant state of change, and we do not yet have in-game systems to inform players of these changes, or to share ways to help them to explore new content and systems. This means we rely entirely on this message, and the linked instructions and known issues to convey the current game state. We regularly have to answer questions or filter bug reports because some players elect not to read this valuable information. By taking a few moments to read through this information, a great deal of our time and efforts can be redirected to focus on new “unanswered” questions, and addressing critical issues impacting each release. We greatly appreciate you taking the time to review this post, and for all the truly valuable feedback you continue to provide.
Also, remember that while we are providing new content with each release, our community is working overtime to make new events for you to enjoy. So, be sure to check out a couple of the Community Events Calendars run by our community members (via in-game book or the player run websites Avatars Circle Community Events and Events of the Avatars calendar).
Without further ado, here are the R21 deliverables.
Key:
Plain Text: The original plan for the Release deliverables. We intentionally preserve the original text so that our backers can compare plan versus actuals.
Italics: Extra notes and new deliverables
Strikethrough: These are items that did not make the release
RELEASE 21, August 27, 2015:
Crafting: Crafting skills will start to come online, and be used during crafting to modify results. Additionally, players will now have the ability to salvage items for materials and components. Base Skills: All Refining and Production skills now have a base skill that increases when used. (See Use Based Advancement, below.) Salvage : Players can now use crafting stations to salvage materials from items. Salvage will never yield all the original materials, but increasing your Salvage skill increases the amount of materials gained. Salvage is accomplished by placing an item on the appropriate crafting station (smithing for metal items, carpentry for wooden items, and tailoring for cloth/leather items) with the standard tool for that station and then hitting the “Salvage” button. Scrap : Sometimes salvage is not successful enough to render out full units of a given material so sometimes you will receive scraps. Scraps can be combined to create a full unit of a given material (like an ingot or a board). “Max” vs. “Current Max” Durability: Wear on gear (weapons and armor) will now not only decrease durability, but also decrease the current maximum. Using repair kits will only add durability up to the current max, not full maximum. Full maximum can only be reached again by repairing the item at a crafting station. Example: Durability 10 / 50 (Max 90) 10 = Item’s Current Durability 50 = Item’s Current Maximum Durability 90 = (Only seen in tooltip) Item’s Maximum Durability Repair at Crafting Stations: Items (weapons, armor, and wooden decorations) can now be repaired at a crafting station using a repair kit and the corresponding tool for that station (ex. smithing hammer for metal weapons at a smithing station). This is the only method that will both repair durability and restore maximum durability. For now, there is only one type of repair kit. Starting in R22, repair kits will begin specializing (smithing, carpentry, and tailoring). In R21, all weapons and armor can be repaired to maximum durability at crafting stations. We will implement the repair of crafting tools in R22. New Crafting UI: In addition to adding Repair and Salvage buttons to the crafting UI (in both bag and list modes), we also made a new UI change for list mode. When a crafting station is used in list mode, a new interface will appear that shows a filtered version of your inventory displaying all items that can be used in the crafting system, This includes items that can be repaired and salvaged. This will also clean up the UI while crafting since you no longer need to have a separate window open for your Inventory. We plan to expand this in R22 to also be contextual based on the station you are using. Salvage & Repair Pages: We added information about how salvage and repair work to the Recipe book. Wooden Streetlamp Recipe: Players can now make Wooden Streetlamp similar to those seen in towns like Soltown and Braemar.
Crafting skills will start to come online, and be used during crafting to modify results. Additionally, players will now have the ability to salvage items for materials and components. Combat: The cover system will be introduced and will modify attack and defense values when you (or your target) are behind cover. Cover Delayed: With fundamental changes to how advancement works (see Use Based below) and some changes to combat math, we decided it was too early to introduce cover as another variable. Log Out Timer: Another aspect that needed changing was handling log-outs, so they will no longer be instant (an easy way to get out of a losing fight). Now when you log out, a timer begins and your character stays in the world, even if you disconnect. Auto-attack uses Free Attack : Auto-attack now shares the same logic as free attack. Essentially, auto-attack is now a free attack that is repeatedly triggered as long as you have a target in front of you and while your camera is facing the target. Double-clicking on a target or selecting a target then hitting the “T” key initiates auto-attack Combat Math Changes : With the change to the use based system, much of the combat math had to change. Damage calculations and to-hit rolls are heavily dependent on the skill value in the related skill. Also, armor values and how they are used has been adjusted to make heavy armors avoid more damage but absorb less than in previous builds. Parry: The parry skill was moved from swords to the tactics tree and can now be used with any melee weapon. A successful parry blocks an amount of damage based on the weapon power and player strength. Most ranged attacks and spells can no longer be parried. Block: Shield block was given an upgrade for this release. When successful, it stops damage based on the shield type and the player’s strength. Also, block can now protect players from missile types AND many magic spells! We are also experimenting with giving block a weakness in that it doesn’t protect against skills in the polearm tree. Dodge: Dodge can now be used to help avoid many magic effects. Unlike Parry and Block, if successful, it completely avoids the damage instead of just stopping a certain number of points. Combine Parry, Block, and Dodge to become a defensive machine. Attack Range : Creatures can now have modifiers to attack ranges to make them easier to attack in melee range. This was particularly true of the wolf and bear models who really loved putting their noses where they didn’t belong. They can now be attacked from a range that more closely matches their visuals. Ranged Weapons and facing: Bows and other ranged weapons will now only work when facing the target. Sorry archers… no more sprinting away while shooting something behind you. Deck Size Scaling: For those that enjoy the deck mechanic, the minimum number of cards in your deck has been changed to smoothly scale with total adventurer experience earned instead of going up in increments of 5.
Maps: Perennial Coast polish will continue and new scenes will come online that expand the story, including the desert town of Desolis and the Chamber of Souls dungeon beneath it. Desolis: This town of former nomads sits on top of the ruins of an ancient Obsidian Order city. It is dominated by a captured Obsidian shard and the ancient Obsidian Order fortress known as the Epitaph. The locals use the old fortress as a prison and death sentence. The Epitaph (aka Chamber of Souls): This vast underground complex was the heart of the Obsidian Order’s power. It was where they used the power of the Obsidian shards to create the Elves, Satyrs, Kobolds, and Trolls. Remnants of these experiments still roam the halls and eat unwary adventurers as well as those poor souls sent here as prisoners. It is also the location of the Chamber of Souls, where a key element of our story unfolds. Desolate Hills: The Desolate Hills of the Perennial Coast have been reduced to a ruined graveyard in the North, an abandoned settlement in the South, and a Shrine to a mysterious Obsidian Lord in the East. It is truly an inhospitable place for travelers, overrun with undead and wolves scavenging the bodies of the defeated. Hometown : Using the dynamic Player Owned Town tools, we built Hometown during R20 to include every single home and basement available in the game. Our amazing community jumped in and volunteered to decorate these spaces. If you are considering a property and/or home purchase, then we highly recommend visiting Hometown to get a feel for what is available ( it’s on an island just off the southeast corner of Novia, near the starting town of Soltown ). Polished Scenes: Polish passes were made on various scenes along the Perennial Coast including: Deep Savrenoc Timberlands: Updated all spawners to be dynamic, added nighttime spawners, added discovery points, and improved patrols / pathing for NPCs. Savrenoc Timberland: Added Elf encampment, improved graveyard area including adding nighttime undead spawners. Savrenoc Stronghold: Updated spawners and patrols, added discovery points, revised the ruined wall into an ancient platform with altar, improved the smaller elf camp, revised the larger elf camp and the ruins in which it sits. Necropolis Barrens: Updated all spawners to be dynamic, added nighttime spawners, added discovery points, and improved patrols / pathing for NPCs.
Perennial Coast polish will continue and new scenes will come online that expand the story, including the desert town of Desolis and the Chamber of Souls dungeon beneath it. Emote “Teaching”: Emotes will now be teachable to other players. Some emotes (like the ones tied to pledges) will only be teachable by the original owner. Teaching will be done via secure trading. Emote Teaching Delayed: The extensive amount of work involved with moving to use based advancement delayed this feature.
Player Owned Towns: We will continue to expand the number of templates and introduce a new Player Owned Town (PoT) to the game. Snowy Mountains Template: This is the first snowy biome template and is a PaxLair variant. We plan to create at least one more snowy template and at least one more mountain template (not snowy). New Player Owned Towns coming online this release who have selected this template will receive it, but if your PoT came online in R20, we currently do not have a way to swap biome without wiping all the town data (which would include everyone losing their houses, lots, items, etc.). So, unfortunately, some of you will have to wait until the next wipe (maybe R23?) to swap. Player Owned Town Decorations: Player Owned Town owners (and stewards) are now able to place certain items anywhere in their PoT without requiring a lot, if there is a large enough flat area to place the item on. The current list includes: NPC Buildings: These come pre-decorated and will not be customizable because otherwise they would basically be a player house without the lot deed requirement. Owners will find them in their bank. For now we have given each town owner one of each and four guard towers. Limits will enforce how many can be placed at one time. Please note that we do not yet have NPC placement working, but we hope to have that in R22. For now, these buildings are purely cosmetic. This is a very rough first iteration, expect this to expand in future releases. The list of currently available buildings includes: Tavern Bank Combat Shop Weapon Shop Armor Shop Magic Shop Home Shop Stables Cemetery Guard Tower Crafting Shop Fishing Shop Cooking Shop Public Garden Moon Tower Titan of Love Oracle Conservatory Dragon Bones Other Decorations: In addition to the NPC buildings there are other miscellaneous decorations that can also be placed including: Trees Pavers Statues Walls Fences Fountains Outhouse Battle Banner Wishing Well PoT Decoration Limits: With the launch of the above feature, we have added decoration limits to Player Owned Towns. Please note we do not have streetlamp decorations nor placeable NPCs just yet, but we hope to have them functioning in R22. The current limits are listed here: Holdfast 1 NPC Building 2 |
irting several years ago (but only for boys. "I haven't heard of it" for girls, says USL spokesman Paul Ohanian). In 2009, in response to "safety and fairness" concerns, USL published official recommendations that all youth teams and tournaments be based on age, not graduating class. But, Ohanian says, recent tales of ninth- and 10th-grade redshirts making verbal commitments to play for NCAA lacrosse powers resonate more with parents than do the USL's guidelines, and have mitigated the group's efforts.
Redshirting "is relatively new to the lacrosse landscape," Ohanian says. "As our sport gains exposure, we're seeing more of these same elements that football and basketball were dealing with now coming into lacrosse. Our role is to tell parents this isn't the best process. If you're good enough to play in college, you're going to play in college."
For now the redshirts are winning out. As of the week of April 28, Georgetown Prep has the No. 1 lacrosse team in the nation and also tops the D.C. area poll, followed by Gonzaga and Landon. And, according to the headmaster, Mater Dei's middle-school team is undefeated.
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This is a picture of Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire founder and CEO of Facebook.
He posted the photo on Tuesday to celebrate Instagram growing to 500 million users.
It's a fun picture, and Zuckerberg looks like he's having a good time! But wait a minute...
Facebook
Enhance:
Facebook
On the laptop, it definitely looks like Zuckerberg has placed tape over the MacBook's camera. Going even further, it looks as if he's taped over the laptop's microphone, as well, Chris Olson first pointed out on Twitter.
Gizmodo says that it looks like that's Zuckerberg's desk and his laptop, because he's posted videos from there before. And Gizmodo also points out that it's a very paranoid move.
It's also ironic given that Facebook is frequently accused by conspiracy theorists that it's listening in on private conversations.
Zuckerberg joins other hacker luminaries who tape over their webcams, including FBI director James Comey and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
But if you had random fans making creepy fan art of you and your family, like Zuckerberg does, then you might be a little paranoid, too.Back in November, Google showcased a few of its funky machine learning experiments, and among them was Quick, Draw! (their bang, not mine) — a game where you sketch something and an image recognition system guesses what it is. Now the company is releasing the millions upon millions of sketches players submitted as an open data set for AI developers to play with.
Now, if the prospect of browsing through a bunch (I’m talking 50 million here) of terrible drawings of hats, shoes, and cats doesn’t sound like fun to you, don’t worry. That’s not really the point.
Really it’s about the metadata. Those drawings came from lots of different countries, and it’s fun to check out how differently, say, Germany and Korea think of cats. Or chairs!
Oh.
Well look, there are patterns in there worth sussing out. Clearly Korean and Russian sketchers were more likely to draw the chair at an angle or sideways. Why? That’s what you’re supposed to find out with your machine learning system!
There are actually lots of interesting differences. As Google’s post points out, a bias appeared toward the sneaker-type shoe, so much so that the system would have trouble recognizing a high heel or sandal. And what about cats? Surely there are sub-cat-egories of how people chose to draw them. I think I did one, actually, and I drew the whole cat. Am I some strange, handsome exception? If only I knew how to create a machine learning system to find out (hint).
Google suggests you use their new Facets tool to visualize the enormous amount of data in the set. And that’s really the interesting part of this whole thing. When you have data sets this big — in the hundreds of millions of examples — how can you sort it and observe it even at a gross level so that people can find coarse patterns and ideas worth pursuing? And how can you spot things like systematic biases or opportunities for improvement?
The 50 million drawings are just a start — the other 750 million or so will be released over time, and presumably interesting data from other projects as well. Keep an eye on the Google Research blog (or TechCrunch, obviously) for the latest.Human rights advocates say inquiry should be expanded to including ‘all children deprived of their liberty by the Australian government’
Humanitarian groups are calling on the Turnbull government to expand the terms of reference for the proposed royal commission into Northern Territory juvenile detention to include all children, including minors in immigration detention.
Ahead of cabinet consideration of the terms of reference for the inquiry on Thursday, a move that follows a damning Four Corners report into the treatment of minors at the Don Dale centre, human rights lawyer and the executive director of Refugee Legal, David Manne, told Guardian Australia the inquiry was a timely opportunity to look at the impact of detention on children across the board.
“I think the terms of reference should be expanded to include all children deprived of their liberty by the Australian government – all minors deprived of their liberty by the state,” Manne said.
Northern Territory royal commission: Turnbull urges speed but Labor backs 'full' inquiry Read more
“The royal commission provides a timely opportunity to inquire into this practice which has gone on in this country for far too long,” he said.
Manne said children both in juvenile detention and in immigration detention had been subjected to harmful conditions and the government assumed responsibility for care for the child when they were detained.
He said the new inquiry would provide an opportunity to deal with “longstanding profound concerns about the severe mistreatment and indeed abuse of children seeking asylum”.
Cabinet on Thursday will consider terms of reference for the proposed inquiry and the Turnbull government is already in discussion with potential candidates to conduct the royal commission.
The prime minister will resist entreaties to broaden the terms of reference. Malcolm Turnbull made it clear on Tuesday he wants the inquiry to be targeted to events in the territory, and to report by early next year in order to address the specifics highlighted by the Four Corners report.
The chief minister of the NT, Adam Giles, has said the royal commission must also examine the child protection system as well as the corrections system. The root cause of the problem he nominated as too many “unloved” kids in the territory who ended up in the child protection system, then found themselves in the justice system.
President of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Gillian Triggs, suggested the proposed royal commission be broadened to include juvenile justice centres in other states, a call that has been seconded by a parade of peak Indigenous and legal bodies, including the National Family Violence Prevention Legal Service and the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation.
Peter O’Brien, lawyer for Dylan Voller, the teenager featured in the Four Corners report, said the terms of reference should be “as broad as possible”.
Politicians''shock' tactics can't obscure their blindness to Northern Territory abuses | Katharine Murphy Read more
“I have fielded calls throughout the day from lawyers representing kids from around the country … so I think there is a case to say that it should be expanded to other jurisdictions,” O’Brien told Guardian Australia.
Benedict Coyne, president of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights, said the inquiry needed to look at broader issues of systemic racism.
About 96% of the NT’s prison population is Indigenous.
The former Labor senator for the Northern Territory Nova Peris questioned the Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion’s, claim on Tuesday that he was unaware of what was going on at the Don Dale detention facility in Berrimah.
“For Nigel to say, he wasn’t aware,” Peris said. “Come on Nigel. You can’t put your head in the sand, you can’t wipe your hands of this.”
She said during her time in parliament, Labor had tried to set justice targets to reduce the numbers of children being incarcerated – bolstered by support programs – but Scullion had dismissed the idea.
Peris, who left politics at the last election, said she had seen the detention centre with Darwin lawyer Jared Sharp in 2015 and was shocked by the experience.
Peris returned to Canberra and in a speech in the Senate, describing the Don Dale centre facility as a disgrace.
Asylum seeker children still in detention despite claims all have been released Read more
“We have seen cuts to frontline services and cuts to juvenile diversionary programs when we need to be giving kids hope,” she told Guardian Australia.
“Instead we see children detained, in remand without being convicted of anything. They are put into an adult jail with no rehabilitation. We are failing these young kids because [at] some stage they are going back into society.”
Peris said the former NT correctional services minister John Elferink should have been sacked from the Northern Territory ministry altogether, rather than just stood down from the corrections portfolio.
Rodney Dillon, an Indigenous rights activist with Amnesty, called on the Australian government to sign up to the UN’s optional protocol to the convention against torture (Opcat) to ensure investigators from outside the country could oversee such detention.
Dillon said Aboriginal people would not have much faith in the royal commission process, given the recommendations of the last royal commission into deaths in custody were not fully implemented.
Four Corners: I can't see reason, I can only feel anger. And sometimes that's better | Stan Grant Read more
“I don’t think it stops at one child detention centre, this would be happening through other watch houses as well,” Dillon said.
“We need to ask how kids who have gone through this are feeling and helping those families.
“What those kids have done in the first place may not be right, but it’s nothing short of torture. People have been having their way with Aboriginal people, they can do what they like with them, we are treated like second-class citizens and worse.”CLOSE Colorado State prepares for second scrimmage of fall camp. Kelly Lyell
Buy Photo Quarterback Collin Hill, who started three games for CSU last fall as a true freshman, said social media allowed him to get a good feel for coach Mike Bobo and the Rams during the recruiting process. (Photo: Austin Humphreys/The Coloradoan )Buy Photo
Collin Hill had never been to Colorado.
He didn't know what the state was like, let alone the university in Fort Collins that was recruiting him to play football.
So he started paying more attention to what coach Mike Bobo, the CSU football program and the university in general were sharing on their social media accounts. The more the quarterback from South Carolina saw on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, the more he liked.
"That definitely was beneficial, because before you get out here, you get a feel for what you're getting yourself into, like what you're about to see," Hill said before a recent practice. "So, from that aspect, it was pretty cool."
Nobody's going to choose a college football program simply because of what they see on social media. But that interaction helps get the conversation started, third-year Colorado State coach Mike Bobo said.
CSU posts regular videos, titled "The Grind" on YouTube, and Bobo and members of his staff frequently share pictures of Fort Collins and the surrounding area, the facilities in CSU's new on-campus stadium and inspirational messages from the coach and others he has speak to his team.
Sports: 5 things to watch as CSU volleyball team prepares for season
Any prospect can see what the program has to offer and decide for himself whether or not it might be the right fit. Social media has allowed CSU and other schools in the Mountain West to recruit nationwide.
"You can come in contact with a guy instantaneously and get instant feedback and start communication," Bobo said. "The days of having to be in front of that kid and constantly in contact or being in close proximity, your school to their school or their home; I don't believe that (is important) anymore. I think you can build a relationship a lot earlier, and it's through social media."
NCAA rules limit the face-to-face contact and phone conversations college football coaches and their staff can have with prospects. But there are no limits on text messages or conversations through social media.
"(With) the sheer number of guys that we have to recruit, it's an easier method to stay in contact with more people," he said. "If you're trying to talk on the phone to a hundred-plus guys, you can't do it. But I can manage a hundred-plus guys through Twitter direct messaging or text, and that's how they communicate."
Besides, Bobo said, many 16- to 18-year-olds are more likely to respond to texts and direct messages on social media than they are to answer a phone call, anyway. So it's easier for everybody involved in the early part of the recruiting process.
"That's how I did most of my (recruiting) stuff," said Hill, who started three games for CSU as a true freshman last fall before a knee injury cut his season short. "A lot of coaches would kind of reach out through Twitter and that kind of stuff, and then you'd get in contact with them. Honestly, I didn't even use (Twitter) before, but that's kind of the avenue they went to reach out to me."
Related: Top 100 recruit from California says he'll sign with Colorado State
CSU, like many schools, has football staffers create graphics specifically designed for prospects to share on social media, putting the players' faces, names and numbers on Rams uniforms when they make an offer. Prospects are quick to share those graphics in posts announcing they've received an offer. Other graphics are provided for them to announce their decisions if, and when, they make a verbal commitment to the program.
Fifteen athletes entering their senior year of high school have used graphics the school has provided on social media to announce their plans to sign with CSU's football program this winter. The most recent came Friday from Quinn Brinnon, a safety at Bishop O'Dowd High School in Oakland, California. Brinnon told his followers Thursday on Twitter that he had narrowed his choices down to three schools, using graphics provided by each of the three — CSU, Fresno State and Wyoming — and that he would announce his decision at a specific time (11 a.m. PDT) Friday. His pledge to CSU was made in a tweet that included a note about his decision, several thank-yous, a Bible verse, a line from the CSU fight song and a Ram emoji, accompanied by two graphics the Rams had provided.
Commitments like that, made on social media, tend to carry a bit more weight than those given directly to a coach, players said. It's harder to back out of a pledge you've made to several hundred followers, many of them fans of the school you've chosen.
It's a commitment that works both ways, though, CSU cornerback Anthony Hawkins said.
"I feel like I was connected more," said Hawkins, a sophomore from Arlington, Texas. "I liked it, because they were pretty open with it; they bought into me, so I bought into them. They didn't hide me; they showcased me. They put me out there on the billboard, and I liked that. They put Colorado State across my chest, so I wear it across my chest."
Rams: CSU kicker nails practice kick, earns scholarship and team goes crazy
Bobo is quick to note that CSU doesn't make offers to prospects through social media. The school simply uses those platforms to initiate the recruiting process and stay in touch with prospects they're interested in.
Geoff Martzen, the program's director of player personnel, new recruiting coordinator Emily Laff and a half-dozen or so student interns maintain the school's recruiting lists and verify whether or not a particular athlete meets the Rams' needs. They check out his grades, test scores and eligibility status with the NCAA Clearinghouse. They arrange official recruiting visits and work with the coaching staff to set up personal phone calls and face-to-face meetings with the athletes and their families, sometimes the high school coach, too.
Coaches still have to do their homework before offering scholarships, and prospects have to do theirs, as well, to make sure the fit is right.
"You've got to find out all the factors once you've started a relationship really through social media," Bobo said. "… Eventually, you get face-to-face, and you're going to get them on campus. But the building of a relationship for young people now is through text."
Follow reporter Kelly Lyell at twitter.com/KellyLyell and facebook.com/KellyLyell.news and listen to him talk CSU sports at 11:30 a.m. Thursdays on KFKA radio (AM 1310).
Fan support: First game at new Colorado State stadium a selloutAlthough PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds released for PC via Steam’s Early Access service back in March of this year, it seems as if the battle royale game has been in the beta program for nearly an eternity. Now, thankfully, it looks as if the competitive survival shooter will finally go live as a full release, as the title’s developers have officially announced that it is leaving Early Access later this evening.
As seen in the tweet below from the official PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Twitter account, the servers are going to be offline for several hours starting at 4:00 PM PST and ending around 11:00 PM PST to prep for the shift from Early Access title to full-fledged game. The developers also wanted to remind fans to “Please note that once the live servers go into maintenance, the test servers will also be closed” in order to “ensure a smooth transition to PC 1.0.”
To ensure a successful and smooth launch, we have altered the PC 1.0 maintenance schedule. It will start 2 hours earlier but end at the same time as before. Thank you for your understanding. – Start: Dec 20 4PM PST / Dec 21 1AM CET
– End: Dec 20 11PM PST / Dec 21 8AM CET — PLAY BATTLEGROUNDS (@PUBATTLEGROUNDS) December 20, 2017
In addition to the announcement of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds leaving Early Access on Steam, the team behind the game also mentioned that the leaderboards would be reset with the change to the newly updated version. Naturally, some fans are going to be upset about that, but if they’re determined enough, those players can always start clawing their way back to the top as soon as tonight’s maintenance has ended.
Furthermore, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds‘ 1.0 update will also bring about the ability to vault over objects and climb things in the environment, which ought to make getting around the map much easier than before. Not to mention, there’s also going to be a new 3D killcam, new weapons and vehicles, and the desert map known as Miramar introduced to all players.
Taking all of this into consideration, it looks as if PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds fans on PC are getting a bountiful gift with a lot of new content to explore over the course of the holidays. Nevertheless, it’s also important to keep in mind that there’s no telling how well the game will run once its 1.0 update is applied. Of course, the development team will always have the chance to refine the experience should the 1.0 update’s launch be rocky. After all, PUBG ran rather poorly when it released for Xbox One, but the studio has since provided a solid patch that fixes some visual issues and adds performance improvements.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is available now for PC and Xbox One.
Source: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds – TwitterMultiple Olympic gold medal winner Chris Hoy has emerged as one of Britain’s most vocal advocates for cycling. But he believes that some cyclists are doing the cause no good by their behaviour on the roads.
“When I’m out on a bike and I see someone doing something stupid I will absolutely have a word with them at the next set of lights,” he told the Telegraph’s Theo Merz in an interview.
Hoy gave a recent example, of a rider he’d chastised while in his home town of Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago.
He said: “There was a guy who was riding like an idiot, jumping lights, cutting up the pavement, and I just said: ‘You’re not helping matters here. If you want respect you have to earn it.’”
The response was stunned silence, perhaps at being told off by Scotland’s most famous cyclist, perhaps in amazement that someone had nothing better to do than police the behaviour of other cyclists.
Since retiring in 2013, Hoy has been developing his own bike brand with Evans Cycles, promoting family cycling, confusing football fans on Twitter who think he's a referee, and recently announced plans to get into car racing.
But he says cycling still matters to him and that’s why he gets annoyed with behaviour that, as he sees it, affects the perception of cyclists. He still wants to see more people on bikes.
“There are so many benefits to cycling,” he said. “It eases congestion, there are social benefits if you do it with someone else and of course there are the health benefits. It improves your cardiovascular system and you lose body fat.
“It’s particularly good if you haven’t exercised for a number of years. If you’re trying to run for the first time it puts strain on your joints, or people can have injuries that prevent them from doing that. But cycling is low impact, it’s easy for anyone at any level and it doesn’t have to be expensive.”
Hoy says he still gets out on the bike too.
“I still go cycling at least four times a week though,” he said. “Sometimes it’s to test models for my range and sometimes it’s purely for my own well-being. If I’m preaching about the benefits of exercise I can’t let myself go – and I wouldn’t want to.”
And of course, if he doesn’t ride, he doesn’t get to tell off those naughty red-light-jumpers.Interview video time stamps and topics:
4:42: Taking Reynad to the Playboy Mansion
8:07: The ins-and-outs of working at Tempo Storm
9:32: LCS franchising
12:36: On what it'll take for Tempo Storm to get a league spot
24:39: Echo Fox/Delta Fox scrimming controversy
35:47: Tempo Storm and the FGC
40:05: Being a support sub on Tempo Storm's Overwatch team
46:53: Tempo Storm and the Overwatch League
Tempo Storm might be best known as the heart of Hearthstone, but the organization has teams in several esports including: Overwatch, Vainglory, Super Smash Bros. and a LoL team in the NA Challenger Series.
Robert Del Papa, Tempo Storm's general manager stopped by theScore esports' podcast to talk franchising, scrimming and the time he took TS's CEO and Hearthstone pro Andrey "Reynad" Yanyuk to the Playboy Mansion.
Click or tap here to listen in on SoundCloud.
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In fact, it was that visit to the house Hefner built that helped Del Papa, who previously worked with the fantasy site FanDuel, secure his current position with the organization.
"After we met up a few times, I brought him as my plus one to the Playboy Mansion," Del Papa said. "FanDuel holds their annual finals at the Playboy Mansion and I skipped my boss and went to the big boss and I'm like 'Yeah, I have this big partner. Real high-roller, I need to bring him in so I can close a deal.' Well it was Reynad, right? So Reynad was my plus one and we had some time there to have some fun, chat a little bit and I kind of knew at that point that Tempo Storm was the org I wanted to join."
As Counter Logic Gaming's former COO, Del Papa has a special interest in the League of Legends scene and has strong thoughts on the reported franchising of the NA LCS. Specifically, he believes that Riot is looking for people who are interested in the longevity of League of Legends, not those who are hoping to make a quick buck and get out.
"I think it was about having the right mix folks that are available to be in," Del Papa said. "Granted, they have said to some degree that it's not necessarily that if you're in the LCS, that doesn't necessarily guarantee you your spot, that's kind of an open topic currently. However, I think long ago there were more people coming in to make a quick buck, not here for the long-term. I think they want people who believe in League of Legends as a long play. They need to share those rights, the broadcasting rights and the other revenue streams because it's kind of stagnated."
RELATED: Riot aim to start NA LCS franchising in 2018 Season, current teams not guaranteed spots: sources
Del Papa believes that one of the biggest factors that stresses out potential LoL owners is the ever present threat of relegation. If a team plays poorly one split or the team can't develop the proper talent that is needed, a major revenue stream can be gone in the blink of an eye.
"The other thing is it really stresses... y'know, now that really good owners are in the league, it really stresses them out to have to play to avoid relegation and so they can't make the strategic acquisitions of players or develop talent quite as well. They have to always have that Sword of Damocles over their head."
However, for Tempo Storm to secure a spot in the theoretical franchised LCS, it will take a lot more than a plus one to the Playboy Mansion.
"It might cost a little more than that you guys... Maybe I need to get one of those trips to the moon with Elon Musk or something. Maybe that'll get us in, I don't know.
"That's why we created a team in NA CS," said Del Papa. "I definitely talked to Reynad about being acutely aware that this will be a difficult battle guys. Meaning there are a lot of really good brands in now. A lot of the teams are really strong, looking to even qualify or promote is not a guarantee that you're in. Even doing that, being a winning team, you have to be a winning team and winning brand. I certainly think we're a winning brand. Hopefully we're also a winning team. that's pretty important too."
A LoL insider, Del Papa also weighed in on rumors he heard about Echo Fox eschewing scrims against all teams except their NA CS sister team, Delta Fox. Though he repeatedly stressed that he has not confirmed this with EF, Del Papa thinks that they are trying to fight against the system and show that they can get things done their own way.
"I'm not on the ground floor of these things, like I said, but I have heard certain rumors basically that Echo Fox is unhappy with the way things are being run and they've been kind of a standout from the franchise model, potentially. And again, I cannot confirm these things directly from Echo Fox. And essentially, they believe it to be a stronger model to basically show their... rather than like toeing the line, they want to take a firm stand on the way they run their business. And to go further from that, those are only things I've heard from speculation. Knowing, having talked to Rick and knowing a little bit about Jace, they definitely are leaders in the sense of like they want to run things the way they want to and I actually respect that part about them a lot."
Possibly the biggest issue facing any esports team, including Tempo Storm, is the development of the Overwatch League. While Blizzard has yet to reveal how much a spot in the league would cost, Tempo Storm is definitely interested in participating in some form or another according to Del Papa.
"Overwatch is something that I personally have a high interest in, and Reynad and I have gone back and forth on our opinions as to what's going on," said Del Papa. "To be as direct as I can and careful with what I'm saying, we definitely want to be in. I don't think anyone would say that they would not.
"Let's assume that it is an expensive endeavor to do that," Del Papa continued. "It doesn't make financial sense necessarily for an org of our size to go in directly. But again, there's the potential for partnership with someone else that could be a thing that would happen."
But would Tempo Storm go for an Overwatch League spot directly?
"Being as careful as I can, for us to be owning a slot directly, I'd say that's probably unlikely," Del Papa said.
Sasha Erfanian is a news editor for theScore esports. You can follow him on Twitter.
Preston Dozsa is a news editor for theScore esports. You can follow him on Twitter.Russia has taken a lot of heat in the last few weeks and months for its increasingly hostile stance toward the LGBT community. Gay pride parades have been besieged by violent attacks that have gone unchecked (or have been outright encouraged) by the police, and a host of new laws have been passed to crack down on anyone even suspected of homosexual behavior. One law even bans "gay propaganda" which can include something as simple as telling a child that homosexuality is normal.
In an effort to (sort of) smooth things over with the international community, a top Russian lawmaker says his country won't be enforcing their harsh anti-gay laws when thousands of visitors come to the Winter Olympics next year. Igor Ananskikh, the head of the Russia's Committee on physical training, sports and youth, said on Friday that they've decided " not to raise this issue during the Games," trying to put an end to fears that gay athletes and fans will be rounded up and prosecuted when the city of Sochi hosts the next Games.
Most worrisome, particularly as it regards the Olympics, is a law that allows foreigners to be arrested by police if they are suspected of being gay. Earlier this week, Russia's sports minister said that gay and lesbian athletes would be allowed to compete in Sochi, but "if he goes onto the street and starts propagandizing it, then of course he will be held accountable." With so many visitors flooding the city — many of whom are known publicly to be gay — that was a real cause for concern, prompting some to consider whether a boycott of the Games is in order. (Gay rights activists around the world are already pushing a campaign to boycott Russian-made vodka.)
Ananskikh's statement is contradictory to other claims made about enforcement of the law, but he openly admits that his concession is not about actually respecting gay rights, but "to be as politically correct and tolerant as we can be" during the Olympics. The goal at this point is merely to avoid a major international incident at an event that is scientifically engineered to make the world look like a happy peaceful place. It won't change Russia's laws or the incredibly dangerous climate for gay people there, but it might be able to let everyone play nice for two weeks next February.
This article originally appeared on The Atlantic Wire.LAPD officers & protesters separated by metal barricade; officer's action within policy in 2015 shooting death. pic.twitter.com/XJIC9vP5MK — Marc Cota-Robles (@abc7marccr) July 12, 2016
#LAPD Police Commission faults officers tactics in #OIS Redel Jones but that shooting was within policy. More at 4p pic.twitter.com/vvhGwQQC9i — Miriam Hernandez (@abc7miriam) July 12, 2016
The Los Angeles Police Commission ruled Tuesday that the officer who fatally shot a 30-year-old black woman in Los Angeles following a robbery report last year acted within department policy.The decision was immediately met with shouts of protest from Black Lives Matter activists, who had crowded outside LAPD headquarters since the morning.Some in the crowd shouted "Shame on you" as board members adjourned their meeting and walked from the room.The decision came after the commission met for over an hour in a closed session.The commission found found fault with some of the tactics used by officers in the Aug. 12, 2015, shooting of Redel Jones, but that Officer Brett Ramirez's shooting of the woman did not violate LAPD policy.Jones was shot in the 4100 block of Marlton Avenue after police responded to a call of a pharmacy robbery in the 3700 block of Santa Rosalia Drive.Police said officers saw a woman matching the description of the robbery suspect in an alley west of Marlton Avenue, and the shooting occurred when officers tried to detain her.Investigators said the woman was armed with a knife, and that a knife was recovered at the scene.Tensions between police and the black community run high amid a string of officer-involved shootings, including the deaths of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota.Rappers Snoop Dogg and The Game tried to ease those tensions Friday by gathering a crowd in front of police headquarters to engage officers in peaceful dialogue with the African-American community.The lineup includes showstoppers like embroidered boots and velour pants, all with new motifs that everyone will want to get their hands on.
In March this year, fashionistas on a budget were thrilled when Uniqlo’s sister brand GU released a collection of reasonably priced Sailor Moon items. The range was so affordable it sold out almost immediately, prompting the retail chain to release another round of limited-edition exclusives on 6 October, featuring motifs from the hugely successful series.
Now with winter fast approaching, GU has announced that they’ll be making everyone’s dreams come true for a third time, with a brand new range of Sailor Moon-themed clothing designed for the winter season. The 11-piece collection will include Tulle Combination Knitted Cardigans and Tulle Combination Knitted Sweaters for 2,990 yen (US$26.55) each, in a choice of white or pink and with tiny moon motifs acting as a subtle reference to the series.
The range also includes Lace Combination Sweaters and frilled sleeve Print Sweaters with a starry print/magical wand motif for 1,990 yen. The Full Zip Parkas retail for 2,490 yen and feature the famous line, “In the name of the moon, I’ll punish you!“.
The Shoulder Bags come in three colours and retail for 2,490 yen each, with bag charms for each of the five main Sailor Senshi sold separately for 790 yen. The gorgeous High Ankle Boots with star-and-moon embellishments are likely to sell out immediately, given that they’re priced at just 2,990 yen.
Rounding off the collection is an impressive pair of Velour Pants, featuring large motifs from the series, available in two colours for 2,490 yen each.
While most of the range will be available to purchase from GU stores around the country, customers should note that the following items will only be sold online and at the Ginza, Daimaru Shinsaibashi, and Yokohama Kohoku Northport Mall branches:
Full Zip Parka in black
in black Tulle Combination Knitted Sweaters (both colours)
(both colours) Tulle Combination Knitted Cardigans (both colours)
(both colours) High Ankle Boots (in red and pink)
The date to mark down on your calendars for the release is 23 November. Given the affordability of the range, Sailor Moon fans around the country are expected to crowd stores and snap up items as soon as they hit shelves so be sure to check out the store list here and plan to arrive early so you don’t miss out!
Featured image: PR Times
Insert Images: PR Times, GUChris Wallace says he just doesn’t understand the difference between Fox News’ activism and the type of material presented by Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart.
Stewart tried to spell out the differences Sunday when he appeared on the conservative network but Wallace just didn’t seem to get it.
Wallace accused Stewart of playing politics by comparing a video for former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s bus tour to a herpes medication ad.
“You’re insane,” Stewart charged. “Here is the difference between you and I. I’m a comedian first. My comedy is informed by an ideological background. No question about that. The thing that you will never understand and things that conservative activists will never understand is Hollywood, yeah, they’re liberal. But that’s not their primary motivating force. I’m not an activist. I’m a comedian.”
“Honestly, I think you want to be a political player,” Wallace insisted.
“You can’t understand because of world you live in that there is not a designed ideological agenda on my part to affect partisan change. Because that’s the soup you swim in. I appreciate that. I understand that |
Johannesson’s views are generally seen as moderate and centrist.
His calm nature, conciliatory tone, and consensus-oriented approach has appealed to voters.
He has also vowed to modernise political life and give voters more of a voice, by, among other things, introducing citizen-initiated referendums.
Casting his ballot on Saturday, Johannesson said he was satisfied he had “managed to present to the people my vision of the presidency.” Asked what his first task would be if he wins, he replied: “Go to France on Monday and see Iceland play England.” Johannesson is “a representative of new times, so he got my vote,” Jon Gudmundsson, a 43-year-old office clerk told AFP after submitting his ballot.
Others thought someone with more experience was needed.
“David Oddsson is my man. I think he is the only candidate with the knowledge and experience to take on this important office,” said shopkeeper Elin Jonsdottir, 62.
Around 245,000 Icelanders were eligible to vote. Polling stations were to close at 2200 GMT, with the first results expected shortly afterwards.
Published in Dawn, June 26th, 2016The main point I want to mention is in the title. If you enjoyed playing through the Dead Rising 3 story with a friend, you'll be easily disappointed to find out that the story mode in Dead Rising 4 is strictly single player. I'm confused by the decision to do so considering the big change in not forcing you to watch the clock, having to administer zombrex, or even escorting survivors to the safe rooms. After playing a few hours fighting off the zombies, exploring, and progressing the story, I find it missing the hilarious, exciting, and fun moments that my friend and I came to enjoy in the previous title. Yes, there is still a CoOp mode to be played in Dead Rising 4, but trust me it's a whole separate experience aside from the general game play. The fact that we were expecting a 4 player CoOp and getting in a completely different way was just very disappointing. So is the other CoOp mode fun? Sure! I'd be lying if I said there weren't any fun to be had in this mode, but I find it weird that they approached it in a different way than they did with the story mode. In the 4 player CoOp you are required to complete missions that unlock more missions as you go. Everything here is pretty much time based including the part where you must find the next safe room. Failure to find the next safe room, even without being killed by zombies will result in a game over. This takes away from wanting to explore and screw around with everything you can find within this game. Time again forces you to go complete missions in certain areas, rather than freely roaming about as you would in the story mode. Should you pick up the game? Not at full price. I would say $30 sounds like a fair deal, anything lower is much better of course. Just my personal opinion, but this is definitely going to be a game I rush through and trade back in. If story mode CoOp was there, I'm sure my friend and I would have taken a lot of time exploring everything and screwing around adding more to the game time, but again, it's a single player experience.
Read moreAfter her extreme venality, which makes her easy for hostile foreigners to compromise, possibly the most worrisome thing about Shrillary is her hostility to the Second Amendment. Fortunately — assuming the Trump train wreck doesn’t totally derail down ballot candidates and give Democrats the leverage they temporarily had when they imposed ObamaCare — there isn’t much she can do about it, thanks not only to the Constitution but to a total lack of public support for more excessive gun restrictions.
Check out these Gallup results:
Support for an “assault weapons” ban has reached a record low.
A steep climb over the past 2 years in an earlier Gallup poll might help explain the plunging numbers:
Considering his Alinskyite background, it is no surprise that Obama’s main short-term legacy will probably be destabilization. Without his extremism and divisiveness, we wouldn’t have Black Lives Matter hooligans running riot on one hand and Trump supporters calling for violent revolution on the other.
The seas are choppy and likely to get choppier. People intuitively understand that this is no time to let Big Government confiscate life vests.
On a tip from Torcer. Hat tip: Hot Air.Although I had registered this blog some time ago, only now am I posting something in it.
I’ve simply not had the time, I had opened my own business for more money and freedom and have failed to realise either of those goals yet.
To opening the batting, I want to talk a little bit about the Gender Pay gap which supposedly occurs in western nations whereby men earn, on average, anywhere from 5-25% more than women for the “same job”. This post will not be thorough but I assure you – my yet to exist readers – that there will be more to come on this issue (so view this as a part of a series).
It is the common mantra of feminists that women are subject to gender discrimination in the form of the pay gap. They claim men keep women down and men are still ‘patriarchal oppressors’ who favour other men in terms of career and financial advancement in the work place. It is this and this fact alone that explains the “pay gap”. But If this were true then, why hire men who will cost your firm so much more in wage costs? (Wages and salaries being the most significant expense item for nearly all entities).
Dr. Warren Farrell has asked the same question and he states that it is simply not economically rational to do so, as hiring women over men is an instant 5-25% saving in salaries and wages expenses.
To explain why it is not economically rational to hire men over women, here is a Supply and Demand model of the theoretical market for male and female labour.
Lets say for the sake of argument that firms needed an output (Qty) of 12,000 units.
To hire men to produce output 12,000 it would cost $1.20 (1.2 * 12,000) = $14,400.
To hire women to produce the same output it would only cost $10,200.
(At $10,200 men would only produce 9,900 units – 2,100 units less than needed).
The total cost of women at $10,200 represents a 41% saving by hiring only women to make the fixed output of 12,000 units. Women will make the same amount of goods/services but for much less – why the hell would you hire men? It’s like going to a restaurant and having the waiter say “would you like to pay $50 or $70 for the main you ordered?” you simply wouldn’t say “put me down for paying the highest price possible please.”
So the argument of male favouritism holds no weight because in a market economy, not producing at the lowest-cost method is said to be “productively inefficient” in that you’re not using your resources in the correct mix. Any one of the many firms out there can simply hire more women and price the “patriarchal chauvinist pigs” who hire expensive men and give each other big raises out of the market.
Yet this has not happened, simply because in real terms men do not make more than women for the same work. If they did these “man-friendly expensive firms” would close-up as “women-friendly cheap firms” would be able to sell the same product to consumers for one quarter of the price. In a market economy people vote with their feet. Consumers would have ensured women dominated the work place by buying only the cheaper woman-made products. This has not happened so it looks very likely that the pay gap is perceived and not entirely real.
AdvertisementsYesterday, we reported on Tesla introducing a new Autopilot restriction that forces the Traffic-Aware Cruise Control to be set at the speed limit on undivided roads when using Autosteer instead of allowing to go 5 mph over the speed limit. There’s actually more to the update than simply following the speed limit.
According to a source familiar with the update, the system is also taking into account the vehicle’s surroundings to tell the driver when you should slow down and/or take over control from Autosteer based on your driving environment. In other words, it’s another way to get drivers to hold the wheel aside from the direct ‘Hold the Steering Wheel’ alert that the Autopilot is sending or to take control since you can drive at any speed you want when taking over from Autopilot.
Tesla owners experiencing the update for the first time were surprised to find that the Autopilot was sometimes prompting them to slow down not only to the speed limit but even significantly below the speed limit.
Naturally, people (myself included) assumed that it was a bug. Here’s an example that happened to Jason Hughes – but other owners have reported similar situations:
Enough is enough. @TeslaMotors, I demand that you remove these broken and ridiculous restrictions that unsafely limit speed erroneously. Now pic.twitter.com/9jVXq6v9fV — Jason Hughes (@wk057) December 22, 2016
It’s actually not a bug but a feature. A source familiar with the update explained to Electrek that it’s a new safety control to reduce the risk of accidents on Autopilot and encourage drivers to take controls in driving environments where the Autopilot is not the most useful – like undivided roads.
It’s important to note that the Autopilot was first introduced for highway driving, but Tesla allowed drivers to activate it on almost all road types at launch. Tesla quickly started to push new Autopilot restrictions after Tesla CEO Elon Musk warned of upcoming constraints to limit some potentially dangerous use of the Autopilot as seen in videos posted online.
Tesla has since been trying to walk the line between safety restrictions to encourage a proper use of the Autopilot and leaving functionalities to those who can use them properly, but it looks like a classic case of a few bad apples ruining it for the rest of the drivers.
Coming back to the latest update, the Autopilot will not only restrict the speed to the speed limit, but it could also reduce it further until the driver takes control if for example, it detects heavy traffic in an adjacent lane. The system can see that as an increased risk and while it is still able to steer automatically safely, it would be safer to slow down or have the driver take over.
Other driving conditions can include having a lead vehicle or not. Of course, it’s better for the Autopilot to have a lead vehicle:
@pcwizardllc Will be restored soon where there is a lead vehicle, ie you are being overtaken a lot due to true traffic speed being higher than the sign — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 23, 2016
What do you think of these changes? Let us know in the comment section below.Boston Celtics rookie forward Jared Sullinger underwent surgery on his injured back and will miss the rest of the season.
Sullinger had moved into the Celtics' starting lineup recently, and had become a pivotal part of the team's nucleus.
After experiencing pain in the past two weeks, Sullinger had to leave Wednesday night's victory over Sacramento in the first quarter and missed the Celtics' practice on Thursday after the back pain worsened.
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[Also: NBA players union places exec director Billy Hunter suspended]
The loss of Sullinger is the second significant blow to the Celtics this week, who lost point guard Rajon Rondo for the season with a knee injury on Sunday.
Sullinger, an All-American out of Ohio State, dropped out of the lottery and landed with the Celtics with the 21st pick in the June NBA draft after predraft medical examinations raised questions about the long-term durability of his back.
Other popular content on Yahoo! Sports:
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• Angels pitcher Jered Weaver would support a gay teammateUEFA supports stadium plan
Read the full UEFA press release here
The Gibraltar Football Association (GFA) has released plans for a new national stadium at Europa Point, the southernmost point of the territory and an iconic location with views across to Africa.
The new ground – provisionally called the Europa Stadium – will be a Category 4 stadium, finally allowing UEFA's newest member to host European Qualifiers on the Rock instead of over 150 miles away in Portugal. Gibraltar's current main venue, the Victoria Stadium, is unsuitable for competitive international football since it does not meet the required Category 4 criteria.
UEFA is, of course, in the process of working with all its 54 member countries to upgrade stadium facilities throughout the continent, particularly in those smaller national associations where, with the new media centralisation arrangements as part of the European Qualifiers, some existing Category 2 and Category 3 stadiums no longer fit requirements. The Andorran Football Federation (FAF), for example, is in the process of constructing a new national stadium with greater capacity and with upgraded facilities, which will enable it to stage matches in the European Qualifiers and beyond.
Gibraltar is building for the future and with the long term in mind. The Category 4 Europa Stadium will ensure that Gibraltar meets stadium requirements for generations to come. UEFA fully supports the GFA in this exciting endeavour and has already sent technical experts to Gibraltar on several occasions to assist in a wide range of decisions – from the site location, to technical help on the design and financial backing via the HatTrick programme. The location in particular was selected because of its iconic situation and because it is currently the only site in Gibraltar with the space and accessibility for a project of this nature.
The architect behind the project is Mark Fenwick, one of Europe's top stadium designers and co-author of the UEFA Guide to Quality Stadiums, which has now been published in five different languages and is the seminal guide to the design and construction of football arenas. The GFA expects the new ground to be ready in the autumn of 2016.
UEFA wishes the GFA and Gibraltar every success in this enterprise and will continue to provide constant help and support. Our 54th member will soon have a stunning new home!Critics are speaking out against the design and funding of Joanna Lumley’s £175m scheme ahead of a judicial review
The £175m proposal for a garden bridge on the Thames is facing an escalating backlash from leading novelists, cultural figures and architects who have slammed the cost, location and “abysmal” design of the project.
Questions were raised over the procurement process last week after the Observer revealed new details on the key role played by Joanna Lumley in charming the London mayor, Boris Johnson, into backing her dream. Others argued that designer Thomas Heatherwick was the “wrong person” for the job.
Despite original plans for the bridge to be entirely paid for by private sponsors, the public contribution to the Absolutely Fabulous star’s dream of a corridor of green across the Thames has now risen to £60m – £30m from the chancellor, George Osborne, and another £30m from Johnson.
Among an abundance of critics, Sir John Tusa, former managing director of the City of London’s Barbican arts centre, said the bridge “sounds like a colossal vanity project for Lumley, Johnson and Osborne”. He added: “[It’s] extraordinary how large lumps of capital funds come out of Johnson’s and Osborne’s back pockets for their pet projects. Who needs it? Who wants it? Who will pay to run it? It all adds up to a misuse of power, position and influence.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Will Self calls the bridge ‘crap’.
While the novelist Will Self admitted that there are “much worse things” than the garden bridge, he added: “It’s crap. But everything’s pretty crap … Lots of public spaces are being dismantled and privatised.
“I don’t like the bridge. Boris is being a dick over it, and silly old Joanna Lumley – what’s she going to do? March Gurkhas up and down it?”
The artist Grayson Perry tweeted: “It seems like a nice idea that is in the wrong place and for the wrong people. They should build it in Hull.”
Jonathan Meades, the film-maker and writer, said it was “game on” for the garden bridge “conditional upon Boris Johnson being buried in the concrete foundations”. He added that Heatherwick is “a sort of graphic designer. We’ve got a lot of brilliant architects. [He is the] wrong person; sweet guy, but not an architect.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Grayson Perry: ‘build it in Hull’.
The author Iain Sinclair said the plans were “absolutely fine”as long as they were left in the catalogue of unbuilt folly. “That stretch of the river is now a kind of grandiose Vauxhall Gardens pleasure dome tourist attractor, with a ferris wheel and an Emirates Airlines chairlift at the other end, which carries very few passengers and gives you a nice fairground ride at a rather expensive price.”
Will Hurst, deputy editor of the Architects’ Journal, believes that many in the world of architecture are unhappy with the way the bridge appears to have “sidestepped the normal rules of planning and procurement”.
Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-British architect, provided a sour endorsement of the bridge last week on BBC Newsnight. The designer of the London Aquatics Centre and Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic stadium said: “[Heatherwick] is a colleague, and I will support him. It could be nice, it may not be – I don’t know. It would block the view, if I would have any criticism. But on the other hand, Blackfriars station blocks the view. And everything you do in a major city is a risk, but I think it might be sometimes worth taking it.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zaha Hadid: ‘a risk worth taking?’
But Piers Gough, the architect responsible for the green bridge in the East End of London, believes the procurement process for the bridge is a “scandal in the making”.
“Philosophically, I think it’s wrong because the Thames is a sort of harsh river,” he added. “It’s not like Venice or even the Seine in Paris – it’s a very tidal, cold space in the middle of London. And to domesticate it with a garden bridge, you’re going to miss the point of the character of the Thames. It will look almost surreal – and not a good surreal.
“Architecturally, the ends of the bridge are abysmal: they are sort of hacked off. It’s not a good termination of the bridge – it’s inelegant – and the views of the ends of the bridge are particularly poor and ungraceful. It doesn’t look good. It isn’t a nice piece of work.”
A judicial review into the project will take place next week, scrutinising the fairness of the procurement process.This article is about the national flag of Portugal. For other flags, see List of Portuguese flags
The Flag of Portugal (Portuguese: Bandeira de Portugal) is a rectangular bicolour with a field unevenly divided into green on the hoist, and red on the fly. The lesser version of the national coat of arms (i.e. armillary sphere and Portuguese shield) is centered over the colour boundary at equal distance from the upper and lower edges. On 30 June 1911, less than a year after the downfall of the constitutional monarchy, this design was officially adopted for the new national flag of the First Portuguese Republic, after selection by a special commission whose members included Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, João Chagas and Abel Botelho.
The conjugation of the new field colours, especially the use of green, was not traditional in the Portuguese national flag's composition and represented a radical republican-inspired change that broke the bond with the former monarchical flag. Since a failed republican insurrection on 31 January 1891, red and green had been established as the colours of the Portuguese Republican Party and its associated movements, whose political prominence kept growing until it reached a culmination period following the Republican revolution of 5 October 1910. In the ensuing decades, these colours were popularly propagandized as representing the hope of the nation (green) and the blood (red) of those who died defending it, as a means to endow them with a more patriotic and dignified, therefore less political, sentiment. Although the flag flown from Porto city hall in the morning of 31 January 1891, symbol of the republican uprising was red and green. Totally red with a green circle in the center, to which were added the inscriptions referring to the republican center to whom it belonged - the Centro Democrático Federal 15 de Novembro.'[1]
The current flag design represents a dramatic change in the evolution of the Portuguese standard, which had always been closely associated with the royal arms, blue and white. Since the country's foundation, the national flag developed from the blue cross-on-white armorial square banner of King Afonso I to the liberal monarchy's arms over a blue-and-white rectangle. In between, major changes associated with determinant political events contributed to its evolution into the current design.
Design [ edit ]
The decree that legally replaced the flag used under the constitutional monarchy with the new design was approved by the Constituent Assembly and published in government journal no. 141 (Portuguese: diário do Governo), on 19 June 1911. On 30 June, this decree had its regulations officially published in government diary no. 150.[2]
Construction [ edit ]
Construction sheet with the official dimensions of the flag. All measures are relative to the length (L).
The flag's length is equal to 1 1⁄ 2 times its width, which translates into an aspect ratio of 2:3. The background is vertically divided into two colours: dark green on the hoist side, and scarlet red on the fly. The colour division is made in a way that green spans 2⁄ 5 of the length and the remaining 3⁄ 5 are filled by red (ratio 2:3).[2] The lesser version of the national coat of arms (without the laurel wreaths)—a white-rimmed national shield on top of a black-highlighted yellow armillary sphere—is positioned over the border between both colours.
The armillary sphere has a diameter equal to 1⁄ 2 width and is equidistant from the upper and lower edges of the flag.[2] The sphere, drawn in perspective, possesses six edge-embossed arcs, four of which are great circles and two are small circles. The great circles represent the ecliptic (wider oblique arc), the equator, and two meridians. These last three are positioned so that the intersections between each two arcs make a right angle; one meridian lies on the flag's plane while the other is perpendicular to it. The small circles consist of two parallels (the tropics), each tangent to one of the ecliptic-meridian intersections.[3]
Vertically centred over the sphere is the national shield, a white-rimmed curved bottom red shield charged with a white inescutcheon. Its height and width are equal to 7⁄ 10 and 6⁄ 10 of the sphere's diameter, respectively. The shield is positioned in a way that its limits intersect the sphere:[3]
at the inflection points of the distal edges of the Tropic of Cancer's anterior half (top) and Tropic of Capricorn's posterior half (bottom);
at the intersection of the lower edges of the ecliptic's posterior half and of the equator's anterior half (dexter or viewer's left side); and
at the intersection of the upper edge of the ecliptic's anterior half with the lower edge of the equator's posterior half (sinister or viewer's right side).
A curious aspect of the official design is the absence of a segment of the Tropic of Capricorn, between the national shield and the ecliptic arc.[3]
The white inescutcheon is itself charged with five smaller blue shields (escudetes) arranged like a Greek cross (1+3+1). Each smaller shield holds five white bezants displayed in the form of a saltire (2+1+2). The red bordure is charged with seven yellow castles: three on the chief portion (one in each corner and one in the middle), two in the middle points of each quadrant of the curved base (rotated 45 degrees), and two more on each side of the bordure, over the flag's horizontal middle line. Each castle is composed by a base building, showing a closed (yellow) gate, on top of which stand three battlemented towers.[3] In heraldic terminology, the shield's blazon is described as Argent, five escutcheons in cross azure each charged with five plates in saltire, on a bordure gules seven towers triple-turreted Or, three in chief.
The colour tones of the flag are not accurately specified in any legal document. Approximate tones are listed below:[3]
Scheme Red Green Yellow Blue White Black PMS 485 CVC 349 CVC 803 CVC 288 CVC — Black 6 CVC RGB 255-0-0 0-102-0 255-255-0 0-51-153 255-255-255 0-0-0 #FF0000 #006600 #FFFF00 #003399 #FFFFFF #000000 CMYK 0-100-100-0 100-35-100-30 0-0-100-0 100-100-25-10 0-0-0-0 0-0-0-100
Background [ edit ]
The Republican revolution of 5 October 1910, brought a need to replace the symbols of the overthrown monarchy, represented in the first instance by the old national flag and anthem. The choice of the new flag was not one without conflict, especially over the colours, as partisans of the republican red-and-green faced opposition from supporters of the traditional royal blue-and-white. Blue also carried a strong religious meaning as it was the colour of Our Lady of the Conception (Portuguese: Nossa Senhora da Conceição), who was crowned Queen and Patroness of Portugal by King John IV, so its removal or replacement from the future flag was justified by Republicans as one of the many measures needed to secularize the state.[4]
After the presentation and discussion of the many proposals,[5] a governmental commission was set up on 15 October 1910. It included Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro (painter), João Chagas (journalist), Abel Botelho (writer) and two military leaders of 1910: Ladislau Pereira and Afonso Palla.[4] This commission ultimately chose the red-and-green of the Portuguese Republican Party, delivering an explanation based on patriotic reasons,[6] which disguised the political significance behind the choice, as these had been the colours present on the banners of the rebellious during the republican insurrection of 31 January 1891, in Porto, and during the monarchy-overthrowing revolution, in Lisbon.[7]
The commission considered that red should "be present as one of the main colours, because it is the battling, warm, virile colour, par excellence. It is the colour of conquest and laughter. A singing, burning, joyful colour... Recalls the idea of blood and urges to achieve victory". An explanation for the inclusion of the green was harder to come up with, given that it was not a traditional colour of the Portuguese flag's history. Eventually, it was justified on the grounds that, during the 1891 insurrection, this was the colour present on the revolutionary flag that "sparked the redeeming lightning" of republicanism. Finally, white (on the shield) represented "a beautiful and fraternal colour, into which all other colours merge themselves, colour of simplicity, of harmony and peace", adding that "it is this same colour that, charged with enthusiasm and faith by the red cross of Christ, marks the Discoveries epic cycle".[6]
The Manueline armillary sphere, which had been present on the national flag under the reign of John VI, was revived because it consecrated the "Portuguese epic maritime history... the ultimate challenge, essential to our collective life.". The Portuguese shield was kept, being positioned over the armillary sphere. Its presence would immortalize the "human miracle of positive bravery, tenacity, diplomacy, and audacity, that managed to bind the first links of the Portuguese nation's social and political affirmation", since it is one of the "most vigorous symbols of the national identity and integrity".[6]
The new flag was produced in large numbers at the Cordoaria Nacional ("National Rope House") and was officially presented nationwide on 1 December 1910, on occasion of the 270 years of the Restoration of Independence. This day had already been declared by the government as the "Flag Day" (currently not celebrated). In the capital, it was paraded from the city hall to the Restauradores ("Restorers") Monument, where it was hoisted. This festive presentation did not mask, however, the turmoil caused by a design chosen single-handedly without prior popular consultation, and that represented more of a political regime than a whole nation. To encourage a greater acceptance of the new flag, the government issued all teaching establishments with one exemplar, whose symbols were to be explained to the students; textbooks were changed to intensively display these symbols. Also, 1 December ("Flag Day"), 31 January and 5 October were declared national holidays.[7]
Symbolism [ edit ]
The Portuguese flag displays three important symbols: the field colours, and the armillary sphere and national shield, which make up the coat of arms.
Colours [ edit ]
Flag of Portugal at the top of Parque Eduardo VII, Lisboa
The explanation for the green and red colours that make up the background field arose during the Estado Novo period, the nationalist authoritarian regime that held power from 1933 to 1974. It claims that the green represented the hope of the Portuguese people, while the red represented the blood of those who died serving the nation.[8]
Despite the fact that these colours never constituted a major part of the national flag until 1910, they were present in several historical banners during important periods. King John I included a green Aviz cross on the red bordure of his banner. The red cross of the Order of Christ was used over a white field as a naval pennon during the Discoveries and frequently on ship sails. A green background version was a popular standard of the rebellious during the 1640 revolution that restored Portugal's independence from Spain.[9] There are no registered sources to confirm that this was the origin of the republican colours. Another explanation gives full credit to the flag that was hoisted on the balcony of Porto's city hall during the 1891 insurrection. It consisted of a red field bearing a green disc and the inscription Centro Democrático Federal «15 de Novembro» (English: Federal Democratic Centre «15 of November»), representing one of many masonry-inspired republican clubs.[10] Over the following 20 years, the red-and-green was present on every republican item in Portugal.[4] The 1891 flag-inherited red stands for the colour of the republican-inspired masonry-backed revolutionaries, whereas green was the colour Auguste Comte had destined to be present in the flags of positivist nations, an ideal incorporated into the republican political matrix.[4]
Armillary sphere [ edit ]
The armillary sphere was an important astronomical and navigational instrument for the Portuguese sailors who ventured into unknown seas during the Age of Discoveries. It was introduced by the Knights Templar, whose knowledge was essential to the Portuguese Discoveries—Henry, the Navigator, the person mainly responsible for the development of Age of Discovery was actually the Grand Master of the Order of Christ. It thus became the symbol of the most important period of the nation—the Portuguese discoveries. In light of this, King Manuel I, who ruled during this period, incorporated the armillary sphere into his personal banner.[11] It was simultaneously used as the ensign of ships plying the route between the metropolis and Brazil,[12] thus becoming a colonial symbol and a fulcral element of the flags of the future Brazilian kingdom and empire.
Adding to the sphere's significance was its common use on every Manueline-influenced architectural work, where it is one of the major stylistic elements, as seen on the Jerónimos Monastery and Belém Tower.[13]
Portuguese shield [ edit ]
Current design of the Portuguese shield
The Portuguese shield rests over the armillary sphere. Except during the reign of Afonso I, it is present in every single historical flag, in one form or another. It is the prime Portuguese symbol as well as one of the oldest, with the first elements of today's shield appearing during the reign of Sancho I.[14] The evolution of the Portuguese flag is inherently associated with the evolution of the shield.
Within the white inescutcheon, the five small blue shields with their five white bezants representing the five wounds of Christ (Portuguese: Cinco Chagas) when crucified and are popularly associated with the "Miracle of Ourique".[15] The story associated with this miracle tells that before the Battle of Ourique on 25 July 1139, an old hermit appeared before Count Afonso Henriques (future Afonso I) as a divine messenger. He foretold Afonso's victory and assured him that God was watching over him and his peers. The messenger advised him to walk away from his camp, alone, if he heard a nearby chapel bell tolling, in the following night. In doing so, he witnessed an apparition of Jesus on the cross. Ecstatic, Afonso heard Jesus promising victories for the coming battles, as well as God's wish to act through Afonso, and his descendants, in order to create an empire which would carry his name to unknown lands, thus choosing the Portuguese to perform great tasks.[16]
O Milagre de Ourique (The Miracle of Ourique), by (The Miracle of Ourique), by Domingos Sequeira (1763)
Boosted by this spiritual experience, Afonso won the battle against an outnumbering enemy. Legend has it that Afonso killed the five Moorish kings of the Seville, Badajoz, Elvas, Évora and Beja taifas, before decimating the enemy troops. Hence, in gratitude to Jesus, he incorporated five shields arranged in a cross—representing his divine-led victory over the five enemy kings—with each one carrying Christ's five wounds in the form of silver bezants. The sum of all bezants (doubling the ones in the central shield) would give thirty, symbolizing Judas Iscariot's thirty pieces of silver.[16]
However, evidence pointing out that the number of bezants on each shield was greater than five during long periods following Afonso I's reign,[15] as well as the fact that only in the 15th century was this legend registered on a chronicle by Fernão Lopes (1419),[17] support this explanation as one of pure myth and highly charged with patriotic feeling in the sense that Portugal was created by divine intervention and was destined for great things.
The seven castles are traditionally considered a symbol of the Portuguese victories over their Moorish enemies, under Afonso III, who supposedly captured seven enemy fortresses in the course of his conquest of the Algarve, concluded in 1249. However, this explanation is weakly founded since this king did not have seven castles on his banner, but an unspecified number. Some reconstructions display about sixteen castles; this number changed to twelve in 1385, to seven in 1485 and to eleven in 1495; it then changed back to seven, in 1578, this time definitively. An hypothesis about the origin of the castles on a red bordure lies in the family ties of Afonso III with Castile (both his mother and second wife were Castilian), whose arms consisted of a golden castle on a red field.[18]
Evolution [ edit ]
Since the foundation of the kingdom, the flag of Portugal was always linked to the Portuguese coat of arms. In fact, until the 19th century, the flag served as a mere support to display the Royal coat of arms, without having any separate meaning. Until the 16th century, the flag consisted in a banner of arms, with its field being totally occupied by the field of the coat of arms, then it came to include the complete coat of arms, including the crown and other external elements laid over a monochrome white field. The flag only acquired a meaning by its own in 1830, when its field was changed from the neutral white to the distinctive blue and white, which were the national colors at that time. Although representing the country since its early beginnings, the flag of Portugal had a limited use until the 19th century, essentially being used as a fortress flag and as naval ensign, with some other flags also existing to represent the nation in other contexts, namely at the sea. In the 19th century, the flag of Portugal started to have a universal use, becoming a real national flag. [19] It evolved in a way that gradually incorporated most of the symbols present on the current coat of arms.
The first heraldic symbol that can be associated with what would become the Portuguese nation was on the shield used by Henry of Burgundy, Count of Portugal since 1095, during his battles with the Moors. This shield consisted of a blue cross over a white field.[20] Nevertheless, this design has no reliable sources since it is a reconstruction that became popular and widely accepted thanks to the nationalistic purposes of the Estado Novo regime.[7]
Henry's son Afonso Henriques succeeded him in the county and took on the same shield. In 1139, despite being outnumbered, he defeated an army of Almoravid Moors at the Battle of Ourique and proclaimed himself Afonso I, King of Portugal, in front of his troops. Following the official recognition by the neighbouring León, Afonso changed his shield in order to reflect his new political status. Sources state he charged the cross with five sets of an unspecified number of silver bezants (most likely large-headed silver nails), one set on the centre and one on each arm, symbolizing Afonso's newly gained right to issue currency.[20][21]
During the time of Afonso I, it was typical not to repair battle damage inflicted on the shield, so changes such as the breaking off of pieces, colour shifting or stains were very common. When Sancho I succeeded his father Afonso I, in 1185, he inherited a very worn off shield: the blue-stained leather that made the cross had been lost except where the bezants (nails) held it in place. This involuntary degradation was the basis for the next step |
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CBD is non psychoactive. Potentially the best thing about CBD, it can’t get you high. THC gets you high, but CBD has no effect on your alertness or capability, it only helps you feel less pain, more calm and more clarity.Rick Westhead TSN Senior Correspondent Follow|Archive
A human rights tribunal has ruled that a Toronto Argonauts season ticket holder's human rights complaint against the team may proceed after the customer alleged the team threatened to cancel his tickets because he condemned its sponsorship of the White Ribbon Campaign.
Robert Heath, an Argos season ticket holder, said during a July 5, 2014, game, he saw a poster advertising the team's support of the White Ribbon Campaign, which promotes awareness of domestic violence.
Heath said he complained to the team that the campaign sexually discriminates against men, and portrays men as villains. According to a judge's ruling, Argos executive Jason Colaro listened to Heath's complaint and then threatened to cancel his season tickets. During a subsequent call, Argos president Chris Rudge hung up on Heath after he explained his complaint.
Health filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal.
"The applicant claims that he was discriminated against on the basis of sex as a result of the Argonauts decision to visibly support the WRC at its games," the tribunal vice chair Keith Brennenstuhl wrote in a decision. "The applicant seems to allege that WRC engages in discrimination against men because the WRC does not advocate for male victims of domestic violence and because the WRC portrays men as villains. The applicant maintains that the Argonauts, in expressing support for this cause, has similarly discriminated against men and is perpetuating the message that men are villains. He asserts that as a male this constitutes discrimination against him."
Brennenstuhl dismissed Heath's discrimination complaint but allowed his complaint regarding the alleged threat over his season tickets to continue.
While Ontario's human rights code specifically prohibits both reprisal and the threat of reprisal for filing human rights complaints, the Argos dispute that the team ever threatened Heath with the cancellation of his ticket subscription.
Brennenstuhl wrote that the case "is not the stage at which I can appropriately make such a factual finding."
The Toronto Sun first reported the tribunal judgment.“But I did not invade Ukraine!” he protested. “And I did not shoot down that plane!”
The following day, work took me to St. Petersburg. Perhaps because the full realization of the scope of the MH17 tragedy sank in while I was on the overnight train, I decided to go to the Dutch Consulate to lay down flowers.
Much to my surprise, there were already hundreds of flowers there — and many more would accumulate by the end of the day. Someone had placed a handwritten note: “Forgive us.” Several identically worded messages had been deposited at the Dutch Embassy in Moscow.
This was just the opposite of the linguistic statement we had been discussing the day before: Here were people deliberately claiming the right to represent their country, though their views were clearly different from those of the majority and the government. This, too, is a Russian rhetorical tradition: It dates back to the 19th-century intelligentsia, who used the slogan “For our freedom and yours” to protest the Russian Empire’s war on Poland, which was later picked up by Soviet dissidents opposing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
When dissidents claim the right to speak as citizens of their country, the backlash is usually immediate and painful. The week after the downing of MH17, the Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta published a cover that said, in Dutch, “Vergeef ons, Nederland” (Forgive us, the Netherlands) and received so many contradictory online comments that the editors published a compilation as a separate item on the website.
Many Dutch citizens thanked the paper for its stance. But most Russian-language readers commenting on the cover were furious. “What basis do you have to ask Holland for forgiveness, which suggests that the Russian Federation is responsible for the crash?” was one typical reaction. “You are libeling the Russian Federation and claiming to speak for everybody!”This morning, the sports world was rocked by a fantastic bit of investigative news work by the Miami New Times. Major League Baseball players Alex Rodriguez, Melky Cabrera, Gio Gonzalez and others were named in the report accusing a Miami clinic, Biogenesis, of providing performance enhancing drugs to numerous athletes.
Former University of Miami players were named:
Other pro clients have substantial ties to UM. Take Cesar Carrillo, who is nicknamed "Al Capone" by Bosch. Carrillo, a hard-throwing starting pitcher, compiled a 24-0 mark to begin his career at UM and was drafted 18th overall in 2005 by the Padres. Carrillo, who is named six times throughout the books, was receiving HGH, MIC, and a testosterone cream as of last year, Bosch writes.
Just below Cabrera in the 2012 notebook is a baseball player whom Bosch calls "Josmany," with the nickname of "Springs." On a separate client list from June 2012, he writes that "Springs" is Josmany Grandal. Although the first name is misspelled, the notations likely refer to Yasmani Grandal, the former star catcher for the University of Miami Hurricanes who once tore up the high school leagues playing for Miami Springs.
The University of Miami was mentioned once in proximity to the clinic named:
The names are all included in an extraordinary batch of records from Biogenesis, an anti-aging clinic tucked into a two-story office building just a hard line drive's distance from the UM campus.
UM baseball strength and conditioning coach Jimmy Goins is named as a client:
At least one UM coach makes an appearance as well: Jimmy Goins, the strength and conditioning coach for the Hurricanes baseball team for the past nine seasons. Goins is recorded in multiple client lists; in one detailed page dated December 14, 2011, Bosch writes he's selling him Anavar, testosterone, and a Winstrol/B-12 mix and charging him $400 a month. Another, from this past December, includes sales of HGH and testosterone.
Instantly, news writers went into heat over another potential Miami Hurricanes scandal
University of Miami baseball implicated in latest steroid scandal. @miaminewtimes bit.ly/Wd81kD — Joseph Goodman (@JoeGoodmanJr) January 29, 2013
Strong work by @miaminewtimes on this: bit.ly/Wd81kD Implicates #Canes baseball, A-Rod in steroidal matters — Matt Porter (@mattyports) January 29, 2013
College link to Miami New Times article is The U. Been hearing links since at least 2005... strength coach implicated miaminewtimes.com/2013-01-31/new… — John Manuel (@johnmanuelba) January 29, 2013
All these journalists forgot the number one rule in journalism (other than "eat all the press box food"): follow the money.
The key here is that Goins was noted in records from the clinic as receiving $400 a month in Anavar, Testosterone, a Winstrol/B-12 mix and HGH. These news writers want you to think this is the makings of a steroids scandal in the Hurricanes baseball locker room. They want you to envision ilicit bathroom butt punctures and needles exchanging hands between the Miami strength coach and juiced up players. This is a great scene, too bad it's not true.
I used to work at a clinic that did a lot of these "low-T" procedures, so I called my former boss who sold these treatments.
"We charge over $1200 a month for a HGH treatments," said the clinic administrator. "Testosterone is really cheap, we charge $10 per injection and you need to get one shot a week every week. We charge $15-20 for B-12 shots, but HGH and the rest of the drugs are expensive."
Then I asked, "How many people can be treated with testosterone, B-12 and HGH for $400 a month?"
"I can't believe even one person can be treated for that much. Unless he was getting HGH from China, that's not even at cost."
A simple online search reveals prices for Anavar quoted at $150.00 for a 10 day supply, and here's a bodybuilding forum where they discuss Winstrol prices.
Another problem with the University of Miami "implication," former Hurricanes players Grandal and Carillo are named as customers of Biogenesis in 2012 and 2011 respectively. Grandal was drafted in 2010, Carillo in 2005.
Is it possible that this clinic was selling drugs below cost to Goins so he could sell at a premium to Hurricanes baseball players? Sure. Is it probable? Not really. What's more probable is that we have a man, Jimmy Goins, aproaching 40 who wanted to stave off the natural aging process. He's a strength and conditioning coach who gets a reminder every day of how much strength a man loses as he ages. Goins isn't the mastermind of a team-wide steroid scandal; he's just a guy getting older who wants to look yolked.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get myself removed from all the goverment lists I'm now on after researching steroids forums.Paderu is a sleepy little town in rural Andhra Pradesh, India. It essentially consists of a solitary winding road with quaint produce shops and tiny grocery stores dotted all along it. Cows languidly compete with rickety auto rickshaws for the right of way, mooing discontentedly when one appears into sight. Sari-clad women haggle noisily with shop owners, as the men smoke beedis and watch the world go by. Among all this, there’s a figure that stands out from the rest. It’s young Frenchwoman Christelle Ledroit, trying to blend into the crowd with a bright red salwaar kameez.
“It helps in connecting with the locals if you dress in Indian clothes”, she says, hailing an auto rickshaw for us. “ And I think the patterns are really pretty.” She seems to have connected with the locals alright. She belts out instructions to the auto driver in fluent Telugu, and several passersby hail her with wide smiles and waves as we drive past.
Christelle has been living in Paderu for the last two years. She arrived here from England in 2011, fresh after an Master’s in Biodiversity Survey from Sussex University. “India is exceptionally rich in its biodiversity” she says when asked why she picked India, a place so far away from home. “And also, it helped that my boyfriend was Indian.” She’d looked at relevant jobs in her field, and had heard of the Naandi foundation, a non-profit organization founded by Dr. Anji Reddy, the founder of Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories. They offered her a field role that involved apiculture – something she’d always been passionate about. “Bees are absolutely critical to the environment, and the world is slowly waking up to this fact. So I didn’t think twice when I was offered this role.”, she says. “And I didn’t really living in a small village. I grew up on a farm in France. And my life here is a fair bit healthier and safer than the big city”, she laughs, welcoming us into her house.
She lives alone in a compact 2 bedroom home at the edge of town, overlooking the edge of a rugged cliff. Unlike her neighbouring dwellings, it is a concrete structure with an attached bathroom. However, there are other problems. The power is intermittent at best, she says, pointing at the large collection of candles that is neatly stacked into a shelf. And there’s no internet, she laments. “I get a hard drive full of movies whenever I go to Hyderabad”.
Christelle’s day in Paderu begins early. She gets up as the sun streams in through the meshed windows, designed to keep out the mosquitoes that are endemic in the area. Soon her translator turns up on his motorbike and she sets off, riding pillion, with us following in a car. “I needed the translator when I first came here. The people around this area are tribals who are very wary of outsiders. They don’t particularly stick to a particular dialect of Telugu either, they are all varied, sometimes even a healthy dose of Oriya thrown in for good measure!” The area is ruggedly picturesque, with coffee plantations dotting the countryside, but the grim signs of poverty are unmistakable. The houses are little more than mud huts, connectivity to the village is restricted to one mud road, and there are no quality health care centers nearby.
We reach a field and immediately a cluster of children gather around us, eyeing us curiously. We stride up to a red and white house with a tin roof. “This was one of the first few houses that we provided with a bee hive”, explains Christelle, deftly avoiding the puddles that the monsoon rains have left in the area. Naandi had initially run the project with 12 farmers across 5 villages. They provided the farmers with trainings and sessions on proper beekeeping practices. Things were hard initially. Only one beekeeper from the initial set was able to capture a colony and house the bees successfully in her hive. The other bees absconded, a trait not unusual among Indian bees. Christelle began focusing on greater trainings for the bee farmers. She founded bee farming communities where the members had regular discussions. She says she was pleasantly surprised by how enthusiastic the response was, especially among women. “It was great to see rural Indian women of all ages come together, united by their interest in apiculture.”
Laxmi was one of those first dozen farmers to have taken to beekeeping. She meekly approaches us and displays her beehives. She expertly handles the hive that has been built by local carpenters to suit the Indian climate. The bees buzzing around her seem menacing, but she hardly bats an eyelid. “I used to be afraid of the bees earlier, but now they don’t bother me at all”, she says.
“It’s a great project for this area”, says Christelle. “Apart from empowering rural tribal women with an additional scope of income, it’s also helps to rebuild the ecosystem due to the pollination.”
We get invited to attend one of the meetings. Around 10 bee farmers are patiently seated around a tarpaulin sheet placed in front of a large house. They all break into large smiles when they see Christelle approach. The mood at the gathering is enthusiastically studious, something my school teachers would’ve been proud of. Christelle begins expounding on the role of honey bees in the environment. She uses colourful prints and graphics and speaks confidently in Telugu. Later, the attendees talk shop over cups of chai.
“It wasn’t easy when I first got here. The first month was a bit of a rude shock.”, she says over dinner at her place. We have spread out newspapers on the floor and are eating traditional Andhra fare – rice and rasam. “It was hard adjusting to life in Paderu. People tended to stare at you all the time, and commonplace things become hard if you’re a woman, even more so if you are an outsider. It was difficult to convince the farmers that I’d really come all this way to talk about bee farming!”, she laughs, digging into her rice with her hands. “But things changed for the better. The people here have been really supportive. When they realized I was only trying to help out, everyone rallied around.”
The lights suddenly go off and Paderu slips into darkness. It’s a power cut. We fetch a little lamp and carefully make our way to the terrace. “Nature has such a delicate balance, you know”, says Christelle, perched on the terrace wall. “You’re so removed from that realization if you live in a city. Here you see things first hand. There’s a spate of heavy rains and entire crops are washed away, the bees migrate. Living in a village like this, feeling the fresh air, working on the land, it keeps you grounded. It’s magical.” The night sky twinkles back at her in agreement.
Christelle blogs at Apianon. You can follow her on twitter and facebook.
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commentsQueue music.
After two years and 116 comics we’re shutting UUDD down. This will be our final weekly comic. Holiday comics were always special for us, so we decided to do our send-off as one final Halloween party with all our characters. It’s as much a celebration of our body of work as it is a thank you to fans who have been reading from the beginning. You can check out a larger version of it here.
You all made the journey worthwhile and we can’t thank you enough.
Back when UUDD started it was a group of friends who wanted to work together. Sopes wanted to get better at illustration, and automaton and I needed outlets to write.
And we did those things. We grew. Scripts got tighter and art soared. But after awhile you have to reassess what your goals are. We realized we’ve accomplished some of our primary goals. As for our secondary goals, we can still continue those together on a different project.
More on that later.
There’s a lot going on behind the panels. A delicate juggling act of talent, timetables, and people involved.
You probably didn’t notice the day the site went down because we had too much traffic. You don’t know about the kind people at InMotion who kept reactivating our domain because I told them it was, "raining on our wedding day."
Or see how automaton took to writing on paper with blank panels. How quickly he can structure our conversation into the panels once he has an idea.
Or know about the awe-struck comments automaton and I exchanged after each comic post day when we saw Sopes’s final product. Each and every single week Sopes dazzled us with something else.
Or saw how giddy we were when we made our first Halloween comic together. I remember I met Sopes while he was drawing it, and he casually said, "So I’m doing the finishes touches on Cock Me." I remember the praise we got from all our friends who were reading the comic out of love, but hadn’t really belly-laughed yet.
Or that run of comics where we went from 20,000 people a month to 100,000. It was a thrilling run. We were only just starting and so excited about how far the comic could go.
Or just how many of these comics had no buffer between them, and every Wednesday comics were finished at 9:00 AM and went up at 10:00 AM.
We never missed a single day.
As we grew, we learned from other webcomics creators. We interviewed each and every one of them here: Up Up Down Down Associates.
Ronnie over at Whomp! Comic has had a link to our site since way back when. He even drew a guest comic for us that is the best individual video game comic I’ve ever seen – it holds a mirror up to nature.
He gave us Internet followers like Fren who read every single comic and commented on half of them. Sometimes I would email Ronnie just to say I love him.
Vitaly Alexius is the guy we all looked at and said, "I wish we’d thought of that." In the webcomic world being different is perhaps the only commodity worth having, and Romantically Apocalyptic has it in abundance. The first time I met him in person he shook my hand and said, "you guys should get your prints done with us. We always have extra at the ends of our print runs and you could tag on." We’d only just met.
Josh Mecouch from Formal Sweatpants is the guy I cheer for in webcomics. He’s doing everything right. Watching him was like learning what we SHOULD do and consider directions we ought to try. I’m a lifetime supporter.
Eoin Ryan of Space Avalanche and I talked about more than comics, we talked about life. I remember talking to him on Skype and being surprised to hear he had some of the same concerns about webcomics as we did. Recently he told me, "think about what you want to be and then work towards it every single day." I look forward to our future conversations.
Brian Russell from The Underfold is as part of this comic as any of the three of us. He helped us with with script writing, marketing, and growing pains. He comforted us when we were down, and cheered with us when we were up. He’s more than a friend, he’s my mentor.
But our real life friends helped too.
Our friends Riyad and John support us every single week. They never miss a comic and are never afraid to tell us how they feel, which gives us TONS of invaluable perspective on how people think and how people read. Much love.
Friends and family who read our comic we love you. Webcomics are easy to ignore, especially if they are about things you don’t understand. Thanks for sticking with us this long. Every compliment you gave brightened our post days. Every comment you gave helped us understand. Running with a comic every week can get tiring, but friends and family asking about it and encouraging us helped raise us up.
Ray Hunter? One day I will hug you. Septicor – your support has been phenomenal. Evan you’re why people make webcomics. And Mike. Loyal, day one fan Mike. You’re a Godsend. Shaha. I wish nothing but Ron Swanson birthdays for you. *chest thump*. Stacie – everyone needs a guardian angel like you. Krylon you son of a bitch I love you. Team Stratford we love you! And Rob. I know you’re there. You’re always there. Thank you. Jimmy! You’re always part of the family.
I’d like to thank Sopes for his tireless, heroic efforts. All our lives I’ve been astonished by his art, but there were weeks where seeing a comic froze me place, staring in quiet awe as I felt privileged to look at something so special.
One time when we were kids I showed up to his house to walk to school with him, only to find him dead asleep, head right next to a blaring alarm. He’d gone to sleep fifteen minutes prior because he’d been working late on a school project. That we never missed a post date is because of him. To see him grow, adapt to schedules, and plan ahead makes me (at the risk of sounding condescending) proud.
And I’d like to thank automaton for doing the impossible and finding a way to co-write with me. I didn’t make it easy. What you don’t know about automaton is that he’s extremely competent and strong willed. He likes to think for himself and prides himself on his decisions and ideas. But he shared. He helped make it work. Our writing shorthand is now so slick that I doubt I’ll find that kind of creative partnership again.
This isn’t the end for all of us. We’ll likely do some mini comics, sell some commissions, and God willing, a t-shirt or two. We’ll move onto other projects, but Up Up Down Down will still be here. Our ideas – like our characters at this party in this final strip – go on.
Thanks for the ride everyone.Cities have personalities – they’re often described as we would people. They can be dry, manic, laid-back, iconic. Barcelona is what you might call a tonic. Always known as a vivid and creative city, Barcelona is taking the lead as an exemplary change agent on the European stage. Its DIY vigor and urgent form of citizen-level democracy are palpable, contagious, and best of all, effective.
This is a city that has been reinvented by activism. A formidable woman by the name of Ada Colau, herself a longtime front-line activist for housing rights, is now the mayor. As a woman, as an activist, as a mayor, she’s a good stand-in for the city itself and the radical positive changes it’s making.
But that’s not to say that Ada Colau is responsible for all the whirlwind political and civic change. Barcelona is not a city in reform from the top down; it’s a city in transformation from the bottom up, and up, and up. It’s taking on the challenges of economic and civic change from an inclusive and deliberate position, maturing its street-level praxis into a political force that won’t be contained by its own borders. It’s ready to share its hard-won knowledge and experience with others internationally.
Barcelona is not alone in its evolution. From our point of view, 2016 is shaping up to be a turning-point year in which the Sharing and Collaborative Economies enter a period of intense self-examination and reinvention, and the emergence of the Commons model or paradigm comes forward to effect powerful change. For example, OuiShare, early and perhaps earnest proponents of the Sharing Economy from its inception, has taken “After the Gold Rush” as its OuiShareFest 2016 theme title. Clever allusions to Neil Young aside, the sentiment expressed is quite clear. It’s time to examine what’s left after the public image spikes and crashes of so many Sharing Economy darlings; time to pick up the pieces and work harder than ever to re-invent, re-purpose what remains and, perhaps most of all, re-decentralize. Everything.
As part of that process, in mid-March 2016 Barcelona was host to the Commons Collaborative Economies event (also called “Procomuns”), focused on commons-oriented peer production and the collaborative economy. This event centered on producing public policy proposals and technical guidelines for building software platforms for collaborative communities, and it drew a huge and diverse crowd. Over 30 countries were represented, and almost half the attendees were women. The participants page is a welcome relief from the dreaded “all-male panel” awards. There were families with little kids present, which is not so common at events like these. This event was just about ideal in terms of showing that it’s possible to bring together a wide range of people who normally interact online into a “real-world” setting, and accommodate some of their expectations of balanced representation, and even a few of their often overlooked real-world needs – like childcare. The outcome: a series of proposals and policy recommendations for governments, 122 in total, ending in a joint statement of public policies for the collaborative economy, targeted toward both the Barcelona City Council and to the European Commission.
We spoke with our colleague Albert Cañigueral to get his impressions of the event. Albert is part of Ouishare and Barcola — a Barcelona City Hall multi-stakeholder work group exploring Commons Based Peer Production and the Collaborative Economy, and one of the organizing entities behind Procomuns. “It was very intense, between the volume of content, the quality of the debates and the diversity of the participants and speakers. It was also organized in record time. At the closing, both Alvaro Porro (Barcelona Activa) and Jordi Via (Social and Solidarity Economy area of Barcelona City Hall) made it quite clear that within the existing diversity of what we understand as the collaborative economy – without penalizing any of the options – the administration is leaning towards the commons, and supports the commons collaborative economy option.”
Another recent policy-focused event held in Barcelona was conducted just two weeks prior to Procomuns, this time by Goteo, the award-winning Spanish civic crowdfunding platform. “It’s crucial that the public institutions of our time understand the importance of taking decisions together with citizen participation, and to commit to taking measures that favor inclusion, access to resources and the process of creating public policies,” Goteo’s Strategic Director, María Perulero, remarked. “Over the last five years, Goteo has built up some experience working with public institutions and other bodies willing to innovate in the decision-making, distribution and execution of financial budgets for culture. What we’ve seen is that when there’s a will to change, transformation mechanisms go to work.” Perulero, along with her colleague Carmen Lozano-Bright, conducted a workshop with Pla de Acción Municipal (Municipal Action Plan or “PAM”) de cultura (Barcelona), in co-creating cases in the field of culture/economy of culture that participants would like to see included in the PAM. One of the proposals collected during the Procomuns event was put forth by Goteo, on the topic of institutional match-funding for crowdfunding innovative pilot projects.
We also asked Cañigueral, since he lives and works in Barcelona, for his take on the city as an incubator for change. “Barcelona has become a reference point for digitally-based social innovation, with a strong commons orientation. You need only look at the P2Pvalue map of Catalan cases (as was mentioned in the Datathon during the event). Just see the city’s diversity of initiatives in Digital Society.eu, and consider the European prizes that have been awarded to Goteo, and Guifi.net, among others. In light of all this, I think that there’s perhaps a little lack of ambition, or a bit too much modesty happening. There are similar examples and even replicas to be found in other areas, in part because again, there’s too much modesty around promoting all the innovation going on here. We’ve got a lot to learn from the English and the Americans. Social innovation in general, including what we’d call ‘commons-oriented’, really needs better marketing.”
The focus on civic and social empowerment and inclusion in policy-making, more than just business development, is an obviously welcome expansion in the role of the citizen judging by the overwhelming attendance, local and international, in the Procomuns event. But, as the saying goes, “with great power comes great responsibility”, and some of the presentations hit the crowd with some sobering wake-up calls, especially in the context of Barcelona and its position as a European city well acquainted with new technology. Dmytri Kleiner’s presentation targeted the devastating human and environmental cost of the raw materials and manufacturing of technology, with the climactic statement “Technology is built out of blood” causing a simultaneous hush in the room and flurry of tweeting.
Because of the unique nature of Procomuns, we’re going to outline the basic happenings and outcomes, as we believe this will (or should) become a reference event for future collaborations between cities, their citizens, policymakers, and local economy advocates and producers.
Diving into Procomuns
The event was inspiring, to say the least, and highly varied in content. It was also made available in three languages, Spanish, Catalan, and English, with simultaneous interpreters present for plenary sessions. We’ve captured a rich sampler to hint at the sheer quantity of speakers and depth of exploration, although we can’t claim that this is a complete summary.
The event was coherently organized around three main tracks: the relevance of the commons-oriented model within the Collaborative Economy; public policy recommendations for the urban and European Commons; and the technical guidelines on free and open software and decentralized technologies. Below, we’ll describe some of the interventions within each of the three tracks, with a special focus on the policy aspect. If you want to dig in deeper, speaker’s names are hyperlinked directly to their video segment. For more resources, see Procomun’s comprehensive website.
Public Policies for the Urban and European Commons
“What are the public policies for the economy we want?” asked Mayo Fuster Morell, an event co-organizer from the Dimmons research group and the P2Pvalue EU project. The sessions on public policies strongly advocated for commons-oriented, cooperative and locally based solutions, in contrast to the prevalent private, corporate and absentee partnerships typically favored by the market interests. The outcome was a series of recommendations for Barcelona’s Municipal Action Plan, which will determine the policies undertaken by Barcelona City Council during its four year legislature. There’s more: these recommendations will also inform the European Commission’s consultation process on public policies for the promotion and regulation of the commons collaborative economy as an integral component in city and community building.
Alvaro Porro, director in the area of Other Economies and Proximity of Barcelona Activa (Barcelona City Council) stressed that policies have to be personal and tangible rather than theoretical, and grounded in living, present, realities. He also remarked that Procomuns was “only the beginning” in what will be a long term commitment between Barcelona City Hall and civil society groups. Porro’s colleague, Jordi Día, is the Commissioner for the Collaborative Economy — a newly created role — and he made reference to the importance of going from values to tangible practices. Mayo Fuster Morell highlighted the uniqueness of this moment in time, where Commons offers an answer and a political alternative to the economic, humanitarian and economic crises affecting us in this post-2008 context. Barcelona, she continued, is a global reference point for the commons economy, as evidenced by P2Pvalue’s directory with more than 1000 practical examples of Commons Based Peer Production in Catalonia alone. For Fuster Morell, the objective of Procomuns was to co-create real, human-centered public policies to not only help Barcelona, but to impact the Commons Economy in Catalonia and beyond.
Commoners from all over shared their experiences. Prodromos Tsiavos, an adviser for the Greek Minister of Infrastructure, Transport and Network, silenced the room by proclaiming that the Internet is dead, arguing that it is so ingrained in our lives that it moves offline and becomes omnipresent, even away from the machine: “It’s an environment, not a medium”. Going on to explain that “Commons are uncommon”, Tsiavos remarked that there is an “acoustic separation” dividing policy makers from the recipients of such policies. The former are also firmly embedded in an old-school left tradition characterized by labor unions and parties which, in their need to centralize power, cannot comprehend the Commons. As a solution, he suggested that we bridge the information gap and build regulatory capacity. Tsiavos cautioned that because EU cross-sector Commons policies are currently very fragmented, we need model policies and transnational consultations to eventually politicize the Commons in a coherent way.
Benedetta Brighenti — Deputy Mayor of Castelnuovo Rangone, Italy, and member of the European Committee of the Regions — coincided with Tsiavos in describing existing policies as being too fragmented in the haphazard road from local to national and EU-level policies. While awareness of the Sharing Economy is growing at the parliamentary level, it is poorly defined and often hijacked by extractive, for-profit interests. What is needed, she explained, are educational programs to help all stakeholders co-design coherent mandates for the sharing economy. In her role in the European Committee of the Regions, she functions as a rapporteur, tasked with communicating policy ideas to the EU Parliament. She stressed that politicians “must begin to listen” to the real Commons-oriented sharing economy.
Sharing City Seoul and Creative Commons Korea were represented by Jennifer Kang and Sun Park, who tracked Seoul’s evolution as a sharing city since its mayor declared it so in 2012. By asking “what are the problems, and what resources do we have in this city?” they have been able to guide, promote and connect sharing activities while collaboratively solving problems. The Seoul city government is now releasing all its data (with the exception of security documents) under a Creative Commons license, including information on public transport and space-sharing, disseminated through easy-to-understand visualizations. The city government also supports and promotes sharing enterprises through subsidies and conferences.
Back to Barcelona, Enric Senabre of Dimmons, Barcola and P2Pvalue, showcased decidim.barcelona, a public online platform for city and policy planning. Senabre went on to explain that events like Procomuns are “an analogue version of decidim”, and that this type of online/offline interaction will continue with future meet-ups and events. As a complement, Barcola uses the online platform Democracy OS as an independent feedback portal where recommendations are compiled, deliberated and eventually forwarded to the Municipal Action Plan. These grassroots initiated policies are expected to reach beyond Barcelona and scale up to the EU Commission, who is very clear on the need to regulate the Collaborative Economy.
The focus on the Urban Commons continued beyond Barcelona in the “Commons and the City” plenary. George Dafermos (P2P Foundation) spoke about his experience in Ecuador’s FLOK Society/Buen Vivir project. With two years’ hindsight, he can highlight the partial successes. Apart from abolishing patents, the Ecuadorian government has passed a series of “organic laws” heavily influenced by FLOK. According to Dafermos, the new organic law on software “is the most commons-oriented framework for software in the public sector in the entire world”. He also commented on FLOK’s unmet expectations. “Despite a wealth of forward-looking policy documents, adoption by policy makers has been inconsistent, although the process ignited a discussion in society, which hadn’t taken place before, which is no small thing”. Dafermos explained that the spirit of FLOK also lives on here in the Commons Transition platform which highlights the need for direct advocacy targeted at community and civil society groups, not only policy makers, who can influence commons-friendly governments through assemblies and chambers of the Commons.
As we live in a world of uncertainty, these radical new policy-making processes are fallible. However, the post-2008 decline in living standards unleashed the freedom of action and experimentation that only the Commons can provide, admitted Christian Iaione, director of The Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons. The Commons, he feels, are uniquely suited for changing the models used by public and private institutions in an environment where people are fed up with competition, decaying public infrastructure, and a slew of privatizations begun in the nineties. Citizens, according to Iaione, are eager to learn about service provisioning that eludes the charade of public/private competition. Public subsidies are not enough, and the collaborative spirit of the Commons and public-based collective action should be firmly embedded into any foundational layer of an urban co-governance matrix. He also stressed the need for more complex partnerships and institutions which would result in a type of polycentric governance where not everything needs to be regulated; where innovation is fed both by the public policies which inspire it, and by a civil society capable of producing it. The ultimate aim, for Iaione |
Berlau, Slatan Dudow, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Paul Dessau, Caspar Neher, Teo Otto, Karl von Appen, Ernst Busch, Lotte Lenya, Peter Lorre, Therese Giehse, Angelika Hurwicz, Carola Neher and Helene Weigel herself. This is "theatre as collective experiment [...] as something radically different from theatre as expression or as experience."[81]
List of collaborators and associates [ edit ]
Works [ edit ]
Fiction [ edit ]
Plays and screenplays [ edit ]
Entries show: English-language translation of title (German-language title) [year written] / [year first produced][82]
Theoretical works [ edit ]
Poetry [ edit ]
Brecht wrote hundreds of poems throughout his life.[83] He began writing poetry as a young boy, and his first poems were published in 1914. His poetry was influenced by folk-ballads, French chansons, and the poetry of Rimbaud and Villon.[citation needed]
Some of Brecht's poems
1940
A Bad Time for Poetry
Alabama Song
Children's Crusade
Children's Hymn
Contemplating Hell
From a German War Primer
Germany
Honored Murderer of the People
How Fortunate the Man with None
Hymn to Communism
I Never Loved You More
I want to Go with the One I Love
I'm Not Saying Anything Against Alexander
In Praise of Communism
In Praise of Doubt
In Praise of Illegal Work
In Praise of Learning
In Praise of Study
In Praise of the Work of the Party
Mack the Knife
My Young Son Asks Me
Not What Was Meant
O Germany, Pale Mother!
On Reading a Recent Greek Poet
On the Critical Attitude
Parting
Questions from a Worker Who Reads
Radio Poem
Reminiscence of Marie A.
Send Me a Leaf
Solidarity Song
The Book Burning (The Burning of the Books)
The Exile of the Poets
The Invincible Inscription
The Mask of Evil
The Sixteen-Year-Old Seamstress Emma Ries before the Magistrate
The Solution
To Be Read in the Morning and at Night
To Posterity
To the Students and Workers of the Peasants' Faculty
An die Nachgeborenen [de] (To Those Born After)
(To Those Born After) United Front Song
War Has Been Given a Bad Name
What Has Happened?
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Primary sources [ edit ]
Essays, diaries and journals [ edit ]
Brecht, Bertolt. 1964. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed. and trans. John Willett. British edition. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-38800-X. USA edition. New York: Hill and Wang. ISBN 0-8090-3100-0.
. Ed. and trans. John Willett. British edition. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-38800-X. USA edition. New York: Hill and Wang. ISBN 0-8090-3100-0. 2000a. Brecht on Film and Radio. Ed. and trans. Marc Silberman. British edition. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-72500-6.
. Ed. and trans. Marc Silberman. British edition. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-72500-6. 2003a. Brecht on Art and Politics. Ed. and trans. Thomas Kuhn and Steve Giles. British edition. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-75890-7.
. Ed. and trans. Thomas Kuhn and Steve Giles. British edition. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-75890-7. 1965. The Messingkauf Dialogues. Trans. John Willett. London: Methuen, 1985. ISBN 0-413-38890-5.
. Trans. John Willett. London: Methuen, 1985. ISBN 0-413-38890-5. 1990. Letters 1913–1956. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Ed. John Willett. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-51050-6.
. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Ed. John Willett. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-51050-6. 1993. Journals 1934–1955. Trans. Hugh Rorrison. Ed. John Willett. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. ISBN 0-415-91282-2.
. Trans. Hugh Rorrison. Ed. John Willett. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. ISBN 0-415-91282-2. 2015. Bertolt Brecht et Fritz Lang : le nazisme n'a jamais été éradiqué : sociologie du cinéma, Danielle Bleitrach, Richard Gehrke, Nicole Amphoux, Julien Riebel. La Madeleine : LettMotif, DL 2015. ISBN 978-2-3671-6122-8
Drama, poetry and prose [ edit ]
Brecht, Bertolt. 1994a. Collected Plays: One. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry, Prose Ser. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-68570-5.
. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry, Prose Ser. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-68570-5. 1994b. Collected Plays: Two. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-68560-8.
. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-68560-8. 1997. Collected Plays: Three. Ed. John Willett. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-70460-2.
. Ed. John Willett. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-70460-2. 2003b. Collected Plays: Four. Ed. Tom Kuhn and John Willett. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-70470-X.
. Ed. Tom Kuhn and John Willett. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-70470-X. 1995. Collected Plays: Five. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-69970-6.
. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-69970-6. 1994c. Collected Plays: Six. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-68580-2.
. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-68580-2. 1994d. Collected Plays: Seven. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-68590-X.
. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-68590-X. 2004. Collected Plays: Eight. Ed. Tom Kuhn and David Constantine. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-77352-3.
Ed. Tom Kuhn and David Constantine. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-77352-3. 1972. Collected Plays: Nine. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. New York: Vintage. ISBN 0-394-71819-4.
Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. New York: Vintage. ISBN 0-394-71819-4. 2000b. Poems: 1913–1956. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-15210-3.
. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-15210-3. 1983. Short Stories: 1921–1946. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. Trans. Yvonne Kapp, Hugh Rorrison and Antony Tatlow. London and New York: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-52890-1.
. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. Trans. Yvonne Kapp, Hugh Rorrison and Antony Tatlow. London and New York: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-52890-1. 2001. Stories of Mr. Keuner. Trans. Martin Chalmers. San Francisco: City Lights. ISBN 0-87286-383-2.The star-studded UFC 217 had no shortage of remarkable moments. While most of it was for good reasons, such as massive upsets and unexpected finishes, there was also some negative attention – specifically, some head-scratching refereeing.
The first confusing moment of the night happened in the second bout, when an illegal blow thrown by Curtis Blaydes (8-1 MMA, 3-1 UFC) on Aleksei Oleinik (55-11-1 MMA, 4-2 UFC) prompted the referee to step in and halt the action. The replay showed that while an illegal kick had been thrown, it had only grazed the ear of Oleinik.
When a doctor’s assessment determined that Oleinik could no longer continue, suspense set in as to what would follow. By the letter of the law, an illegal strike had ultimately made its way to a fighter. But, quite obviously, the fight-stopping damage had not stemmed from it.
Ultimately, Blaydes was declared the TKO winner of the heavyweight bout. And, amid the mess, the MMA community seemed to agree the right call was made. But considering both intent behind the strike and the fact that the blow did touch him, would Oleinik be right in disagreeing with the result?
According to longtime referee “Big” John McCarthy, the answer is a clear no. The referee’s job, he explained, is first and foremost to ensure the safety of the fighters. And, with that in mind, all the steps taken by Blake Grice on that night were the correct ones.
“Blaydes did something that was illegal,” McCarthy said. “He threw a kick and he did touch the ear of Alexi Oleinik. Blake Grice comes in, he calls a stop to the action. When he calls a stop to the action, he separates the fighters – he does exactly what he’s supposed to do.”
When the doctors of the particularly cautious New York State Athletic Commission stepped in to assess the wobbly Oleinik, who’d been through the ringer in the minutes prior to the stoppage, it was decided he was too hurt to go on, which posed additional questions.
“So what was he damaged by?” McCarthy said. “Was he damaged by a foul or was he damaged by legal blows? Well, he was damaged by legal blows. All of the blows that hurt him and made it to where the doctors are now saying, ‘He is unable to continue’ were all done legally in that fight.
“What stopped the fight was an illegal action by Blaydes. He ends up throwing a kick. Did the kick touch Alexei? Yes, it did. It touched his ear. Did it have any effect? Did it hurt him? No. It had no effect on any of the damage he had occurred. ”
Faced with an illegality, the referee had to weigh the options.
“(The referee) says, ‘Yes, there was a foul. And if the fighter can go on, I may take a point for that foul. But I can’t take a point because the fight is not going on,'” McCarthy said. “And I can’t go to the judges scorecards based on the round that this is in.
“So I can now determine that this is either a no-contest, or I have a disqualification, or I can say that because the doctors say that the fight can’t go and that was caused by legal blow, this is a TKO victory by Blaydes.”
Ultimately, McCarthy believes that Grice’s thought process was one that did right by Blaydes, by the commission and even, as unhappy as he may have been hearing it at the time, Oleinik.
McCarthy also took the time to address what became yet another controversial point of that fight. Once the instant replay was requested, UFC Vice President of Regulatory Affairs Marc Rather could be seen showing it to officials on a screen octagonside.
Considering that the commissions are supposed to work independently from the UFC, and that Ratner is ultimately an employee who looks out for the interests of the promotion, his seeming involvement in NYSAC’s decision raised some eyebrows. And it wasn’t the first time.
Ratner’s role, McCarthy explained, is to use his expertise to provide insight and answers to the UFC’s commentary team – not commission officials. And, while he’ll admit that Ratner has in the past been (unwillingly) “stuck” in situations that he shouldn’t be involved in, that’s not at all what happened at UFC 217.
“What occurred was, Blake asked for instant replay,” McCarthy said. “And the commission has a monitor, but they couldn’t get the replay up on the monitor. So Marc took and swung his monitor around, said, ‘Here it is.’ And let them view his monitor.
“If you look, Marc’s not giving him any information. He’s got (referee) Dan Miragliotta there and he watches the replay on that monitor that is Marc’s monitor.”
For complete coverage of UFC 217, check out the UFC Events section of the site.
MMAjunkie Radio broadcasts Monday-Friday at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. PT) live from Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino’s Race & Sports Book. The show is hosted by “Gorgeous” George Garcia, Brian “Goze” Garcia and Dan Tom. For more information or to download past episodes, go to www.mmajunkie.com/radio.During a rally in Pensacola, Fla., Friday, President Donald Trump spoke of the shared values of Americans and declared that the nation does not worship government, but God.
Trump said the country is “protecting religious liberty” under his administration, including “getting rid of the Johnson amendment,” which prohibited non-profit institutions including churches from making political statements and is repealed in the current version of the tax reform plan.
Then Trump launched into a section of his speech that attracted nearly thirty seconds of continued applause:
We have stopped the government attacks on our Judeo-Christian values,” Trump said, “because we know that families and churches, not government officials, know best how to create a strong and loving community. We know that parents, not bureaucrats, know best how to raise their children and to nurture their children. And above all else, we know this, America doesn’t worship government, we worship God.
Earlier in his speech, Trump said that despite critics saying he had not accomplished one legislative item on his agenda, he had cut more regulations than any other president — including Abraham Lincoln.
“Honest Abe Lincoln, he was a regulation guy,” Trump said. “Abe Lincoln was a regulation cutter. Can you believe that?”
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Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.In its backward glance at the 1870s, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) treats readers to a peculiar spectacle on the occasion of an engagement. As the young bride-to-be, May Welland, presents her left hand—recently sapphire ring-bejeweled by her fiancé, Newland Archer—to her socialite grandmother, the grandmother seems more interested in her appendages than the jewels.
“But it’s the hand that sets off the ring, isn’t it, my dear Mr. Archer?” she says. “Mine was modeled in Rome by the great Ferrigiani. You should have May’s done, my child. Her hand is large—it’s these modern sports that spread the joints—but the skin is white. And when’s the wedding to be?” she broke off, fixing her eyes on the soon-to-be groom’s face.
The vignette’s curiosity reveals much about the Victorians’ conviction that hands contain meaning. They represent idealizations and expectations of gender, worthy of immortalization in sculpture; they serve as an index of social anxieties, synecdocichally drawing attention to unruly bodies and desires; they emblematize socioeconomic status, showcasing the trappings of wealth and the hardship of poverty. In fact, the fashion of the age —both popular and “scientific”—contended that cheirosophy or chiromancy—practices we now playfully, even derisively, call “palm reading”—could reveal an individual’s character and life trajectory.
Popular magazines at the time, The Strand included, also tried their hand at arguing for the appendage’s intrinsic significance with a two-part exposé by Beckles Willson that argues, “The hand, like the face, is indicative or representative of character.” The author follows up his self-assured assertion with what amounts, delightfully, to pin-up shots of famous hands accompanied by the author’s frequently laudatory evaluations of their respective merits. Willson’s enthusiasm uncovers a cultural predilection for objectifying hands that had enjoyed popularity for several decades by the time his article appeared; and while it remains fashionable even today to suggest otherwise, it proves quite difficult to deny that the Victorians were, in fact, not at all averse to getting handsy.
The Victorians’ flamboyantly flaunted their finger fetish in the glassware mass-produced for their newly fashioned and notoriously extravagant dining habits; human hands—in myriad forms—became motifs that could teach, terrify, and/or titillate. In the case of the “Tree of Life” pattern created by the Hobbs Brockunier Glass Co. of Wheeling, West Virginia, anyone seeking cream and sugar for hot beverages faced being forced into fondling miniature hands, sparking frisson as users contemplated a socially sanctioned, though somehow still oddly illicit (and vaguely creepy) frottage culminating with a splash of cream.
Two views of a Hobbs Brockunier Glass Co. “Tree of Life” creamer, c. 1879. Joshua Adair
Other pieces, like the matching spooner, don disembodied digits holding vessels aloft, whose pattern name and symbolic elements conjure origin myths and invite the contemplation of procreation.
Additional “handy” examples from the pattern include compotes, cake stands, and an epergne, that invited diners to admire, though not necessarily touch, disembodied hands balancing pronouncedly phallic shapes.
Left, Hobbs Brockunier “Tree of Life” epergne base c. 1879 and right, a “Tree of Life” Spooner c. 1879. Joshua Adair
Other tableware from the period, including James Hadley’s iconic sculpture-turned-spill vase “Mrs. Hadley’s Hand,”(circa 1864) produced by Royal Worcester in Worcester, England, and redecorated by other artists like Eduard Bejot, invited gazers to engage with the grasping—even gripping—potential of the female hand. While Bejot’s tarted-up version screams privilege with all its paste jewels, Hadley’s original evinces turquoise-braceleted middle-class style.
This lust for the clutching female hand expanded considerably from Hadley’s form to include flowers, cornucopias, torches, seashells, even corn on the cob. Each form sports jewelry—rings and bracelets—and manages to look altogether more alluring than Thing ever could hope to.
Two views of a Royal Worcester “Mrs. Hadley’s Hand”, c. 1864. Joshua Adair
Whereas the fine porcelain of Royal Worcester proved prohibitively expensive to the average consumer, chalkware and pressed glass examples were inexpensive—but eye-catchingly expressive—alternatives to objectify the female form.
As the 19th century progressed, these tantalizing hands re-formed as they endeavored to evoke moralistic messages by reminding butter-seekers, for example, of time-worn adages, whose symbolism may have harbored a caveat about entertaining notions and seeking out other lither, more comely hands.
Not all disembodied hands objectified the feminine to titillate diners; others conveyed messages about social justice and the obligations of privilege, though with no less of a tactile treat, perhaps, for those receptive to the charms of the male hand. One example, Vallerysthal’s “Beggar’s Hand” toothpick holder, stylishly nudges dinner guests to consider the less fortunate as they clear the debris of overindulgence from their teeth.
A trio of chalkware hands, maker and date unknown. Though the cheapest version in their day, chalkware hands are the rarest and most valuable today due to their extreme fragility. Joshua Adair
Dinner guests encountered a similarly charged message when their hosts served up sugar in O’Hara Glass Co.’s “Pennsylvania Hand,” that features a fist clenching a scroll or bar.
Two view of an O’Hara Glass Co. “Pennsylvania Hand” sugar bowl, c. 1880. Joshua Adair
Because most glass manufacturers of the period failed to maintain detailed records, it proves exceptionally difficult at this remove to establish the intended meaning of this particular motif absolutely. However, the clenched fist – whether it sports a bar or a scroll – has been a recurring anti-slavery, pro-freedom, even pro-black, motif. It may also have a connection to President Abraham Lincoln, whose modeled hands enjoyed a certain brand of fame in the mid-19th century. While it is possible, of course, that none of these possibilities capture the designer’s meaning, these masculine hands clearly convey strength all while objectifying them for dinner guests to caress.
In other cases, and perhaps more delightfully because of their absurd appearance on a single piece in an entire line, men’s hands make an appearance to thrust forth a creamer’s handle, affording yet another hand-holding opportunity at the dinner table.
Ever more suggestive, perhaps, were those hands inviting users to put them to whatever use they might conceive—nefarious or otherwise—as they stretched out to be filled.
Atterbury “Bird in Hand” butter dish, c. 1889. Joshua Adair
While it might seem a bit sophomoric to suggest these housewares figured in erotic play or some other tomfoolery, the Victorians’ impishness (especially considering their fondness for furtling) suggests that these trays invited more than utilitarian use, pregnant with possibility and meaning. The most famous example, produced by various companies in the U.S. and Europe, erroneously titled “Queen Victoria’s Hands,” were not, in fact, modeled on the imposing monarch’s hands – though she too obsessed over disembodied appendages and continues to be surrounded by free-roaming hands even today.
A hand-shaped tray holding buttons, one of which also features a bodiless hand. Joshua Adair
The tray itself doubtlessly found endless uses, including safekeeping calling cards, jewelry, and other trinkets like buttons, even those featuring bodiless hands of their own.
Regardless of what they stored—or their received meaning—it does not require a palm reader to pronounce that the expressive and tactile potential of myriad unattached mitts held them in sensual thrall. They also illustrate beautifully, if eerily, that the Victorians were indeed a handful—in the best ways possible.On one hand, the announcement that Saudi Arabia’s King Salman will not attend President Obama’s Camp David summit of Gulf Arab monarchs on Thursday, despite having earlier accepted the invitation, highlights all over again the considerable strains between Washington and Riyadh. In the four months since Salman came to power, the Kingdom has defied the U.S. by starting one war in Yemen and reviving the most problematical elements in another, sending new support to the Syrian opposition forces that include the Nusra Front, an affiliate of al-Qaeda.
On the other hand, the king’s absence—ostensibly to deal with a brief cease-fire in Yemen, but widely viewed as a snub—will give U.S. officials a chance to size up the young fellow who the monarch has invested with immense new powers: His son, also known as the Minister of Defense, as well as president of the royal court. Mohammad bin Salman may be 29, as some accounts have it, or 34, the age offered in other reports. Or somewhere in between. The uncertainty speaks volumes about how little is known of the fresh-faced young prince, derided by the Supreme Leader of arch-rival Iran as “an inexperienced youngster.”
“I don’t think anybody knows who he is,” says F. Gregory Gause III, head of the international affairs department of the Texas A&M University Bush School of Government and Public Service. “He’s never had a job where he had a counterpart with Americans in bilateral talks. I think there’ll be plenty of people looking to size him up.”
The jobs that young bin Salman holds are known well enough. Defense is a ministry awash in money. “That’s where the rake-offs occur in the system,” says Charles A. Freeman, who was U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. And head of the royal court is basically chief of staff, putting the king’s son in daily charge of the ruling apparatus.
But the lack of information about bin Salman himself says a great deal about how fast the ground is shifting in the Middle East—and especially in the House of Saud, the family that has ruled the Kingdom since it appeared on the sands of the Arabian Peninsula in 1932. Saudi-watchers used to be the Middle East’s version of the Kremlinologists who studied the Soviet Union. The players in both places moved at processional speed and change, should it occur, was glacial. But then Salman took power following the January death of his brother Abdullah, who ruled for 10 years.
“Basically what’s happened in Saudi Arabia since the death of Abdullah is a series of political coup d’etats,” says Freeman. “In Arabia, genealogy is ideology and lineage really is faction. In any one-party system you have factions, and in a one-family system you have factions.” Despite Salman’s reputation as a conciliator between branches of the family, since ascending to the throne, Freeman says, “he’s basically cut them all out.”
Salman, 79, was expected to be the Saudi ruler who prepared for the inevitable transfer of power to a younger generation of Saudi princes. But rather than casting the net wide, he designated his nephew as the new Crown Prince—the first grandson of the founding King, Abdulaziz, to be so named—and his own young son Mohammad as Deputy Crown Prince, or second in line. The nephew is already well known in Washington: Mohammad bin Nayef, 55, has long been Interior Minister and run the Saudis’ counter-terror operations; he has twice met with President Obama in the Oval Office. But in selecting him, the king reached past hundreds of waiting princes.
“The model was kind of corporate leadership within a number of senior members of the older generation, and they didn’t always get along and they didn’t always agree, but they had a general corporate sense of where they wanted the country to go and it worked well for more than 50 years,” says Gause. “I thought the new king would try to recreate that kind of corporate responsibility across a number of people in the new generation, but that’s obviously not what Salman wanted. He’s privileged a couple of people and cut out a large number. And how that affects family cohesion down the line will be interesting to watch.”
For now, the war in Yemen, aimed at a Shi’ite rebel group advancing in the neighboring state, has provided a rallying effect at home. It also had the effect of forcing the U.S. to provide battlefield intelligence and targeting information (“not to support them would leave the relationship with no content,” says Freeman). But the fundamental problem remains Iran, the Saudis’ great regional rival. Riyadh feels threatened not only by Tehran’s gains in Iraq and Yemen, and continued support for the Assad regime in Syria, but—even more—by Obama’s engagement with the Iranians. Along with fellow members of the Sunni-dominated Gulf Cooperation Council, they feel threatened by the attention Washington is paying to Iran, in a region where attention equals prestige, or even license. Already almost wholly reliant on the U.S. for their defense, the Gulf Arab monarchs are asking for a formal treating with Washington guaranteeing their protection, something Obama officials say they cannot provide.
“I think their fears that we are going to just throw them over and that Iran will be our big ally in the region are greatly exaggerated,” says Gause. But those are the fears that prompted the Obama administration to convene the Camp David summit. And if King Salman cannot make it, Freeman says, he may have sussed it out as a “pseudo-event.”
“The Saudis and others have learned from Israel that you can give the United States the bird,” says Freeman. But that, the former ambassador adds, may work out for the best at Camp David. “Having the two Mohammads—bin Nayef and bin Salman—in this thing puts the two people who are actually running things in there. So if there’s something that’s actually going on in Saudi Arabia, these are the two who can make things happen.”
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Contact us at editors@time.com.Seattle, Wash. - September 4, 2013 - A study published today in Aging Cell identifies a new tool to accurately analyze extremely rare mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) deletions associated with a range of diseases and disorders as well as aging. This approach, which relies on Droplet Digital PCR (ddPCR™) technology, will help researchers explore mtDNA deletions as potential disease biomarkers.
The accumulation of mtDNA mutations is associated with aging, neuromuscular disorders, and cancer. However, methods to probe the underlying mechanisms behind this mutagenesis have been limited by their inability to accurately quantify and characterize new deletion events, which may occur at a frequency as low as one deletion event per 100 million mitochondrial genomes in normal tissue. To address these limitations, researchers at the Seattle, Washington-based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center developed a ddPCR-based assay known as "Digital Deletion Detection" (3D) that allows for the high-resolution analysis of these rare deletions.
"It is incredibly difficult to study mtDNA mutations, let alone deletions, within the genome," said Dr. Jason Bielas, Assistant Member of the Public Health Sciences Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and lead author of the study. "Our 3D assay shows significant improvement in specificity, sensitivity, and accuracy over conventional methods such as those that rely on real-time PCR."
Bielas added, "The increase in throughput afforded by droplet digital PCR shortened the analysis of deletion events to days compared to months using previous digital PCR methods. Without the technology, we could not have made this discovery."
At the center of the study was Bio-Rad Laboratories' QX100™ ddPCR system. Using the QX100 system, Bielas and his team analyzed eight billion human brain mtDNA genomes and identified more than 100,000 genomes with a deletion. They discovered that, contrary to popular belief, the majority of the increase in mtDNA deletions was not caused by new deletions but rather by the expansion of previous deletions. They hypothesized that the expansion of pre-existing mutations should be considered as the primary factor contributing to age-related accumulation of mtDNA deletions.
How the 3D Assay Works
3D is a novel three-step process that includes enrichment for deletion-bearing molecules, single-molecule partitioning of genomes into droplets for direct quantification via ddPCR, and breakpoint characterization using next-generation sequencing.
Once the enrichment process is completed using methods previously developed by Bielas and colleagues, the concentration of molecules within the droplets is adjusted by using the QX100 system so that the majority of droplets contain no mutant genomes while a small fraction contain only one. This process allows each deletion to be amplified without bias and without introducing the artifacts that are common in qPCR.
Following amplification, deletions can be analyzed using ddPCR to determine the absolute concentration of mutated molecules. Using the relationship between droplet fluorescence and amplicon size, Bielas and his team were able to characterize the size and complexity (whether they were a result of a few clonal expansions or a large collection of random deletions) of rare mitochondrial deletions in human brain samples.
The 3D assay provides an important new tool that will allow researchers to better study the mechanisms of deletion formation and expansion, and their role in aging. Droplet digital PCR's high throughput and increased sensitivity will also allow Bielas' lab to target other low-level disease-causing mtDNA deletions in skeletal muscle, brain tissue, and blood.
###
About Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
At Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, home to three Nobel laureates, interdisciplinary teams of world-renowned scientists seek new and innovative ways to prevent, diagnose and treat cancer, HIV/AIDS and other life-threatening diseases. Fred Hutch's pioneering work in bone marrow transplantation led to the development of immunotherapy, which harnesses the power of the immune system to treat cancer with minimal side effects. An independent, nonprofit research institute based in Seattle, Fred Hutch houses the nation's first and largest cancer prevention research program, as well as the clinical coordinating center of the Women's Health Initiative and the international headquarters of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network. Private contributions are essential for enabling Fred Hutch scientists to explore novel research opportunities that lead to important medical breakthroughs. For more information visit http://www. fredhutch. org or follow Fred Hutch on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.
About Bio-RadSpeaking on World Food Day, Francis said climate change was a driver of hunger and migration and the Paris climate agreement was the legal basis for the solution
By Karl Mathiesen
Pope Francis expressed dismay on Monday at US president Donald Trump’s intention to withdraw from the Paris climate deal.
The head of the Roman Catholic church was speaking at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.
According to Reuters, he told an audience that included Trump’s agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue: “Thanks to scientific knowledge, we know how we have to confront the problem and the international community has also worked out the legal methods, such as the Paris Accord, which sadly, some have abandoned.”
In June, Trump announced he would take the US out of the Paris deal as soon as legally possible, which is in 2020.
In the lead up to that announcement, Trump and the pontiff met in the Vatican. Francis gave Trump a copy of his 184-page essay on humans’ relationship with the environment, Laudito Si. Trump promised to read it.
The pope’s speech in Rome on Monday marked World Food Day. Francis linked climate change to global hunger and large movements of people.
“We see consequences of climate change every day,” he said, calling for a change in the way the world uses resources. “It is clear that wars and climatic change are a cause of hunger, so let’s not present it as if hunger is an incurable disease.
“The yoke of poverty caused by the often tragic movement of migrants can be removed by prevention, consisting of development projects that create jobs and offer the capacity to respond to climactic and environmental changes.”This year the federal government will send $62.5 billion in transfer payments to provincial and local governments — over one quarter of the federal budget.
Here is an explainer to help you understand why these payments exist, how they work, and why they matter.
What exactly is a transfer payment?
A transfer payment is simply a wire transfer from the Government of Canada’s bank account to a provincial government’s bank account. Every year, the federal government transfers a large portion of its budget (over one quarter this year) to other governments in Canada. Most of this goes to provincial governments.
Why does the federal government give money to provinces and territories?
There are three main reasons why the federal government transfers money to provincial and local governments.
1. To make sure that no matter where someone lives in Canada, their governments have enough money to deliver reasonably comparable public services.
For almost 60 years, the federal government has provided cash support to provincial governments with a below-average access ability to raise revenue, after adjusting for population size and differences in tax rates. This measurement is called “fiscal capacity.” There are two main programs for this purpose: the Equalization program for provinces, and a special payment called Territorial Formula Financing for the three territories. Together these account for about $20 billion, or roughly one-third of the transfer payments made by the federal government.
2. To cover the federal share of programs that federal and provincial governments created together.
Many of the core social programs we rely on were created as joint ventures between federal and provincial governments, a partnership that was very common in the 1960s and 1970s, but less so today. The modern health care and social assistance systems were created this way, along with investments in social housing and post-secondary education. Today, the largest federal contribution towards these programs are rolled up in big multi-purpose pools of cash support that represent the majority of federal transfer payments (the Canada Health Transfer and Canada Social Transfer). Some other programs (e.g., social housing) have their own dedicated funding agreements with specific requirements.
3. To pay for provincial and local governments to do things that the federal government would like to happen.
In the case of some of the smaller federal transfer programs, the federal government provides money to provinces to provide services that are either in provincial jurisdiction or the federal government is not currently set up to manage. This category includes federal funding for provinces to provide skills training programs.
What are the major transfer payments and how do they work?
When people talk about federal transfers or “major” federal transfers, they are typically referring to three programs: the Canada Health Transfer (CHT), the Canada |
said. “I do not believe there was any criminal activity on his part.”
Quarles was one of two officers who arrested Jerry Clark in February 2012 after Clark’s daughters turned him in for carrying a gun in his car.
Since Quarles was one of the key witnesses, Clark’s defense attorney Kari Reardon subpoenaed Spokane police on May 21 requesting records of the ongoing internal investigation.
Assistant City Attorney Mary Muramatsu, who also serves as the police department’s legal adviser, responded with a legal argument stating why the city shouldn’t be forced to divulge the nature of the investigation into Quarles.
“The premature release of mere accusations prior to the completion of an investigation is neither responsible nor supported by the law, and it does not serve the interests of effective law enforcement,” Muramatsu wrote.
But Reardon wrote that she needed the information because it “relates directly to Officer Quarles credibility as a law enforcement officer. Clearly, SPD had enough of a concern about Officer Quarles that he was placed on leave and is not allowed to work.”
Reardon noted that the same department allowed Officer Karl F. Thompson Jr. to continue working a desk job despite his indictment for using excessive force and lying to investigators about his 2006 fatal confrontation with Otto Zehm. “That an officer has been removed from work while something is investigated certainly causes the defense to believe that allegation must be very serious,” Reardon wrote.
Judge Clark sided with Reardon but also issued a protective order prohibiting public disclosure of the investigative details beyond the defense team.
Within minutes, Muramatsu returned to the courtroom with Marriya Wright, the deputy prosecutor. They then presented Judge Clark an order dismissing the weapons charge against Clark, who has five felony convictions: attempting to elude police, riot with a deadly weapon, theft, burglary and possession of controlled substances.
In addition to his felony convictions, Clark has eight misdemeanor convictions including resisting arrest, two domestic violence assaults and two violations of no-contact orders.
Just last June, after Clark bonded out on the unlawful possession of a firearm charge, officers responded to a report from Clark’s girlfriend alleging that he had committed a serious assault on her.
Officers attempted to conduct a traffic stop on Clark, but he sped away in what became a police pursuit through the West Central neighborhood. He eventually ditched his car and fled on foot, according to court records.
After police lost him, Clark was spotted returning to his home in the 1100 block of West Providence Avenue. Because officers believed Clark could be armed and had ties to the Hells Angels, they deployed the SWAT team for the arrest.
A jury later acquitted Clark of the second-degree assault charge but convicted him of felony attempting to elude police.
Clark, who is not in custody, also has pending charges for unlawful possession of a firearm, driving on a suspended license and four counts of possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver.
Staff writer Jonathan Brunt contributed toEarlier this week the Evad3rs dev team pleased the Apple world by releasing their most complex jailbreak yet. Their amazing and super-simple tool allows anyone to run unsigned code on their iOS6 firmware in a matter of minutes, smashing Apple's control over what can and cannot be installed on their devices. BitTorrent apps are completely outlawed by the Cupertino outfit, but a new version of a torrent client released this week bypasses those restrictions.
Unlike 150 million or more Internet users, Apple is not a fan of BitTorrent. Every time someone submits a perfectly legal piece of torrent-related software to their App Store, the company issues a blanket ban.
In September last year there appeared to be a light at the end of the tunnel when software slipped through, but just days later the dream was over when Apple said the apps had been approved “by mistake“.
The reasons Apple can exercise this kind of control are wrapped up in two issues. First, their absolute control over the content of the App Store and second, the restrictive DRM present in every single iDevice be it an iPod, iPhone or iPad.
Thankfully there is a way around this with a technique called jailbreaking, an act which through software removes Apple’s control and allows third party software to run unhindered. Just this week the geniuses of the Evad3rs dev team released their latest jailbreak for iOS6 and what better way to celebrate the freedom it provides than installing a new torrent client?
The software, which is based on the open source Transmission, is called iTransmission 3. It is the much needed upgrade to iTransmission 2, a tool from Beecher Adams that received its latest release in the middle of 2012.
Installation
First your device needs to be upgraded to iOS6 or iOS6.1 and the jailbreak installed. Version 1.1 of the jailbreak is out now implementing a couple of fixes.
With the jailbreak comes Cydia, the alternative to Apple’s app store. Simply click the icon on your iDevice and it will load. Click the ‘Search’ button, type in ‘iTransmission 3’ when prompted and click ‘install’ followed by ‘Confirm’. The software will download, install, and place a launch icon on your device – we’re using an iPhone for our demo.
Quick Setup
Having a quick look under the hood before diving into a torrent never hurts, so clicking the little ‘cog’ icon on the bottom right of the interface gets us into iTransmission 3’s settings page.
Options include turning on and configuring the client’s web interface and allowing iTransmission 3 to use WiFi and/or cellular communications, a useful feature for keeping those data bills down.
The ‘dial’ icon on iTransmission 3’s main screen calls up settings for speed. These include limiting the number of connections overall and connections per torrent. Setting any of these too high could cause your iPhone or iPad to become unstable, so a little trial and error is required to get the optimum setting.
In most cases on an established torrent the settings shown below should do the trick. So as not to saturate your download or upload bandwidth there are features to restrict either, should you so require.
Adding a torrent to download
Users have two options to add a torrent. The first (‘web’) launches a web browser which is far from ideal (no pinch/zoom) but functions adequately. We browsed to ThePirateBay.se, and grabbed a release with just a few seeds so the site gave us a.torrent file instead of the default magnet link. The torrent added the download to iTransmission 3’s queue immediately.
The second option, adding a torrent via a magnet link, was just as painless. Magnets can be added directly by clicking on them from the web browser. If you have the magnet link in your iPhone’s clipboard or can remember it, that can be entered into the ‘magnet’ input box directly.
Once a torrent or magnet link is added simply navigate back to iTransmission 3’s main page and a full status report for active transfers is displayed. Highlighting any torrent reveals new controls which allow the user to stop, pause, resume or delete a transfer.
Other details available include the current download and upload speeds, the hash of the torrent and which client created it, where a torrent was downloaded from and whether it’s private or not, plus details of the downloaded files and where they will be stored in your iDevice.
Overall, iTransmission 3 is a decent client that is simple to use and functions as advertised. The app works on iPad but does not yet take advantage of the larger display, something that should be addressed in a future update.
Available from the the repo at ModMyi, iTransmission 3 is completely free and currently only for iOS6.x.Murphyville is the main urban settlement on Emerald Isle (formerly Ireland), spanning the south-east coast. It is independent to Brit-Cit but highly 'influenced' by it. The main export is entertainment.
There were 20 million inhabitants on the island in 2113.
Judge-Sergeant Charlie Joyce is one of the more famous Judges from the city.
Contents show]
Description Edit
Murphyville is large by modern standards but lacks the tall starscraper blocks of most megacities. In lifestyle and layout, it's similar to modern-day Dublin - but with much greater urban development, as St Stephen's Green was reduced to fifteen blades of grass and a shrub called Kevin until Dredd ran over it in 2113. Smaller rural hab-villages exist away from the city but were mostly used by tourists in the 2110s.
By the 2130s, it had a Murphyville Spaceport (Spásfort Bhaile Átha Cliath) that had replaced the old Murphyville International Airport.
Joyce asked Dredd if a perp was a "mental fella", meaning psi - implying psis don't exist on the Emerald Isle.
The bulk of stories were written by Belfast born Garth Ennis, who used it as a savage parody of Ireland and the stereotypes around it.
History Edit
Ireland's potato crops died out in 2052. For the sake of the tourist trade, they secretly mashed up rice to look like potatoes.[1]
It remained neutral during the Atomic Wars of 2070 but that didn't protect it from extensive radiation damage. [2] Enough of Irish civilisation survived that a tourist boat, the Saint Joshua, continued to travel the coast, and a political class still existed.
In 2071, Brit-Cit Covert Ops tried to assassinate a pro-unification politician, Aileen Brady, to hold onto Northern Ireland; the operation was botched and caused the sinking of the St Joshua. Unwilling to let the civilians onboard drown, Covert Ops (masquerading as Coast Guard) saved 78 of the boat's passengers and crew. This was one of the key events that ended Emerald Isle and Brit-Cit's historical animosity, and a covert group in the Isle of Man was charged with keeping the real events secret. [3]
The island was only reclaimed from radiation damage in 2095 due to Brit-Cit aid and in return, Brit corporations have a major hold on the Isle's government. The country was turned into a gigantic theme park based around stereotypes of traditional Irish life. Stereotyped rural villages like the Charles Haughey Memorial Village were set up in the countryside, catering for the tourists (and only serving potatoes). Insulting promotional ads were fronted by a cartoon leprechaun called Seamus O'Tuber.[4] Murphyville itself became increasingly urbanised but sometimes bit off more than it can chew: the Black Atlantic tunnel to the island ends in the Atlantic Bridge as they ran out of cash to complete the tunnel itself
At some point, the Emerald Isle Militia became a semi-formal Judge force. They created the spud gun at a time when they were unable to afford bullets and tried using the fake potatoes instead.
The famous Judge Joyce attained the rank of Judge-Sergeant in 2110.
Discontent with patronising tourists and the need to cater to them grew. Young nationalists had formed the Sons of Erin terror group in the 2110s. Many of the Judges sympathised and the Sons rarely did anything serious, until Sons leader Frank Neeson hired a mob blitzer called Donny Staples (mistaking him for a war veteran) to help them in 2113. They first executed the ambassador to Mega-City One, then were steered by Staples into the "Bloody Monday Morn" massacre on May 12: hitting Murphyville International Airport, Riverside Travel Centre, Justice Central Station, Telemurph, the docks, and various hab villages and spudatoriums. A visiting Dredd helped Joyce and the Judge Militia wipe out the Sons of Erin but the tourist trade was still crippled. [5]
In 2114, Judge-Sergeant Joyce uncovered human body parts in Fingal Pie Factory pies. This turned out to be a gang of Trinity College medical students who thought it was a laugh to smuggle human bodies into food. [6] 2114 was also the year that Murphyville finally signed the Judicial Charter with Mega-City One after years of diplomatic wrangling. [7]
In the same year, Murphyville faced zombie attacks on Judgement Day. Murphyville still had graveyards rather than [resyk]] and zombies poured out of them, with airstrikes on graves written off as the Church would never buy it. Chief Judge Maginty was present at the Hondo conference on the crisis.
Murphyville was one of the many megacities trying to get the head of Judge Eckhart in 2117. Judge Patrick Wilde was actually a double agent for Vatican City but failed to secure the head.[8]
At some point in the 2120s, Charlie Joyce found footage that revealed the St Joshua coverup and was murdered by elements of Justice Department, on orders from "Douglas" (capital of the Isle of Man). The coverup made Joyce out to be drunk on duty, which destroyed his reputation as various cases he'd solved were subject to legal appeal. Judge-Inspector Stephen McGann was involved in this.[9]
In 2126, the city was under Chief Judge Krilly. He visited Mega-City One for the Global Justice Summit and got into a fight with Euro-City's Chief Judge Boltstern (who dismissed him and city as irrelevant unless they wanted to hear about potatoes) when he came to the defence of an Oz Judge.[10]
After Chaos Day, an unknown number of Irish Judges (including Joyce's son Fintan Joyce) were sent to Mega-City One to replenish its numbers.
In 2137, McGann was Chief Judge, with Deputy Chief Judge Grainne Walsh. Fintan Joyce was targeted for assassination to stop him learning his father's secrets (under the mistaken belief Charlie Joyce had made a copy of the footage) and when he and Dredd went to Murphyville to investigate, they were targeted by a judicial black ops squad. When this was failed, McGann was killed so Murphyville Judges (with Brit-Cit aid) would have a pretext to arrest the MC-1 Judges and have them die "resisting arrest". After a battle at the Murphyville Spaceport, Walsh called off the operation due to the loss of Judges and revealed the conspiracy. To prevent further trouble, a Murphyville/Brit-Cit raid was launched on the Isle of Man. The full events were obscured, but the St Joshua conspiracy had come out; both city-states blamed each other and tensions escalated between them. [11]
In 2138, the Emerald Isle and Brit-Cit decided to make Dredd and Joyce into a shared enemy to reduce tension, and Brit-Cit demanded Dredd be extradited for the shooting. [12])
Judges Edit
The Judge Militia used to be poor, hence the need for the spud gun, and their bikes were still less advanced than the Lawmaster by 2114. They were more like the traditional Garda than most Judges, rarely using the same level of violence and being more integrated in the local community; Judges were allowed to drink, even on duty, and can have families. Bloody Monday Morn was a severe shock to the Militia.
The uniforms are highly distinctive, with the top being a "trenchcoat" rather than the biker leathers of most forces. The green and white colouring (with orange bits) is based around the Irish flag. Large sidearms were in use by the 2110s (apparently without the multiple rounds of other Judge forces). The force operates out of Justice Central Station while criminals are locked up in Kilmainham Iso-cubes. Central has a wall of photos of Judges who died on duty.
Under the Judicial Charter, Murphyville Judges can pursue criminals to Mega-City One and receive assistance, and vice versa.
References EditI am “a Benn, not a Bennite”, Hilary famously declared when he fought the by-election that brought him to the Commons in 1999. He is, and he isn’t, as we soon learnt, with the son of the Tony Benn going on to serve in the cabinets of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Jeremy Corbyn has always been the opposite – a Bennite, but not a Benn. Now a few supporters of the Labour leader are said to be ready to try to oust the former shadow foreign secretary from the Leeds Central seat he has occupied ever since he uttered his best epigram.
It looks like being a clash between two visions of the Labour Party – centre-left versus Corbynista, interventionist versus something close to pacifist – and one that has been brewing ever since Hilary stood in the House of Commons and delivered a soaring speech in favour of Britain launching air strikes on Syria last December.
Yesterday John McDonnell did little to douse the flames of controversy when he vowed not to intervene if a plot emerged against Benn, a politician he described as his “friend”.
Any attempt to remove the former shadow foreign secretary from his safe West Yorkshire seat would, however, be dramatic – and utterly destructive.
If Hilary Benn is a candidate for left-wing deselection, as the Sunday Times reported, then the agitators should stand down. Local members may not pursue the option. There is nothing to be gained by trying to remove Benn but a whole lot to be lost.
First, it would fuel public concern that Labour is simply interested in internal battles just at a time when, with Corbyn triumphant in the summer leadership election, there has been a semblance of calm across the parliamentary party (PLP).
It also would distract from the huge task Labour faces of trying to win – and, indeed protect – enough marginal seats to get back into power whenever the next general election finally comes round. Yorkshire constituency seats are dotted across the list of 106 seats which Labour was aiming to take last year and there is even one in Benn’s own city in Leeds North West, where Greg Mulholland held on for the Lib Dems despite local outrage over tuition fees in a student-heavy seat.
And a full re-selection, purely on the grounds that Benn is a critic of Corbyn, would go against Labour values. Yes, local members want democracy and MPs they can hold to account. That is in keeping with our Labour instincts. But to punish someone for opposing the party leader would look mean-spirited when Corbyn has repeatedly spoken of his desire to “reach out” to sceptical MPs. It would look like an act of revenge.
Now, many Corbyn supporters will ask what loyalty Benn deserves? In their eyes he is to blame for the attempted coup in June when dozens of shadow ministers resigned in the days after he was sacked from the foreign affairs job. And his support for the bombing of Syria is seen as not just disloyal to the leader, but dangerous and wrong.
But the truth of what happened on the weekend after the Brexit vote may take years to emerge. One version claims that Benn was ringing round colleagues over whether he should call on Corbyn to resign. Another is that he hung on despite months of briefing against him. Whatever happened, he has chosen not to stick the boot into Corbyn in the way numerous other backbenchers have done over the last year.
Similarly Benn did not try to fuel the speculation when he was briefly touted as a challenger for Corbyn in the aftermath of that Syria speech. The next day he shrugged off the acclaim for his oratory, telling the media pack his thoughts and prayers were with the “brave men and women of the Royal Air Force”, and began the process of trying to ratchet down the noise around his role.
St Hilary? Of course not. Most politicians need an element of cunning simply to survive but the suggestion that Benn covets Corbyn’s job seems far-fetched. At the height of public interest after his Syria intervention one media outlet described him as Labour’s “leader in waiting”. If that was ever true – which I doubt – then it certainly isn’t today. After the events of the last year the chances of the membership ever picking Benn have shrunk close to zero so neither Corbyn, nor his supporters, should fear him as a rival.
They should tolerate him or even respect him, however, whether through enlightened self-interest or simply self-interest. They could take the view that Labour has always been a broad church – you don’t need reminding that Corbyn rebelled 400 or 500 times against the party whip, depending on the method of estimate – or simply assume that there is no point picking a fight with Benn. As chairman of the new Brexit select committee he has a platform for his views that is likely to confer greater prominence and respect upon him.
Either way, an attempt to de-select Benn would be a waste of time at a moment when Labour is making some progress in try to quell its turmoil. The Opposition needs to focus on fighting the government. It has lost none of its force despite constant repetition to say that our enemies are, and will remain, the Tories.Sisodia has reportedly suspended the school principal and ordered a probe. (Source: Express Archive)
In a surprise inspection recorded on a television camera and tweeted promptly, Deputy Chief Minister and Education Minister Manish Sisodia and his team of officials suspended the principal of the Rajinder Prasad Secondary Sarvodaya School at President’s Estate.
Fake recipts for purchase of thousands every month, nothing was purchased. Principle under scanner for scam. pic.twitter.com/Alt3cbya8C — Ashutosh Mishra (@ashu3page) April 15, 2015
In a surprise inspection recorded on a television camera and tweeted promptly, Deputy Chief Minister and Education Minister Manish Sisodia and his team of officials suspended the principal of the Rajinder Prasad Secondary Sarvodaya School at President’s Estate.
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Sisodia came down heavily on the principal Vishan Lal after finding that the school allegedly maintained fake bills for training students in food processing when there was no food-processing laboratory in the school.
Following his visit, Sisodia ordered the suspension of Lal and termination of the services of a guest teacher who taught food processing.
Government officials said the visit was conducted after the government received a complaint against the school. Sisodia referred the case to the anti-corruption branch for filing an FIR.
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A TV news camera followed Sisodia to the school. He is seen examining the school’s record book and reprimanding the principal for irregularities.
“Do you know that you have been eating out of children’s share? You are making a mockery of education,” Sisodia is heard saying in the TV footage.
Sisodia was accompanied by senior officials including secretary to the deputy chief minister. Government officials said that it was found that no laboratory existed in the school for providing this training and the students told the minister that they had virtually never been given any information about the subject.
Scrutiny of the bills, however, showed that in the name of practicals, fake bills showing purchases of chicken, mutton, olive oil, potatoes and rice were regularly raised.
When questioned, the principal is seen telling Sisodia, “Bachche kisi ke sage nahi hain (Children are loyal to no one).”
Sisodia then lost his cool and chided the principal, “Aapko sharam aani chahiye. Aap principal hain (You should be ashamed of yourself. Are you really the principal)?”
The principal also told Sisodia that he had made the school “number one” but Sisodia retorted saying that the school was “number one in corruption”.
Between 11.44 am and 12.50 pm, seven tweets about the surprise inspection were posted from Sisodia’s twitter handle @msisodia. The tweets contained photographs and the minister’s observations of the school visit.
A government official said that bills produced by the school showed several discrepancies. “The bills were found to have been raised from shops in places like Seemapuri, Trilokpuri, Jahangirpuri for the school situated in central Delhi. There is no mention of the goods purchased in the stock register of the school and no TIN (Taxpayer Identification Numbers) were mentioned.
During the inspection it was found that fake bills appeared to have been prepared in a hurry, in which the amount of purchases done against the quantity mentioned did not tally in many bills,” a government official said.
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The minister and government officials also found that account books of the school showed salary payments to five safai karmacharis, but only one karmachari was on duty. The safai karamchari on duty told the minister that he was paid only half the amount of what he was asked to sign on papers, government officials claimed.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption IndyCamp protestors evicted from Scottish Parliament land
Independence campaigners who held a vigil outside the Scottish Parliament for 11 months have been evicted.
The IndyCamp group set up at Holyrood in November 2015, but were taken to court by parliament and served with an order to quit the site.
The camp applied for leave to appeal in the UK Supreme Court, but the eviction order remained valid in the meantime.
Fences were put up around the site and caravans towed away after parliament said it had been left "no option".
The eviction was enforced by messengers-at-arms on Friday morning, 343 days after the vigil began.
It follows a lengthy and often colourful legal battle between the camp and the parliament's corporate body, which the campers have vowed to continue.
They claim they were not given a fair hearing in their Inner House appeal case, and have applied to challenge it in the UK's highest courts.
The camp was set up on the edge of the Holyrood campus almost a year ago, with the goal of staying in place until Scotland becomes independent.
But the parliament's corporate body took legal action, arguing the group was taking up space others could be using for an indefinite period, and endangering the neutrality of the parliamentary estate.
As the site was being cleared, camp veteran Dean Halliday told BBC Scotland: "There was a big bang at the door.
"We were lying sleeping, opened the door to lots and lots of police officers in high viz vests, sheriff's officers, people in suits. It was really rather intimidating.
"We put an appeal in yesterday - I myself lodged the papers at the Supreme Court. What happened to due process?"
Rights 'violated'
Fellow campaigner Garry Mitchell said: "The Scottish Parliament insist they're going to look after people's human rights, and make them forefront - well where are our rights? Clearly brushed aside.
"This helps our appeal all the more. They've violated every right we have."
The Scottish Parliament previously said its "clear preference" was for the campers to leave voluntarily.
However, it obtained an order to have the camp removed, which could be enforced regardless of the latest move for an appeal.
A spokesman said: "The Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body (SPCB) have consistently requested that the protesters respect the judgement of the court and leave the Parliament estate peacefully and of their own accord.
"As a result of their continued refusal to do, the SPCB had no option but to have the camp removed.
"The SPCB has followed due process throughout this action. The order granted by the Court of Session to remove the camp remained valid and enforceable regardless of whether leave was sought for an appeal to the Supreme Court and the parliament was entitled to enforce it following the repeated refusal of the protesters to remove the camp voluntarily."SOFIA, Bulgaria — The fall of the Berlin Wall rocked Bulgaria in 1989, so much so that the small Balkan republic is still recovering from a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder.
While Germans celebrate the 20th anniversary of the wall's fall, and Czechs and Poles toast the Velvet Revolution and Solidarity, most Bulgarians are likely to treat Nov. 9 as just another day. No grand festivities are scheduled in the capital, Sofia.
The lack of cheer reflects a lack of closure, said experts. Once the Soviet Union’s closest ally in Europe, Bulgaria today is the poorest member of the European Union — a trajectory Bulgarians discuss with a mix of pride and resignation. There is a sense the country has come a long way since the collapse of communism but still isn’t enjoying all the fruits of democracy.
“It’s gloomy,” said Ognian Shentov, chairman of the Center for the Study of Democracy, a Sofia-based think tank. “There is a depressing feeling the transition is not over. There is reform fatigue. Maybe in five years we can celebrate the 25-year anniversary in a better way. But now, probably. we need more time to reflect.”
Bulgaria has been slow to slough off its communist past. Unlike Germany, where the Berlin Wall’s destruction made a clean break between past and present, and neighboring Romania, where a firing squad ended the communist era by executing party boss Nicolae Ceausescu, Bulgarian dictator Todor Zhivkov was ousted quietly in a palace coup on Nov. 10, 1989.
“It was not a revolution that brought Zhivkov down. It was just news on the radio,” said Diana Ivanova, an activist who oversees the nonprofit I Lived Socialism project, a website that collects Bulgarians’ personal recollections of life behind the Iron Curtain.
The communist functionaries who unseated Zhivkov were in and out of power until 1997, when their inept handling of the economy drove crowds into the streets to demand greater change. For the next decade, Ivanova said, Bulgarians largely kept silent about communism, focusing on rebuilding their shattered economy and their successful applications to join NATO in 2004 and the EU in 2007.
As a result, unlike other former Warsaw Pact countries, Bulgaria has never held a vibrant public discussion on the communist era. “We just know part of the story,” said Ivanova. “We don’t know how the people felt. Nobody actually asked them how they felt. This is for me a missing point.”
A commission to declassify Bulgaria’s state security services’ archives began its work in earnest only two years ago, much later than other Eastern Bloc countries. While the commission has triggered minor scandals by exposing politicians as former collaborators, including sitting President Georgi Parvanov, bureaucratic roadblocks hinder complete access to the files.
Recent leaders have given Bulgaria little to cheer about, too. Successive governments have failed to tackle important reforms, such as improving the judicial system and curbing corruption.
Last year, the EU suspended around 430 million euros ($600 million) in aid to Bulgaria because no one could account for how the money was spent. The suspension occurred after years of warnings from Brussels about Bulgaria’s failure to nab high-profile, alleged mafia bosses, who presumably stole the cash.
Many of those alleged mafia bosses are former communist apparatchiks, further stoking cynicism about 1989, said Vessela Tcherneva, an analyst at the Center for Liberal Strategies, another Sofia think tank. Referred to as “mutri,” or mugs, they have grown rich by exploiting their prior government connections to abscond with public cash and property.
“There is still a very strong notion the 10th of November was a coup engineered by the communist elite for the sake of holding on to their privileges,” Tcherneva said. “The Bulgarian transition has been perceived as something relatively unfair. And rightly so. People don’t really see 1989 as something they have ownership over.”
Paradoxically, the lingering power of ex-communists has generated nostalgia for the certainties of the Soviet era, especially among the so-called “red grandmothers,” or seniors who still view Moscow as Bulgaria’s Slavic cousin and protector.
A recent survey by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project found that 45 percent of Bulgarians viewed Russia’s influence as positive. Bulgaria came second only to Ukraine, which hosts a large Russian population. The same poll found that 62 percent of Bulgarian respondents said life was better under communism.
Of course, some Bulgarians were positive about the gains of the last 20 years. Zhelyu Zhelev, a dissident who served as Bulgaria’s first democratically elected president from 1990 to 1997, said the absence of commemorations at least shows the real will of the people.
“Bulgarians have a little allergy to big manifestations,” Zhelev said. “During socialist times, it was obligatory to go out on the street and demonstrate. Now they don’t.”Share Facebook
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In a mood to change your living room ceiling design? read here to know the areas you can play with under the possible circumstances ( including the theme, backdrops, furniture and space).
1- Slab Ceiling
In case you want to adjust wooden themed living room ceiling, install these overlapping slabs, this look amazing with dim light setting.
2- Patterned Ceiling
If patterns and art is something that allures you, you must check this hypnotic design, as this remains popular choice for small living room decor ideas.
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Retro yet appealing and chic, this type of thai ceiling completes the contemporary interior design of a grand living room.
4- Wood Appeal
If you have wooden furniture and contrasting walls, a tray ceiling of same nature would increase the allure of overall setting. This kind of ceiling with dim lights remain one of the popular ceiling design ideas of the year.
5- Nature Texture
I would call it an ideal choice for those who are closer to nature. you can install a wallpaper or patterned ceiling about the earthy appeals. This is rather newest type of ceiling design ideas for living room.
6- Modern Tray Ceiling
If you want to revamp the look of your living room to a modern one, this type of tray ceiling is going to serve the purpose at best. Light hues and simple lights would contribute in achieving elegance.
7- Tray and Beam Fusion
In case you have a luxury living room, this stylish ceiling should not be missed. This has basics of tray style, while beam style is incorporated to make it highly magnificent. This is going to be an expensive option but the countless compliments from everyone would simply settle the price.
8- Panel Fixed Ceilings
You can have wooden panels fixed within the structure crafted at the ceiling. You can use hanging lights to complete the look. This one would be ideal choice for those who want to change the retro look to modern living room designs.
9- Thin Wooden Drop Ceiling
If simplicity is what appeals you, you must stick to thin, joined wooden ceiling. no hassles, no expense, but beautiful and gorgeous idea for large living rooms.
10- Textured White False Ceilings
In case you want to have nothing but complete white toned living room, you can play around with texture within the plane ceiling. Add hanging lights so that it further beautifies the surrounding.
11- Chinese Style Living Room Ceiling
As the name suggests, drop wooden ceiling is going to rock the look of Chinese style living room. yellow lights, wooden furniture and similar drop net ceiling is going to make the ambiance breath taking.
12- European Style Living Room Ceiling
This style focuses on pure luxury and miraculous appeal, simply depiction of something from the fairy-tale. If you are looking for grandest look for your king size living room, have a pop ceiling design.
13- Chic False Ceiling Design
This ceiling is going to give your setting a hip look. This is one of the simple yet stylish ceiling and living room plans from 2015.
14- Victorian Ceiling
If you like darker rooms, this ceiling plan is going to facilitate your need. With cluttered wooden cove look, this portrays the love for Victorian age.
15- Modern Luxury Ceiling
If your living room is inclined towards modern yet royal looking space, than tray ceiling plan is going to suit it perfectly.
16- State Of Art Ceiling Design
I would call it a disco light resembling look,. Really, in a glace it looks like a wooden circular ball with lights fixed on the ceiling. This is certainly a hot and new trend.
17- White Drop Ceiling
With numerous small lights fixed in the circular path, you can stick to simple tray ceiling design for a small living room.
18- Pop Ceiling Design
Have you looked at this kind of ceiling yet? The pop style remains good choice for small setting.
19- Dual Slab Ceiling
You can split the ceiling into two with center textured panel – this is going to look great for living rooms which has larger windows and proper passage of lights.
20- Textured Tray Ceiling
If you have brighter walls, a plain textured tray ceiling is going to look simply wow.
21- Wavy Effect
How about having a ceiling depicting waves? Tell your interior designer to give your ceiling modern touch. Image Credit
22- Ceramic Top
If white and gold is what you fall for, this patterned ceiling design is going to be your love at first sight.
23- Overlapping Slab Ceiling
Medium sized slabs if placed creatively to design ceiling, it can change the look of overall adobe.
24- Egyptian Style Ceiling
Looking for cooper or brown tone ceiling ideas? This sophisticated and chic style ceiling is going to rock your spacious living room; it certainly adds the luxury element. Image Credit homecaprice.com
25- Tiled Ceiling
With luxury tiles assembled around a small marble box fixed with lights, you can get contemporary appeal for your living room.And What It Means for Online Education
Background: University’s Online Courses Deemed Inaccessible
On August 30, 2016, the Department of Justice informed University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) that large segments of UC Berkeley’s free, publicly available online content was not accessible to individuals with hearing, vision, or manual disabilities. The DOJ’s letter to university administration stated that UC Berkeley’s courses were in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which prohibits discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities by public entities.
UC Berkeley’s experience with making online content accessible to people with disabilities is not unique. In recent years, many universities have been making learning available on the web, most popularly through MOOCs, massive open online courses, which often attempt to translate the experience of taking college classes to a format available through web browsers and other online formats. In addition to offering web-based education to the public, universities use the web to augment traditional courses through assignments, additional reading, online quizzes, lecture supplements, and other ways in which university lecturers can add dimensions beyond the traditional classroom lecture or laboratory experience.
Berkeley Web Accessibility Response Cites Expense, Lack of Clarity—and Garners Criticism
UC Berkeley responded to the DOJ by stating that, in the “absence of clear regulatory guidance,” it attempted to bring free online content to the public; but given the “extremely expensive measures” that would be required to continue to make these resources available to the public, they now “must strongly consider the unenviable option” of removing the free, online content from public access.
Many commentators (including the Cato Institute and Simple Justice: A Criminal Defense Blog) latched onto UC Berkeley’s reasoning and suggested that the DOJ, in its effort to make everything perfect, was the enemy of the good. Was it worth the many losing free access to Berkeley’s courses, just because they weren’t available to the few?
Web accessibility consultant Karl Groves had one of the more direct responses to Berkeley’s threat to simply remove the courses rather than make them accessible. Groves points out, in rather powerful language, that there is a long history of web-accessibility-related litigation and settlements and if Berkeley did not know this and made online content available without making it accessible, “ |
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'Essentially, the different platforms give birth to innovation, and innovation is the thing that actually disrupts the market' – Eric lim
What to do
Farrall recommends four key elements for companies seeking to respond. The first is acknowledgement at executive-suite level of the threat of digital disruption and a commitment to react; the second is a focus on the customer or citizen and understanding how they want to interact with your business; the third is investing in digital specialists who can work within organisations but also change their culture.
"And finally, continuous improvement – you can't just build an app or do a social media project and declare victory," Farrall says. "You have to constantly be driving innovation and looking at the landscape in order to keep up with digital disruption."
Farrall also advocates a two-speed technology approach for business; one that ensures an agile digital front-end platform for app creation, social media activity and the like while maintaining a secure core system where data resides.
"That is the best construct we've seen that allows businesses to really secure their data and their core systems while innovating and keeping up with customer expectations," Farrall says.
Future shocks
One major question that has arisen out of Lim, Kazan and Tan's paper is whether there is an optimal digital platform configuration that could fend off potential disruptors. Lim says there is no clear answer at the moment, but that drawing attention to the different layers is a good first step towards success.
He says having a strong understanding of the different dimensions of platforms can help a business anticipate innovation – and respond to it.
"Essentially, the different platforms give birth to innovation … and innovation is the thing that actually disrupts the market."The news came halfway through the protest rally that prosecutors in Alberta would file an appeal in the Cindy Gladue murder case, and the crowd shouted with relief. No one can know yet what the outcome of that appeal will be, but it seemed, for a minute, that another bit of humanity had been restored to her. Too late for her, of course, but a comfort perhaps for her family, and for the people who had gathered in her name.
The goal of the afternoon protest in Toronto – and others like it in 20 cities around the country – was to make Ms. Gladue whole in memory, so that she was an individual, not just another sex worker, a person so dehumanized that her preserved vagina was presented as evidence in an Edmonton courtroom. The goal was to make sure there aren't any more Cindy Gladues.
Right now, what the country knows about her is a collection of details that provide the outline of a death, but not a life. We know that she was 36 and a mother of three when she was found bleeding to death in an Edmonton hotel bathtub in June, 2011. We know that there was an 11-centimetre wound to her vagina, which was either caused by a sharp instrument, as the Crown argued, or by blunt trauma resulting from "rough" but consensual intercourse with the man accused and acquitted of her murder, Bradley Barton. That's a meaningless number, 11 centimetres, until you go look it up. I did, on a tape measure. It's not meaningless any more.
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Those are the bare numbers of a life that has been reduced, in the public mind, to unresolved degradation and violence. Too many aboriginal women in this country have suffered similar fates. There was a person behind those numbers, behind that horrifying death and posthumous humiliation, and Cindy's mother Donna wanted people to know. She released a statement about her daughter, which was read at the rally by Audrey Huntley of the No More Silence coalition.
Cindy was born in Athabasca, Alta., on July 23, the oldest of four siblings. She was jealous of her little brother when he arrived, because she didn't want to share her mother's attention. She grew up loving cooking shows and her grandmother, and couldn't understand her mother's fondness for bingo. In Donna's words – and you can hear the echo of mothers everywhere – "she was a kind-hearted person who would help you any way she could."
According to her mother, "she started to hang around with the wrong crowd." Donna stepped in to help raise Cindy's three daughters, "because that's what moms are for, to help your children." Those children are without a mother now, and Donna is without a daughter: "Losing my daughter Cindy was the hardest thing I've ever had to go through."
Those details add up, and begin to offer a picture of a woman who had been reduced to body parts – in fact, reduced to one body part. The symbolism is too cruel, but perhaps not surprising for a system that dehumanizes sex workers and victims of sexual violence in general. Imagine if the victim in this trial had been an accountant, or a dentist. Would her vagina have been presented as evidence? And if you're thinking, "Accountants and dentists wouldn't have been in this position," think again. Women of all ages, professions and backgrounds are victims of sexual violence. What Ms. Gladue did for a living makes no difference when considering what happened to her.
At the rally, Christa Big Canoe, a lawyer with Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto, put in words what many of us were thinking and couldn't quite articulate: "If you set aside the shock of the verdict in Cindy Gladue's murder trial, you're still left with the horrific fact that a court in Canada allowed the most intimate part of a woman's body to be exhibited in a jury trial. … Cindy was a human being. She was a human being regardless of her profession. Her remains belong to a human being, and they had no place [as] evidence in a Canadian justice system."
Ms. Big Canoe noted that the tissue used in evidence at the trial still hasn't been reunited with Ms. Gladue's body. She hasn't been served justice, and she still isn't whole. Maybe you have to be a woman to understand how debasing this is. Really, you should only have to be human.About a year ago, University of Illinois researcher John Rogers revealed a pretty amazing creation : a circuit that, rather than living on an inflexible board, could stick to and move with someone’s skin just like an ink stamp. But like any early research, it was mostly a proof-of-concept, and it would require relatively expensive, custom-printed electronics to work.
Today, Rogers, in conjunction with Northwestern University’s Yonggang Huang, has published details on version 2.0 in Science, revealing that this once-esoteric project has more immediate, mass market appeal.
The new product is thicker and more robust than the original circuit, yet it sticks to the skin as easily as a temporary tattoo. Its base layer serves as a flexible, conductive foundation. (Under a microscope, it folds like origami.) Researchers then fitted that base layer with cylindrical supports that can connect to third-party electronic components.
So what’s that mean? It means that you could create a wearable electronic that’s one-part special sticky circuit board, every other part whatever-the-hell-you-manufactured-in-China. This flexible circuit could accommodate a stock battery, an accelerometer, a Wi-Fi chip, and a Bluetooth circuitry, for instance, all living on your skin rather than inside your iPhone. And as an added bonus, it would be relatively cheap.
“One big advantage of commercial chips is that they are very low in cost: total parts costs, even for the multifunctional patch, is a few bucks,” researcher John Rogers explains. “The materials costs for the substrate and the fluid and the interconnects is a few 10s of cents.”
That price matches the longevity, as Rogers tells us the sticky circuits will last hours, maybe a day, before you have to remove them. For now, the team’s research focuses on health care applications. They’ve designed their device as a 24/7 body monitoring patch to be used in tricky field tests like sleep studies, where bulkier hardware is a burden. (As we reported before, Rogers would like to eventually create circuits that can stick to your organs.) Health monitoring is far from a pipe dream. In the researchers’ testing, the sticky circuits measured EKG/EEGs, for instance, with as much accuracy as existing machinery.
Rogers estimates that the technology will hit the market in one and a half to two years, through his commercial venture MC10.Date Wed 24 October 2012 Category geeky. Tags python network
Update 18. Nov 2012: Cleaned up some comments about cores. To make it clear, this will only run on 1 core!
Threading in Python can be confusing in the beginning. Many examples out there are overly complicated so here is another example that I have tried to keep simple.
Here, I want a fast way to ping every host/ip in a list. As fast as we can, threaded, and then at last return a dict with two items. A list of dead nodes, and a list of nodes who answers on ping.
Example:
In [ 1 ]: from pinger import Pinger In [ 2 ]: ping = Pinger () In [ 3 ]: ping. thread_count = 8 In [ 4 ]: ping. hosts = [ '10.0.0.1', '10.0.0.255', '10.0.0.100', 'google.com', 'nonexisting', '*not able to ping!*', '8.8.8.8' ] In [ 5 ]: ping. start () Out [ 5 ]: { 'alive' : [ '10.0.0.255', '10.0.0.1', 'google.com', '8.8.8.8' ], 'dead' : [ '*not able to ping!*', 'nonexisting', '10.0.0.100' ]}
The example above will ping 8 hosts at the time and saving the results to the end. We are using 8 thread_count in this example. Which means that python will have 8 ping command running at the same time.
The whole source of the Pinger class looks like this, read the comments and you will see how it works:That confirmation provided enough incentive for the museum to develop an exhibition on Paul and Hedvika Strnad, as well as their American relatives. The challenge was to transform Hedvika’s drawings into three-dimensional reality.
Image Kathie Bernstein, director of the Jewish Museum Milwaukee, has been involved in the project for more than 15 years. Credit Tom Lynn for The New York Times
In the fall of 2012, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater had done a production of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” giving a special performance at the Jewish museum. The show had required period costumes. So a year later, as work commenced on the Strnad exhibition, Ms. Bernstein and her staff turned to the theater’s costume artists.
Jessica Hartman Jaeger at the repertory theater assigned a dozen people from the costume shop to the task. Over nearly 3,000 hours spread across 10 months, they matched the colors in the drawings; determined the likely fabrics, like rayon and bouclé; extrapolated the sketches into patterns; and assembled the dresses and coats with matching hats and shoes.
To Ms. Jaeger, these looked like clothes meant for fun, similar to what a young woman might have worn for a day of shopping or a movie matinee. Yet all the spunk and verve they exuded stood in contrast to what had befallen the Strnads. Unable to get out of Czechoslovakia because of the United States’ tight restrictions on immigrants and refugees, they were interned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, deported to the Warsaw ghetto and killed without any record.
“I felt so inadequate,” Ms. Jaeger recalled. “You want to do justice to the designer. You want her vision to be realized. But you can’t talk to her about it. And the reason why is tragic.”
Even as the dresses were being made, another piece of history dropped into place. Ms. Gettinger had been searching for the niece who had filed the Yad Vashem form, Brigitte Neumann Rohaczek, and ultimately found her listed in a footnote to a German-language book about the Kindertransport, which had rescued Jewish children. She wrote to the author: No reply.
At about this point, in late 2013, a college student studying abroad in Germany, Tyler Grasee, contacted Ms. Gettinger asking for a summer internship. She put him to work trying to find Ms. Rohaczek. Within weeks, Mr. Grasee had her address and telephone number in Nuremberg.
Mr. Grasee then interviewed Ms. Rohaczek, and from her memory poured palpable details of Hedvika. She liked to be called Hedy; she had red hair; she smoked; she owned a dressmaking shop. Sometimes she had her seamstresses make clothes for Brigitte’s dolls. Ms. Rohaczek also gave the museum a letter from Paul to her father, with a handwritten note from Hedy at the bottom.February 2009, by Britta Gustafson (CC BY-SA)
St. Michael's University Church (at 6586 Picasso Road) is an Episcopal church that describes itself as "an inclusive, welcoming and progressive community", serving both students and local families and other permanent residents. It has a garden, meditation and yoga gatherings, AA meetings, prayer groups, and other community programs. It was established as St. Michael and All Angels Church in 1954 and has an unusual triangular building with a stained glass window, built in 1963.
History
Church house from 1955, one of the oldest buildings in IV. May 2015, by Britta Gustafson (CC BY-SA).
From a Santa Barbara News-Press article on September 24, 1994 ("St. Michael's enjoys 40 years of service in I.V." by Bob Barber), the church "was founded as a mission of Trinity Episcopal Church, Santa Barbara, in the fall of 1954", as the first church near the new UCSB campus, which opened that year (when Isla Vista had a population of about 500 people, mostly low-income people in small cottages). Trinity leaders had bought the property in 1949 for $5,000 as the new campus was being planned, and the church started with a brick chapel and chaplain's house that opened in March 1955.
From St. Michael's University Episcopal Church: Our First 40 Years by Mark Gardner, a church publicationA church publication by Mark Gardner in 1994, St. Michael's University Episcopal Church: Our First 40 Years, says that the Isla Vista Improvement Association started meeting in the brick building in 1955, as one of the few public buildings in IV (pretty much the church and the Isla Vista Market). The Association worked on zoning regulations and planning for the community, and "'...were the same ones who had come out there under economic pressures, squatted on the land, acquired it by tax sales, moved condemned buildings out there and in various ways had landed there by almost illegal means, by they wanted to improve the community.' In the early days the population of Isla Vista was a mix of Anglos and Latinos." (page 10). The first years of the church also included Devereux School students at services (page 11). In 1962-1963, after Goleta's growing military research and development industry brought a lot more families to the congregation, the church built the larger triangular sanctuary.
As more context on the founding of the church, the Wikipedia article about Isla Vista says: "The University of California, Santa Barbara moved to its new campus in 1954...A new, nationally prominent provost, Clark G. Kuebler, was brought in to lead the new campus...charged with developing UCSB into a first-rate, small, liberal arts college to complement the enormous "multiversities" of Berkeley and UCLA. Kuebler was a prominent leader in the Episcopal Church and helped establish Isla Vista's first church, St. Michael and All Angels at Camino Pescadero and Picasso." Kuebler became the UCSB provost in February 1955, but in November 1955 he was accused of soliciting a male undercover police officer in New York City, which was widely reported in the press, and with his reputation ruined, he resigned (described on pages 128-132 in this book).
Also from St. Michael's University Episcopal Church: Our First 40 Years by Mark GardnerThe News-Press article has a summary of some of the church's projects: "St. Michael's Nursery School began in the fall of 1963, after an effort by congregation members led by school director Noreen Price. The school moved away in 1988. St. Michael's and Transition House opened a shelter for the homeless in Isla Vista in 1987 in a house that was moved from the Gaviota area. After the shelter closed in 1991, the building became the pastor's office, education room and site for Sunday child care. In 1971, the original chapel building was converted to Canterbury House, a residence for several Episcopal students (and one Lutheran) and a ministry center. Students meet at the house several times a week for prayer." The "little white house" moved from the Gaviota area in 1987 was originally one of the "dwellings for oil workers...on Atlantic-Richfield Co. property about three miles north of Winchester Canyon", and Caltrans required cutting in half to move it along the freeway (pages 47-48 of St. Michael's University Episcopal Church: Our First 40 Years). By the 1980s, Friendship Manor residents had also become part of the congregation (page 50).
The church has gone through a number of shifts in the proportions of permanent resident members and student members; in 1983 it renamed itself from St. Michael and All Angels Church to St. Michael's University Church as part of a shift toward focusing on students (page 42).
Architecture
1980 edition of Santa Barbara Architecture, page 248
May 2015, by Britta Gustafson (CC BY-SA)
The News-Press article says "The church was designed, according to Pastor Mark, to resemble the tent the Israelites pitched to house the presence of the Lord during their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. "The community of St. Michael's is composed of Bedouins, nomads who migrate here for a time and pitch their tents...Like Bedouins, we must be a people of great hospitality to the stranger.""
The book Santa Barbara Architecture features the 1963 church building as an example of Woodsy Style, on page 248 of the 1980 edition (with the Geodesic Dome House on the next page). It lists the architect as Carleton Winslow, Jr., whose father, Carleton Winslow Sr., was a prominent architect in Southern California. The book's description of the building: "The upward thrust of the triangular interior is accentuated by white structural I-beams, and softened by a wood-slatted ceiling. The contrast of the high, jutting roof peak to the falling roofline makes this seemingly simple building quite complex. The stained glass altar wall is the visitor's introduction to the church."
This is the interior with white structural beams and wood slats, as seen from outside the back windows:
October 2012, by Britta Gustafson (CC BY-SA)
November 2011, by Britta Gustafson (CC BY-SA)From the News-Press article: "The 70-foot-wide clear glass at the entrance symbolizes St. Michael's openness to the university, the pastor says. The 37-foot-high stained glass window (recently damaged by a vandal) was designed by Vern Swanson, former curator of education at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art." Vern Swanson (also spelled Vern Swansen) has a painting in the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art and archives at Alpha Rho Chi at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
More about the window from St. Michael's University Episcopal Church: Our First 40 Years: "The window was assembled by the John Wallis Glass Studio of Los Angeles. Among the images of St. Michael combined in the abstract design are his jeweled crown, the trodden serpent, a pair of wings, a cross with a circle in the middle of it, and scales (Michael was said to be the weigher of departed souls). The glass was produced by the Cathedral Glass People of Indiana" (pages 18-19).
The chancel (altar area) was renovated in the early 1980s to have less of a concrete "bunker" feel and have more flexible furniture arrangements, with a new organ "from a mission in Los Angeles, Mt. Calvary on Slausen Avenue, which closed" (page 44).
The courtyard "space bell"
November 2011, by Britta Gustafson (CC BY-SA)
The story of the bell in the courtyard, from pages 20-21 of St. Michael's University Episcopal Church: Our First 40 Years:
On May 6, 1961, the congregation dedicated its "space bell" at an afternoon service. The bell actually was part of an Atlas missile titanium gas reservoir that received a slight dimensional imperfection during its manufacture by Arcturus Manufacturing Co. According to Sidney V. Petertyl, member of the Bishop's Committee and the person who arranged for St. Michael's to obtain the bell, one of the company's executives happened to give the missile part a "swift kick" as it was being loaded on a truck to be taken to the scrap metal heap. The kick revealed "its magnificent bell tone."
"The truck drove away empty, and Mr. McCormick (the executive) went home that night with a well-scuffed shoe and a determination to get some expert opinions as to whether his rejected missile forging would qualify for a church bell. He was directed to the famous stained glass studio of Horace Judson in Los Angeles, and there, after a shoe-scuffing, fist-bruising audition, the rejected forging was enthusiastically promoted to being a church bell."
The bell was christened "The Prophet Isaiah" during the dedication ceremony. The bell was seen as a modern-day sword-being-turned-into-plowshare story, especially appropriate because of the church's proximity to Vandenberg Air Force Base. The addition of the bell reflected the research and development industry's growing influence on St. Michael's. (Petertyl was an engineer with Servo-mechanisms in Goleta.)
Here is a short video of what the bell sounds like.
Context
From an article about a Winslow Jr. church in Los Angeles County that was built in 1959 and destroyed in 2014, relevant to St. Michael's as well: "As a building type, houses of worship underwent significant transformation during the postwar era with both religious organizations and architects embracing new forms and building materials to express ancient concepts." "The often simplified designs of modernism that eschewed extraneous decorative detailing were particularly attractive to parishes with limited budgets, whereas traditional designs with decorative detailing could be cost prohibitive."
Also from that article, about this architect in particular: "Carleton Winslow, Jr., while not as well-known as his architect father, was a skilled local architect who specialized in ecclesiastical design...Winslow was a proponent of modern design for houses of worship...Architecturally, Winslow’s modern churches are emblematic of the modernism embraced in greater postwar Los Angeles."
St. Michael's is one of two angular modern 1960s church buildings in Isla Vista; the other is the United Methodist Church a few blocks away.
LinksFans that have been in attendance for recent Nashville Predators home games (and as far back to the Rookie Development Camp scrimmage in July), have probably noticed a new song ringing through the Bridgestone Arena speakers when the home team scores a goal.
For as long as the Preds have called Nashville home, Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2” has been played as the team’s goal song, becoming a familiar tune through 16 years of regular-season and playoff hockey. However, starting in the 2014-15 season, the Nashville Predators will no longer use Glitter’s work in the building.
Why, fans may ask, has a song that was so beloved by fans, been taken away?
In June, for the second time in less than 15 years, “Rock and Roll Part 2’s” author and performer, Gary Glitter, was arrested for sex crimes against children. Previously convicted for similar offenses in 1999 that led to more than three years in prison, Glitter is currently awaiting trial on eight new charges.
Every time the Nashville Predators scored a goal and “Rock and Roll Part 2” played in the building, Glitter would receive royalties from the song usage. Additionally, for several years, fans have requested the Predators move toward banning Glitter from the building, like virtually every other pro sports franchise.
“In Smashville, we’re passionate about establishing traditions that the fans love, but sometimes those traditions must change because of outside circumstances beyond our control,” Nashville Predators President and COO Sean Henry said. “In good conscience, we couldn’t continue to align ourselves with ‘Rock and Roll Part 2’ and through these outside circumstances we have chosen to alter our song and build upon our tradition of incorporating more of ‘Nashville’ into our goal celebration, building and our team.”
Beginning in the 2014-15 preseason, the Preds officially rolled out a new goal song, “Gold on the Ceiling,” by The Black Keys, a group that calls Nashville home, to follow Tim McGraw’s special edition of “I Like It, I Love It.”
Choosing a song by a group that calls Music City home continues to build on the Preds’ tradition of “bringing the outside in,” by incorporating the musicians and artists that make Nashville a great city, into Nashville’s hockey atmosphere. In addition to The Black Keys and “Gold on the Ceiling,” the Predators have also premiered a brand-new song written by Charlie Daniels to be played following victories and continue to welcome new and upcoming artists as well as veteran performers onto the Ford Band Stage throughout the season.
While the exact song has changed, fans are encouraged to join in with “Gold on the Ceiling” and fill Bridgestone Arena with familiar taunting chants raining down and intimidating opponents. As any resident or visitor of Music City can understand, the change of song has necessitated a bit of a change in lyrics and timing, but before long, the new chant will be a familiar sound at 501 Broadway.China on Saturday restated its claims to the disputed islands and in a statement demanded an apology and compensation. “Such an act seriously infringed upon China’s territorial sovereignty and violated the human rights of Chinese citizens,” the statement said.
At the outset, Japan had made an uncharacteristic display of political backbone by detaining the captain, when in the past it had simply chased away Chinese vessels that approached too close to the islands, which are claimed by both countries but administered by Japan. Apparently angered by a rising number of incursions by Chinese fishing boats in recent years, Tokyo initially appeared determined to demonstrate to Beijing its control of the islands, analysts and diplomats said.
Instead, the move unleashed a furious diplomatic assault from China. Beijing cut off ministerial-level talks on issues like joint energy development, and curtailed visits to Japan by Chinese tourists. The fact that the detention took around the anniversary of Japan’s 1931 invasion of northeast China, spurred scattered street protests and calls by nationalistic Chinese bloggers to take a firm stand against Tokyo.
In recent days, China stepped up its intimidation. Chinese customs officials appeared to block crucial exports to Japan of rare earths, which are metals vital to Japan’s auto and electronics industries. Then on Thursday, four Japanese construction company employees were detained in the Chinese province of Hebei.
In the end, diplomats and analysts said Japan was forced to recognize that taking the next step of charging the captain and putting him on trial would result in a serious deterioration of ties with China, Japan’s biggest trading partner.
“At this point, Japan had only one choice,” said a Western diplomat in Beijing, who spoke on the usual diplomatic condition of anonymity. “It had to charge the captain, or it would have to climb down.”
It chose the latter. On Friday, prosecutors on the island of Ishigaki, where the captain was held, cited diplomatic considerations in their decision to let him go, and suspended their investigation into charges of obstructing officials on duty.
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“Considering the effect on the people of our nation and on China-Japan relations, we decided that it was not appropriate to continue the investigation,” the prosecutors said in a statement.
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Until Japan’s sudden reversal on Friday, the tussle had grown to dominate both nations’ diplomatic agendas, including during the United Nations development summit meeting this week in New York.
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China had refused to meet on the sidelines of the meeting with Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, and instead threatened additional actions if Japan did not release the captain.
The Japanese used the summit meeting to seek American support for its position. They seemed to get it when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told Japan’s new foreign minister, Seiji Maehara, that America’s treaty obligations to defend Japan from foreign attack would include any moves against the islands where the Chinese captain had been arrested.
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The islands, known as Senkaku in Japanese or Diaoyu in Chinese, are also claimed by Taiwan.
The fact that Japan seemed to back down after escalating the situation brought an outpouring of criticism of Mr. Kan, who was re-elected prime minister just two weeks ago. On Friday, members of his own governing Democratic Party joined opposition lawmakers in condemning the decision to release the captain.
“I’m flabbergasted that this was resolved with such a clear diplomatic defeat for Japan,” said Yoshimi Watanabe, leader of the opposition Your Party.
The setback appears likely to raise new concerns about the leadership of the Democrats, who took power in a landslide election victory last year with promises to improve ties within Asia and reduce Japan’s dependence on the United States.
However, the standoff underscored how sentiment in Japan had hardened against China, even in recent months. Ever more frequent movements by Chinese warships into Japanese waters have stirred fears here that fast-growing China will become more aggressive in pushing its territorial claims.
However, there were also growing calls in Japan for a quick resolution to the standoff, particularly by the business community, which has become increasingly reliant on China for trade and investment. On Friday, the president of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Atsushi Saito, told reporters he welcomed the release.
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“As a Japanese, I have mixed feelings about appearing so weak-kneed,” Mr. Saito said, “but realistically speaking, we had to put this problem behind us.”
In China, the captain’s release appeared to be a victory for the leadership, and particularly the prime minister, Mr. Wen. The Communist Party is keen to show itself as defending China’s territorial claims, which enjoy strong emotional support from the Chinese people. China also views itself as geopolitically hemmed in by Japan and other cold war-era American allies as it tries to take its place as a regional power.
Chinese analysts agreed that Japan had appeared to fold, but said Tokyo had no choice if it wanted to avoid a continued escalation with China.
“This was a move that Japan had to make or China would have taken further steps,” said Wang Xiangsui, a foreign policy analyst at the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “Now the two sides can discuss this more calmly.”
Mr. Zhan, the trawler captain, arrived in the Chinese coastal city of Fuzhou at 4 a.m. local time, according to the official Xinhua news agency. He was met at the airport by senior officials from the Foreign Ministry and the Agriculture Ministry, which had chartered a plane to pick him up after his release in Japan.
When the door of the plane opened, Mr. Zhan was carrying flowers and immediately was greeted with hugs by relatives waiting for him, Xinhua reported.
“Being able to return safely this time, I thank the party and government for their care,” Mr. Zhan said. “I also thank the Chinese people for their concern.”While we are increasingly aware of threats to our personal information, the reach of such threats really can be baffling. Who would have guessed that one day your refrigerator may put your identity information at risk? As the Internet of Things’ (IoT) reach continues to grow, so does the need to secure and protect identity and personal information. This is especially true as our cities are getting “smarter” – that is, becoming more connected as our devices “speak” to each other, sending data in real-time.
The range of IoT-connected devices includes everything from convenient smart toasters to life-preserving pacemakers. The ubiquity of these devices – and the accompanying volume of data and its accessibility – is changing how personal information is protected. Devices are becoming more connected, introducing new and unique challenges to privacy and security: an example of which was the recent denial of service attack launched by IoT devices serving as bots. However, users are not always aware of the connected devices’ vulnerabilities or how better to protect themselves against potential threats.
Convenience may drive the adoption of IoT devices, but there should be an awareness and understanding of related privacy and security risks – especially to allow devices and systems that are designed and developed to protect both individual users and the broader ecosystem. This requires a broad understanding of how systems are connected, the threats they face, and ways to integrate risk-mitigating controls. It also requires knowledge about the intersection of the device, the data it produces, and how that data may be accessed -- with the users’ consent!
User authentication and access control lay at the heart of maintaining a convenient, secure, and safe IoT ecosystem. Standards and common frameworks are the building blocks that help to protect users from a device breach. In the rapidly evolving world of cybersecurity, it can be difficult for these documents to maintain pace. To advance this effort, Deloitte[1] has been working with commercial and federal sector clients to help them address these new challenges while identifying new opportunities to promote collaboration and cross-sector insights. This includes working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to enable leading cyber practices to be incorporated into standards and frameworks.
NIST serves as the program office for the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), a US Presidential initiative to develop technologies and market conditions that make online transactions more secure and privacy-enhancing. The NSTIC establishes principles for trusted identities — security, privacy, interoperability, and ease of use — and charts a path for public-private collaboration to deploy innovative identity technologies. The NSTIC’s principles and concepts apply widely to traditional identity and access management use cases, the IoT, and connected smart cities. Further, NIST worked with industry to develop the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), a voluntary security framework to improve cyber practices in critical infrastructure. As more IoT devices are developed and deployed, the scope of critical infrastructure can expand.
Recently, NIST has been supporting the development of standards and frameworks for IoT devices and smart cities through a series of programs and collaborations.
The Cyber-Physical Systems Public Working Group works to accelerate the development and implementation of cyber-physical (“smart”) systems within various sectors of the economy – including “personalized health care, emergency response, traffic flow management, and the electric power generation and delivery.” In May 2016, the group released the Framework for Cyber-Physical Systems.
NIST’s Smart Grid Program focuses on the safe modernization of electric power grids through incorporating information technology “to deliver electricity efficiently, reliably, sustainably, and securely.” Working with partners from government, industry and academia, they are developing the Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability Standards and conducting research to further the smart grid’s development.
The NIST National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) released the draft paper Identity and Access Management for Smart Home Devices in June 2016. This paper is intended to initiate a conversation on authentication and authorization-related challenges in smart homes, as to establish practices for securing these devices.
Further, NIST is part of the international public working group developing the Smart City Framework to establish consensus and leading practices for solutions that address modern cities’ needs.
Timing could not be better, as two key events this week — World Standards Week and Meeting of the Minds — will focus on enabling greater dialogue between stakeholders, which can help advance standards for securing and protecting our increasingly connected world.
World Standards Week convenes standards professionals from a range of sectors for a series of events, with this year’s theme being “Standards Build Trust.” Such collaboration is necessary to develop commercially-viable standards. There are a variety of identity, security, and privacy standards – either existing or being developed – that enable the use of secure, interoperable digital identities and attributes that can be used across security domains, organizational boundaries, and devices. Among the many organizations promoting such standards are the FIDO Alliance, World Wide Web Consortium, OpenID Foundation and Internet Engineering Task Force.
The FIDO Alliance is working to change the nature of online authentication to develop “technical specifications that will define an open, scalable, interoperable set of mechanisms” as to decrease reliance on passwords for authentication. They further this goal by contributing technical specifications to recognized standards development organizations (such as NIST). FIDO could benefit IoT users as their promulgation of biometrics and tokens as authentication factors can reduce the complexity of maintaining multiple credentials for IoT devices.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community developing open standards to “ensure the long-term growth |
? What happened to Anu and Enlil, what has become of the beautiful Goddess “Inanna” Ishtar … The one god, Aten, and what happened to the omnipotent Amun/Amen of Thebes? … Amen, whose name is still echoing in every house of prayers on earth?
How come we fail to recall any of the magnificent epics of Sumer (watch video of the epic of Gilgamesh) or the amazing mythology of Egypt (watch video of the Egyptian creation myth) whereas our kids know the stories of the Hebrew Bible by heart? But then again, if our kids are to be introduced to the myths of ancient Egypt and the epics of Sumer (watch video of the Sumerian creation myth) they won’t feel like they are in a strange land. The stories of Sumer and Egypt will sound so familiar.
… This has long been common knowledge amongst the scholars of history, archeology and anthropology, but I find it extremely necessary today, in the so called information age, to drag it out of the academic realm and expose it in the open before the public eyes.
Why do we remember and celebrate legendary figures like David and Solomon who had no (actual) bearing on the human course of history, while we hardly recognize the enormous impact historical figures like Akhenaten or Hammurabi had on how we today come to define monotheism and the rule of law. (Watch video of Hammurabi’s code of laws, some of which are echoed in Moses’s commandments)
But then, what do we, men of modern times, know or even care? … We were only told that in the beginning was the word. But according to history … it wasn’t. In the beginning, was the river – the Nile in Egypt and Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia.
The river and its fertile delta granted the Egyptians and the Sumerians not only the stability and prosperity but also the time to contemplate life and beyond. This is how ancient mythology and spirituality kicked off and evolved.
Unlike the desert culture of violent conflict and raids, cultivating the land required communal work that had to follow social norms and values based on collaboration. This was the dawn of social conscience. Man’s first moral code of conduct was not handed down to him on some clay tablet; rather it was an outcome of his early social experiences that were based on cooperation and not on aggression.
The Egyptian/Mesopotamian communities of farmers were highly influenced by the dynamics of the river. The ebb and flow of their rivers made the Egyptian and Mesopotamian farmers think of life as a (repeated) cycle of birth, decay and rebirth again. This was man’s first vestiges of religious thinking.
But does that mean that non-agricultural communities were not religious? To answer that question, we first have to differentiate between religion and rituals. Most primitive communities, e.g., nomadic tribes like the Hebrews, had their local deities, as gods of war and fertility.
On the other hand, a religion in ancient Egypt was not a religion of comfort or beneficence. It was an all-embracing doctrine, like a harmony that was observed by all the players in a big philharmonic orchestra. It was a way of life. These Egyptian and Mesopotamian religions were Mythopoeic. Whereas our world view may be scientific or rational, so we tend to believe, these river civilizations adopted a world view based on myth.
The biggest copyright infringement in history
Now we know that religion, with colossal temples and ziggurats and creation myths, first sprouted along the fertile banks of the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia and the river Nile in Egypt. Then how could we explain the dominance of Judaism, some tribal cult which supposedly originated (centuries later in time) amid the arid terrains of ancient Arabia, over the Egyptian and Sumerian once thriving theologies?
Actually Judaism didn’t, surpass the influence of the Egyptian nor the Sumerian theology; this was a formidably hard task for any nomadic community to aspire for, instead Judaism did it the easy way. As the antiquity era was approaching an end, and as the hieroglyphic and the cuneiform writings were getting extinct, the Hebrews simply stole the Egyptian and the Sumerian thunder.
The Hebrew scribes, whom I presume knew what they were doing, copycatted the famous myths/epics of ancient Egypt and Sumer, in what could be the world’s first and yet the biggest copyright infringement, and stuffed their Bible with them.
The Hebrews as nomadic tribes, and later as tradesmen, were always on the move all over the west coast of ancient Arabia (ancient Incense route) that was bounded to the west by Egypt and to the east by Sumer and Babylon (Mesopotamia). Their constant journeys gave them access to the famous epics and stories/myths of the ancient Near East.
When The Hebrew scribes began to write down some of their old (Arabian) stories, which they never thought would one day be deemed as ‘holy Bible’, it was not an overnight job. Rather, writing the book of Hebrew tales was a lengthy and interrupted process that may have started sometime after the release from Babylonian Captivity (539 BCE) and culminated around the time of the Hellenistic period (332-63 BCE). During that time all of – the so called – Ancient Canaan was virtually an Egyptian province (In my book I reveal how Ancient Palestine was never called Canaan)
While geography was the reason behind the development of the brilliant civilizations of both the Egyptians and the Sumerians, it was on the other side, and ironically enough, the main cause for the Hebrews’ misfortune.
Delivered to the savagery of the clans and Squeezed in a land barren and hostile between the ancient superpowers without any chance of military resistance or evolving further beyond the nomadic/unsettled structure, the Jews turned to metaphysics and began to fantasize.
In an atmosphere of despair and rage, especially after the Romans ruthlessly crushed what was seen as the last Hebrew disobedience (66-70 CE) the Jewish religious megalomaniac Messianic fantasies prospered. The powerlessness of the Jews found an outlet in the myths and invented a glorious national history- something similar to what modern day Zionism did – avenging long years of ostracism and cruelty and dragging their enemy’s names through the dirt.
Actually Judaism first evolved as an Arabian local cult. From the start, according to the ancient Arabian culture, Judaism relied on rabbinical oral laws and teachings (tribal laws in essence)
It was only after the Babylonian Captivity that the Rabbis had thought of writing down their oral teachings. Contrary to the Israelite gloomy depiction of the Captivity, this deportation had been an enlightening experience for the ancient Israelites. Those herds of Israelite Bedouins/nomads for the first time had a rare encounter with a superior urban civilization. The Babylonians were settled urban communities with a unique culture,.e.g., art, architecture, theology and mythology.
This is when the Hebrew scribes, by default or by design, had incorporated many of the ancient Sumerian and Assyrian mythology and blended them into their new book.
In the Bible, the Hebrew scribes unleashed the dagger of malevolence and took a stab at the superpowers of the ancient world, namely Egypt, Sumer and Babylon.
Through a prism of total prejudice and deeply seated grudge the Hebrew scribes wrote, page up and page down, not what really happened in ancient times, but rather what they wished had happened.
So, in their scrolls, the Hebrew scribes depicted Babel (Babylon) as the (hot bed of vice) with its tower in ruin, where in reality it stood 90 meters high, and Egypt as the land of slavery and tyranny, devastated by Yahweh’s gruesome plagues in the aftermath of which Egypt’s Pharaoh and his army drowned, where in fact, Egypt stood, for uninterrupted 3000 years, as one of the ancient world’s superpowers. At that time, something quite weird, that only analytical psychology could explain, started taking place in the Hebrew Bible.
Everything the Israelites desperately longed for (namely a mythology with fascinating stories like that of the Sumerians, a religion with big temples like that of the Egyptians … and yes, a piece of land they could call home like everybody else) the Hebrew scribes made damn sure it was granted to them on the pages of their bible.
And in the process of making up a virtual/counterfactual history for the Israelites, the bible scribes had to simply rewrite the ancient Near Eastern history in a way that would make room for their tribal patriarchs to fit into its history.
Replacing Ziusudra with Noah, Enki with Adam, Sargon of Akkad with Moses, Aten with Yahweh and most importantly Faraon with the King of Egypt, the Hebrew scribes gave the world one of its most inconsistent and dangerous books ever.
In a cunning way, the Hebrew scribes, as they wrote down the scripture of their Bible, had plagiarized the ancient Near Eastern wisdom and claimed it theirs. Copying the ancient and profound Egyptian/Mesopotamian mythology by a bunch of mysterious Hebrew scribes was, from my perspective, the beginning of the deterioration of human religious thinking.
Defaced Monotheism
Unlike the Greek mythology, the ancient Near Eastern mythology was denied, by the demise of the ancient languages and the Hebrew alteration/defacement of its stories the golden opportunity of producing/fostering a European-like renaissance.
The Hebrews, appropriating what otherwise could have stayed as one of the world’s finest myths and theology, have turned it into a completely different thing.
They have molded it into a tribal thing; the universal nature of the Egyptian gods, e.g., Amun, Aten, had been twisted and refashioned to function only as the Hebrews’ own exclusive god, and hence the Hebrews as his own chosen people. And in a way this dominating concept of favoritism/nepotism has, and for the first time in the history of mankind, introduced/nurtured the idea of religious extremism.
Usurping the profound mythology of the ancient Near East by the Israelites, was like snatching the original score of Franz Schubert’s last and unfinished symphony and handing it over to some tribal drum player to finish the job. Need we ponder over the product of such undertaking? … Nothing short of a total catastrophe.
Some will argue that the echoing of the Sumerian and Egyptian myths and beliefs in the Hebrew Bible is but another example of interaction/influence amongst the different cultures of the ancient Near East.
“The literature created by the Sumerians left its deep impress on the Hebrews. To be sure, the Sumerians could not have influenced the Hebrews directly, for they had ceased to exist long before the Hebrew people came into existence. But there is little doubt that the Sumerians had deeply influenced the Canaanites, who preceded the Hebrews in the land that later came to be known as Palestine” pp.143-4, “History Begins at Sumer” Samuel Noah Kramer.
First of all the Israelites had never been in Canaan. North Yemen and South Ancient Arabia is where Israelites’ tribe and their Patriarchs’ stories took place. You could read all about it in my book “Egypt Knew no Pharaohs nor Israelites”
Secondly, of course the Hebrews/Israelites were influenced by the Mesopotamian literature and the Egyptian Theology, but frankly, the Hebrew case was more than just another cultural interaction; it was an act of infringement.
And even if by time, the Sumerian and Egyptian myths had probably turned into anecdotal tales of the distant past, how could we explain the reason/motive why the names of the main characters were extracted out and replaced by Hebrew counterfeits. … Moreover, with all the previous overlooked, how could we forgive the Hebrews’ wickedness of ascribing all this wisdom to their tribal god?
As their scribes were tampering with the history and the mythology of the ancient Near East, and through their ignorance/deceit the Israelites messed up not only with the great stories of Egypt and Sumer but they also damaged the concept of universalism and pluralism that for centuries characterized the religious thinking of the ancient Near East.
As the Hebrew scribes were tramping over the history of the ancient Near East they rewrote/invented a mythical table of nations (sons of Noah) that, at the end, and through a long cycle of selective favoritism, came down and as expected to favoring the sons of Shem (founding myth of modern day Semitism). And hence, the world through the tribal lens of the Israelites was only conceivable as Jews vs. Gentiles. This lingering duality complex that denied the Jews, till this very day, the ability to assimilate anywhere outside the psychological orbit of the tribe.
“Jew and Gentile are two worlds, between you Gentiles and us Jews there lies an unbridgeable gulf…There are two life forces in the world: Jewish and Gentile…I do not believe that this primal difference between Gentile and Jew is reconcilable…” – You Gentiles, page 9, by Maurice Samuel
Contrary to what many may believe the Hebrew bible did invent/create the idea of monotheism, the Egyptian king Akhenaten did that and centuries before Judaism, and as a matter of fact YHWH, the Israelites’ one god had a consort by the name ‘Asherah’ On the other hand, the Sumerian and Egyptian pantheon of gods were pyramidal/hierarchical in a way that was feeding into the concept of one and supreme god presiding over the pantheon – aka Henotheism.
In his famous book, Moses and monotheism, Sigmund Freud concluded that monotheism was not a Jewish but an Egyptian invention, descending from the cult of the Egyptian sun god Aten. Moreover, upon applying his psychoanalysis to the myths/stories of the Hebrew bible, Freud not only argued that Moses was an Egyptian priest but he was also perplexed by how the whole story of Moses/Exodus, according to the oedipal pattern of analysis, was inverted and didn’t make sense the way it had been told. In other words the Hebrew myths/stories didn’t seem original.
Had Freud lived longer, delved deeper into the mythology of the ancient Near East, he would have reached the same startling conclusion about the origin of the Hebrew bible stories, as he did monotheism.
What Judaism actually added to the world’s religious thinking is something totally different and, at the same time, inherently harmful. Through their tribal and somehow shallow collective mentality, the Hebrews had planted the root of religious dogmatism and fanaticism when they allowed for the absurd idea of God’s chosen people to flourish and permeate the religious thinking from then on.
Unfortunately that religious extremism passed on to Christianity, which was supposed to act as a counterbalance to Judaism’s tribal vulgarity, until it reached its worst case in Islam. What good is this kind of monotheism when its adherents, be it Jews, Christians or Muslims, are soaked to the skin in their fundamental belief/illusion that their god is the only true god and hence they are the true sons/believers … and that the others are just deluded people who somehow got lost along the way to salvation.
Dividing the world into Jews and Goyim is simply the Jewish idea of monotheism, or in other words, the Jewish defacement of monotheism which we today and most unfortunately still endure through its long term fallouts. What kind of god, who would favor a particular son and detest/abandon his others.
This was something totally new to the Ancient Near East. May be the Egyptians had their own gods, but that did not prevent them from respecting Babylonian gods like Ishtar or acknowledging their power. Even when Alexander the great or the Greeks, known as Ptolemies, invaded Egypt, they continued to worship the ancient Egyptian gods alongside theirs. And sometimes the ancient gods of the two cultures were combined (Syncretized) in one divinity, as in the brilliant example of the syncretized god, Serapis (half Greek, half Egyptian), who stood in glory for hundreds of years inside the ancient temples of Alexandria and at the gate of its legendary library (later burned down by a mob of early extremist Christians)
Find out how Judaism played a key role in obstructing the world’s ancient wisdom and knowledge and distorting its history. Click this link to download Dr. Ashraf Ezzat’s book ‘Egypt knew no Pharaohs nor Israelites’
Compared to the monotheism of Akhenaten and his god Aten, the prejudiced monotheism of Judaism- based mainly on the principle of nepotism/favoritism- was such a dangerous setback for the ancient religious thinking.
The Aten, contrary to the tribal version of Yahew, was a universal god, a sun disk that stretched out its rays all over the earth and blessed everybody, not just the Egyptians. The Hebrew scribes, in a cheap bid to grant a piece of land to the Israelites, and by default or design, had stripped the mythology of ancient Sumer and the theology of Egypt of its mysticism, universalism and wisdom.
The Talmudic/tribal influence of Judaism on the subsequent Abrahamic religions (Christianity and Islam) weighed heavily on world’s religious evolution and thinking. The former has been since paralyzed and frozen (beyond hope) in medieval times and the latter immersed in dogmatism and violence (beyond redemption)Motorola’s first phone to launch in Europe since the company was acquired by Google will aim to undercut all its rivals on price, the company has revealed.
The much-rumoured, mid-range Moto G launched today at £135, offering a 4.5” screen and Android 4.3, with the promise of an upgrade to the latest version soon.
Dennis Woodside, the chief executive, said typical consumers with £150 to spend on a mobile phone were forced to use software that was two or three generations out of date and ran on cheap hardware. “It’s really a poor experience. That’s a big problem we wanted to go solve,” he claimed.
Mr Woodside said “The Moto G solves that problem for one fifth of the cost of an iPhone 5s. We really built this to compete with the iPhone: it’s got a 25 per cent bigger display than the 5s, Qualcomm’s latest quad processor, 18 different combinations of backs and a guaranteed update to the latest Android experience.”
The 143-gram plastic 3G device offers 329 pixels per inch and a 5MP camera. Like the iPhone 5s, it also offers slow-motion video. Although it comes only with a maximum of 16GB onboard memory, it also offers 50GB of online storage for two years.
The approach follows Google's own strategy of offering 'Nexus' phones with various manufacturers that attempt to offer good Google Android experiences at low prices. The company's platform has been dogged by so-called 'fragmentation', as manufacturers make different size devices using various adaptations of its software. This has discouraged software developers from writing programmes for Android, focusing instead on Apple.
Mr Woodside claimed 10 million Britons would be looking for a smartphone for less than £200, and argued that while the previous Moto X had been focused on American audiences, the Moto G would be the first “truly global” product since Google bought the company that could move the price of mobile phones. “For phones you’ve not seen the benefit of Moore’s Law,” he said. “There’s a handful of players and it’s not to their advantage to see prices fall.”
Forrester analyst Thomas Husson said: "It looks like Moto G will offer a decent deal to target prepay customers in the UK, and some other European countries. However, the brand faces an uphill battle in Europe and it will be interesting to see if Motorola is planning a differentiated marketing campaign. Due to huge smartphone growth expected in emerging markets, Motorola could also leverage the lower cost device to try to re-establish itself in some countries like India."
Buy Motorola Moto G from Amazon.co.ukWe still don't know who the GM of the Angels will be this winter, but it is no matter to me. At least not right now. I've got plans of my own for what the Angels should do. Yes, it is time for me to play pretend and act out what I would do if Arte Moreno completely lost his mind and made me the GM of the Angels.
Though I am tempted to blow the thing up, I can't fathom willing wasting another year of Mike Trout's sublime excellence. I am, however, sick and tired of reckless spending, so there will be no nine-figure deals coming from me. No, sir, I'm going to make this roster younger and do it without significantly raising the payroll in 2014. Hopefully when it is all said and done, the lasting image of the 2014 Angels is a parade down Katella and not an ominous picture of an ill-fated press conference like the one above.
(As always, proposed trades are as fair as I can figure, but I fully realize that I don't know how much opposing teams value their players compared to how I value them.)
Cut the dead weight
First things first, the Angels need to clear some roster and salary flexibility. That means making a few tough decisions and some easy ones. The easy ones are non-tendering Tommy Hanson, J.C. Gutierrez, Chris Nelson and Kevin Jepsen. All four are coming off of terrible seasons and in no way worth the raise they will be due in arbitration.
Less easy is non-tendering Jerome Williams. You could do worse as a swing guy, but there is also no need to pay him $2 million or more. And, yes, that means keeping Blanton as the swing guy instead. I know how terrible he was, but as a long man and spot starter, he can't do that much damage. Besides, the Angels can't continue to pay guys several million bucks to not play for them.
The tough call though is letting Jason Vargas walk. He is a great fit for the team and shouldn't be prohibitively expensive, but if the Halos are going to spend that kind of money, they need to look for a bigger payoff. If that big payoff move falls through, Vargas is a nice fallback option, but nothing more.
Sign Masahiro Tanaka at all costs
This is that big payoff move. The Angel rotation is at great risk. Jered Weaver is great, but his arm has A LOT of mileage on it and it is starting to show. C.J. Wilson was excellent in 2013, but he is also 32 years old. This rotation needs to get young and talented in a hurry. Last time I checked, the farm system isn't going to help with that. That means it is time to get creative and a little bit desperate.
Tanaka is the best young arm on the market. He probably isn't on par with Yu Darvish, but reports indicate that he should be pretty good and ready to go right away. What also helps is that the Angels do have cash to spend but not luxury tax room. They can thus pony up the $30+ million in posting fee (that might be less based on if the posting system changes) and then shell out a six-year deal in the $45-55 million range to land Tanaka. From a luxury tax perspective, they are essentially swapping out Vargas' number for Tanaka and getting the benefit of all that upside.
There is bound to be intense interest in Tanaka though, so if I were GM, I would be fully prepared to spend on him like he is Yu Darvish, even if the talent isn't totally there. Sometimes you have to pay a premium for your own desperation. Seriously, if this doesn't happen, it blows up my whole plan.
Trade Howie Kendrick
Yes, the Angels just got good young pitching in Tanaka, but I'm greedy. I want more. The best way to make that happen is to trade Howie Kendrick. He has the most value out of anyone on the roster not named Mike Trout but a bigger reason is that shedding his salary gives the Angels more flexibility under the luxury tax to sign Mike Trout to an extension this winter or next. It is also fairly certain that Kendrick will return a high quality young arm since he was almost trade for Zach Lee and more at the deadline. Once the Robinson Cano situation settles, the Angels should be able to find a new home for Howie in LA (for Lee), KC (for Ventura maybe) or Toronto (for Sanchez, Stroman or Nolin). Those are just the obvious suitors. The Yankees, Orioles and Nationals could all work their way into the conversation as well. For the purposes of this exercise, let's assume the LA teams consummate the rumored Kendrick for Zach Lee and Chris Withrow deal.
That leaves Grant Green as the starting second baseman. He seems like he should be good enough to hold that position down with his bat, but the glove is more of a concern, so as a corollary to the Kendrick trade, the Angels need to pursue a more reliable veteran back-up infielder. No more of this Brendan Harris crap. That's why I would pursue Willie Bloomquist. He is no defense wizard either, but he can play the entire infield and has shown that he can handle the bat well enough to not be a liability.
Trade Peter Bourjos
This was the toughest decision of them all. The Angels are going to have to trade either Bourjos or Trumbo. Their needs are too great to hold onto them both. Trumbo clearly has more value than Bourjos due to his proven power. Bourjos might've had more value than Trumbo not so long ago, but his rash of injuries have killed much of that. That would mean trading low on Bourjos though, which is obviously less than ideal. Alas, having just unloaded Kendrick, I'm worried about the lineup. Trumbo might be an OBP risk, but his power is essential, especially if Pujols can't get healthy. Bourjos is expendable since Trout can provide comparable defense in center. Additionally, I'm mildly concerned that keeping Bourjos and sticking Trout in left field isn't going to help the cause of keeping Trout in Anaheim for the next decade. Sorry, Petey, you have to go.
Trading Bourjos won't be easy though. While he was coveted a few years ago, the number of teams desperate for a center fielder of his ilk has dwindled rapidly. Fortunately, the Mets still exist. So long as they don't sign Jacoby Ellsbury, they should be overjoyed to get Bourjos. A package involving Vic Black and maybe Zach Lutz as part of the throw poop against the wall to see what sticks strategy of filling the third base hole.
Sign a bench bat
We're close to done, but not quite there. I have one active roster spot left to fill and no, it isn't third base. I am gravely concerned about Albert Pujols being able to stay healthy, Josh Hamilton sucking again, Trumbo staying in his second half slump and Kole Calhoun getting overexposed to lefties. What I want is a right-handed bat with some pop off the bench. Unless Mike Morse is willing to sign a cheap one-year deal, that likely means trolling the non-tender market. Nolan Reimold, Gaby Sanchez, Mark Reynolds and so on. None of them have much upside, but at least they are depth which this team needs because of their lousy farm system. If Casey McGehee is willing to come back from Japan at a reasonable price, he might be worth a gamble since could also help at third base.
Oh, right, third base, huh?
So, yeah, I pretty much am going to punt on third base. For now, anyway. Internally, I've got Willie Bloomquist as the ultimate fallback option, but I'm willing to give the first shot to Luis Jimenez. He may not hit, but he can field the position well and given how bad the Halo defense was last season, I have to prioritize fielding somewhere. I'm not about to hand him the position though. I'll be casting a wide net after the non-tenders come in. Justin Turner, Luis Valbuena and Emilio Bonifacio are all guys who could hit the market and I'll be ready to pounce.
None of these guys are any better than holdovers though. Hopefully that will be good enough to make it to the trade deadline. If the Angels are in contention at that point, there are a number of impending free agent third baseman that they could trade for: Jed Lowrie, Aramis Ramirez, Chase Headley, Pablo Sandoval and so on.
Filling out the bullpen
As big of a problem as the bullpen has been, I'm not too worried about it. The Angels will be getting Sean Burnett back (or at least they should be) and I've acquired a big arm in Vic Black. That leaves two spots to fill out. I'm more than fine doing that from within. Mike Morin and R.J. Alvarez are guys who could be ready come Opening Day and both could have big impacts. They can compete with Michael Kohn and WIthrow or whoever else the Angels acquire in trade. Withrow should win that spot in a walk if that is the deal actually happens. The other spot, I'll open up to all the lefties in the organization. Hopefully Nick Maronde steps up and wins it, but maybe the Halos have to let Michael Roth or Buddy Boshers hold down the fort for a bit. It really doesn't matter, that final bullpen spot is likely to turnover quite a bit anyway.
There you have it, a roster that isn't exactly getting a huge makeover, but it is younger, has better pitching, is only marginally more expensive and primed to return to contention if there big money veterans can rebound. That has always been the case for the 2014 Angels. There is no big, giant move they can make that will transform the franchise any more than Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton regaining at least a large percentage of their old forms. If they don't at least this roster has some more youth to build around going forward.
C – Iannetta
1B – Pujols
2B – Green
3B – Jimenez
SS – Aybar
LF – Hamilton
CF – Trout
RF – Calhoun
DH – Trumbo
Bench C – Conger
Bench IF – Bloomquist
Bench OF – Shuck
Bench UT – G. Sanchez
SP – Weaver
SP – WIlson
SP – Tanaka
SP – Richards
SP – Lee (or whoever they get for Kendrick)
CL – Frieri
RHP – De La Rosa
RHP – Black
LHP – Burnett
LHP – Maronde/Roth/Sisk/Taylor/Boshers
RHP – Withrow/Kohn/Alvarez/Morin/etc.
LONG – BlantonJackson Heights Embraces 78th Street Play Street and Makes It Permanent
“It’s just a street. It’s asphalt. It doesn’t look like anything,” said Jackson Heights resident Donovan Finn of the block of 78th Street between Northern Avenue and 34th Avenue. “But it feels like something.” Finn’s neighbors, it seems, agree.
Two years ago, Jackson Heights residents and City Council Member Daniel Dromm won a hard-fought battle to close the block to traffic for two summer months. Now, 78th Street is being turned over to people 24/7/365, as reported by the Daily News, and it’s on track to receive a bottom-up redesign that will make the new space more than just asphalt.
Turning 78th from a summer play street into a permanent, year-round plaza was a breeze. “It sailed before the community board, with almost no dissenting votes,” said Finn, a member of the Jackson Heights Green Alliance. That’s not because reallocating street space has no detractors in Jackson Heights — it does — but because the hard work of persuasion had already been done, first by hundreds of neighborhood activists and then by the hundreds more who flocked to the new space.
The story of the 78th Street plaza actually goes back to 2008, when local residents concerned with the paucity of park space in the neighborhood managed to turn the block into a play street, but only for half a day on Sundays. When they tried to extend the closure to all of July and August, they encountered pushback from other locals worried about lost parking, nighttime loiterers and rush hour traffic. The transportation committee of Queens Community Board 3 voted down the proposal. It took sustained activism to persuade the full board to change its position.
Around 200 residents marched to the community board in May of 2010, demanding more open space and room for kids to play. At the front of the rally was Dromm, who had campaigned on the issue in the 2009 election, then leafletted neighbors in support of the play street and commissioned a traffic study on its effects.
Other electeds, too, pitched in their support for the summertime street closure. Letters of support from City Council Member Julissa Ferreras, Assembly Member Michael DenDekker, State Senator Jose Peralta, and U.S. Congressman and Queens Democratic Party Chair Joe Crowley were all included in a 30-page packet that play street supporters assembled. For extra effect, they delivered it to each and every community board member at their home address, said Finn.
CB 3 reversed its vote, and now the plaza’s status in the community is an established fact on the ground. “A lot of what it took was just people seeing it in action,” said Finn. “That was the proof.” Skillful management of the play street, including finding artists and local businesses to program the space, helped ensure that it provided the desired benefits to the community.
Moving forward, the Department of Transportation has two designs underway: one to enable the street closure to function year-round while still letting parents at the adjacent Garden School drive and drop off their children on 78th; and a longer-term vision of how the street can be remade as a space that works for people, integrated with Travers Park on one side and the Garden School park on the other. The school will likely be accommodated with a short cul-de-sac for vehicle drop-offs. For the final design, Finn said he hopes to see shade trees and public seating, which are scarce in Travers Park, to attract more senior citizens or anyone who wants to sit and, say, read the Sunday paper.
Though 78th Street isn’t officially a permanent pedestrian plaza yet, it appears that residents have already succeeded in making it a permanent part of the streetscape. “This has been a long, but definitely worth it, battle,” said Finn.Today we want you to get to know the characters of our game a little better.
Horace Oinkstein
Meet our protagonist. A peaceful, educated pig living happily on a low-key farm in the middle of nowhere. Horace, heavily influenced by writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad, believes strongly that every man forges his own destiny (no wonder his favorite poem is Invictus). He has been exploring the secrets of science since he was a piglet. How he acquired the necessary books and equipment remains a mystery. Thanks to his steady and determined demeanor Horace became the unofficial leader of the farm animals and therefore feels responsible for them. Unfortunately he fails to realize what cruel fate awaits him and his comrades – a logic flaw originating from the naive belief of an innocent creature – that such terrors are simply too gruesome to exist. Prepare for a nasty surprise Mr. Oinkstein!
Eggdar Chou
Horace’s best friend. Being a rooster is a full time job, being a rebel rooster with an attitude takes overtime. With so many idiots around and Eggdar being the only one able to enlighten them about their idiocy it’s a wonder he manages to sleep at all. Thankfully, if he misses his sleep he can always recover during this long hours of unconsciousness. Unconciousness? Well, let’s just say weighting as much as a chicken does not bode well in a fight. And with an attitude like Eddgar’s fights come naturally.
Niu Barnes
The Hermit. Chewing grass on a sunny day for hours and hours (and hours) makes a cow think about the meaning of chewing… er… wait… about the meaning of grass… or maybe about the meaning of meaning, was it? Anyway it makes a cow think. And this one got really good in it. If one needed a problem thought through from multiple different angles, this cow would look at it from multiple universe
Mad dog Coll
Imagine hate… Now double it. Whatever the outcome, this dog is looking at it in a rear view mirror. For him despising the world and everybody on it became a skill honed for each moment of his dog’s life (that’s like seven normal moments each time). He has no friends, so what. True wolves are the lone ones and Mad Coll should have been born a wolf. It is only through an unfortunate and unfair chain of events that he is, in fact, a dog. And it makes him mad… All the other animals are quite sure that Coll is harbouring a sinister secret, perhaps a traumatic experience from the past. What could make a happy creature like a dog go so wrong?
Reckon Provorem
Absolute (sic!) chillout master. If zen had a drunk son, this would be Reckon. Life is hard in a forest full of nasty surprises (like hunters, trees to fall from, hunters, trees to bump your head into, and hunters), so one has to take the edge off with a drink… or several for that matter. The only thing to remember is – where are one’s nuts (yes, this is a tribute).
Theodor Cleaver
And finally, our antagonist. Theodore is the kind of man, who pours acid on a beggar’s face for disturbing him. Of course, being around Theodore is disturbing enough. He can be described as the essence of a “glorious lack of sophistication”. Most people are surprised to discover the simplicity of his ways is not due to lack of intelligence. He just can’t be bothered to meet the social standards. Besides rules are for someone else entirely, aren’t they? Farm animals are quite certain that most of his problems originate from the tyrannical demeanor of his unthinkably fat mother.
Hope you like our characters. If you are bored enough you can check who you would be in our game. Also if you have brilliant ideas and a desire to discuss Pigsodus, please subscribe to our subreddit.New Zealand's strong economic growth is placing strains on the environment that threaten to undermine its "clean, green" reputation, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) warned Tuesday.
The South Pacific nation has long marketed itself |
, the Canadian electronics maker has since reached out to police, promising to aid the investigation "in any way [it] can." Although no decision has yet been made to extend law enforcement's powers over social media services, such as Twitter and Facebook, arrests like these seem to indicate a murky free speech future.Following a beta-tester leak, Sony has gone and confirmed that, yes, the long-awaited suspend/resume feature is finally coming to Playstation 4.
Version 2.50, or as Sony is calling it, “Yukimura,” adds the suspend/resume feature, as well as utilizing remote play and share play both at 60FPS, and more.
Here are some of the other new features that fans have been requesting:
Sub-account to Master account Upgrade: Users with a sub-account will now be able to upgrade to a master account directly from their PS4 when they turn 18, removing restrictions for chat, enabling users to fund their own wallet, make purchases and more. Currently, users can upgrade their sub-accounts online at https://account.sonyentertainmentnetwork.com/.
Users with a sub-account will now be able to upgrade to a master account directly from their PS4 when they turn 18, removing restrictions for chat, enabling users to fund their own wallet, make purchases and more. Currently, users can upgrade their sub-accounts online at https://account.sonyentertainmentnetwork.com/. Facebook Friend Search: Gamers globally have jumped into PS4 as a redefined social gaming experience and connecting with friends over the network is a huge part of what makes the PS4 community so special. PlayStation now lets you go even bigger by connecting with your Facebook friends on PS4 using your linked account. Search for Facebook friends who are PlayStation Network members and build on the foundation of Friends you already have in your list.
Gamers globally have jumped into PS4 as a redefined social gaming experience and connecting with friends over the network is a huge part of what makes the PS4 community so special. PlayStation now lets you go even bigger by connecting with your Facebook friends on PS4 using your linked account. Search for Facebook friends who are PlayStation Network members and build on the foundation of Friends you already have in your list. Remote Play & Share Play at 60 FPS: For games that support 60 fps, the ability to customize the frame rate of Remote Play and Share Play will be added with “Yukimura.” Play to your bandwidth strengths and use this option to stream gameplay at 60 or 30 FPS when using Remote Play or Share Play on supported devices.
For games that support 60 fps, the ability to customize the frame rate of Remote Play and Share Play will be added with “Yukimura.” Play to your bandwidth strengths and use this option to stream gameplay at 60 or 30 FPS when using Remote Play or Share Play on supported devices. Accessibility Options: “Yukimura” introduces a wide variety of options to make their PS4 entertainment experience even more accessible. Options include text to speech, enlarged text, bolder fonts, higher contrast UI, zoom for displayed pictures, invert colors on screen and more. Users will also be able to reassign buttons for DualShock 4, making it easier for users with limited manual dexterity or limited reach and strength to play.
“Yukimura” introduces a wide variety of options to make their PS4 entertainment experience even more accessible. Options include text to speech, enlarged text, bolder fonts, higher contrast UI, zoom for displayed pictures, invert colors on screen and more. Users will also be able to reassign buttons for DualShock 4, making it easier for users with limited manual dexterity or limited reach and strength to play. Trophy Improvements: We have received a ton of feedback to improve Trophies. In “Yukimura,” a screenshot will automatically be captured at the moment a Trophy is earned, making it easier than ever for you to share your greatest gaming moments with your friends. We’re also adding more sorting options along with the new ability to remove games from the Trophy list that have 0% completion.
We have received a ton of feedback to improve Trophies. In “Yukimura,” a screenshot will automatically be captured at the moment a Trophy is earned, making it easier than ever for you to share your greatest gaming moments with your friends. We’re also adding more sorting options along with the new ability to remove games from the Trophy list that have 0% completion. Share Video Clips to Dailymotion: When sharing standout PS4 moments via the Share button on DualShock 4, “Yukimura” will allow players to upload directly to Dailymotion.
A release for the Yukimura update hasn’t been confirmed.SFPD Police Car SFPD Police Car Photo: Sarah Ravani / Photo: Sarah Ravani / Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close SFPD officer stabbed the leg in SFO confrontation 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
A San Francisco police officer was hospitalized on Tuesday afternoon after being stabbed in the leg at San Francisco International Airport, apparently by a transient, according to an airport spokesman.
The officer, who was not identified, was responding to reports of a suspicious person walking on the lower level roadway in front of Terminal 1 about 2:30 p.m., said airport spokesman Doug Yakel.
When the officer arrived, the man was inside the baggage claim area. He lunged at the officer with a knife.
The suspect was arrested. The extent of the officer’s injuries was not immediately known, but they were not believed to be life-threatening.
Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.comA three-year surge in anti-abortion measures in more than half the states has altered the landscape for abortion access, with supporters and opponents agreeing that the new restrictions are shutting some clinics, threatening others and making it far more difficult in many regions to obtain the procedure.
Advocates for both sides are preparing for new political campaigns and court battles that could redefine the constitutional limits for curbing the right to abortion set by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and later modifications by the Supreme Court.
On Monday, in a clash that is likely to reach the Supreme Court, a federal appeals court in New Orleans will hear arguments on a Texas requirement that abortion doctors have admitting privileges at local hospitals — a measure that caused one-third of the state’s abortion clinics to close, at least temporarily.
Advocates for abortion rights, taking heart from recent signs in Virginia and New Mexico that proposals for strong or intrusive controls may alienate voters, hope to help unseat some Republican governors this year as well as shore up the Democratic majority in the United States Senate.Even with Toddlers, It’s the Thought that Counts
A reassuring new study finds that even in toddlers, intentions matter more than actions.
If you’re a parent, you probably get bummed if you promise something to your child but can’t come through with it—a Zhou Zhou pet, for instance, or a Tickle-Me Elmo back in the day. And while your child might be a little disappointed that he’s not unwrapping his top request, you don’t need to worry about him thinking badly of you for it: a new study says that even toddlers are able to recognize good intentions in others, and will help people who’ve tried to help them, even if the attempt failed.
In the study from Queen’s University, researchers performed a series of three experiments with 16 toddlers and two actresses to see how the toddlers would react to different behaviors. In one of the experiments, one of the actresses would deliberately refuse to give a child a toy. The other actress would attempt to pass the toy, but accidentally push it out of reach.
When the tables were turned and the actresses asked for the children’s help, 75 percent of them assisted the one who had tried to pass over a toy, even though she’d been unsuccessful. None of them helped the other actress.
So even though the first actress hadn’t actually helped them, they’d realized that she was trying to do something kind, and returned the favor anyway. The study seems to illustrate that intentions are more powerful than actions, even for young children.
“This is the first time anyone has demonstrated that children this young can be selective in their helping,” said Kristen Dunfield, a doctoral student in psychology involved with the study. “Before that, we just knew children helped, and that they helped a lot. In this case, the helpfulness didn’t really change - what changed was who the child was distributing that helpfulness to.”
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DisqusWhen [late al-Qaeda leader] Abu Musab al-Zarqawi tried to find a link between the “distant enemy” and the “near enemy,” his partisans attacked three hotels in the Jordanian capital Amman in 2005. Yet, as Jordanian society was shocked by this incident, any potential favorable social environment for the Zarqawi group — which is viewed as the most radical Salafist jihadist group in Jordan — was annulled. However, the Syrian events that started three years ago are now providing such a favorable environment in light of the increasing everyday difficulties faced by Jordanians, the inefficient political and social reform program, the presence of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees and the sectarian conflict in the region that escalated following Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria.
This new environment in Jordan is probably what pushed the head of the Southern Command (which includes Egypt and Jordan) of Israeli military intelligence to consider, in its recent strategy report, that stability in Jordan is connected to developments in Syria and Iraq. According to this report, Israel expects “a jihadist crescent” to surround and penetrate Jordan. The report shows that Israel is preparing at the intelligence and operational levels for a potential terrorist jihadist penetration into Jordan.
The security of the Jordanian-Syrian border continues to exhaust the Jordanian state’s energy today. The Jordanian border guards carry a double burden to prevent all kinds of infiltration and smuggling. The lack of a single Syrian side to communicate with poses further dilemma. Jordan does not base its choices on the possibility that the Syrian regime will restore its control over its cities and towns. However, it also does not make its decisions based on the Syrian opposition’s progress on the ground because the opposition is not unified.
After a recent incident where Jordan’s air force was forced to destroy Syrian vehicles that attempted to infiltrate the Jordanian border, Jordanian analyst Fahd al-Khaytan said, “We will likely witness cases where the Jordanian army will be forced to carry out proactive operations, and to reposition itself in border areas with Syria, in order to cut off infiltration routes and keep smuggling gangs and radical groups away from border crossings.”
Also, the Syrian government is not currently controlling key oil and gas fields in Hasakah, Deir al-Zour and the Euphrates valley, as these areas are now under the control of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and Jabhat al-Nusra.
This means that the two organizations are selling the oil and smuggling it via Turkey. According to an analysis published by the Carnegie Endowment, “The scale of oil production in rebel areas is difficult to gauge. Given the damaged infrastructure and the lack of pipelines to serve the new trading routes, crude output is unlikely to be more than 20,000 barrels per day. However, even assuming a significant discount from world market prices, this could correspond to revenues of some $50 million per month.”
In comparing the various Syrian borders, it appears that the Jordanian-Syrian border (375 kilometers) is the most controlled in comparison with the Iraqi-Syrian border (605 kilometers) or the Turkish-Syrian border (900 kilometers). This means that Jordan can feel the danger that threatens the kingdom if it does not take the formation of an Islamic emirate in south Syria or eastern Iraq seriously.
King Abdullah II said in Davos in 2013, “The new Taliban movement, which we will have to deal with, will be in Syria this time.” The king confirmed in this forum that “even if better governments come to power in Damascus, we will still have to keep our borders safe for two or three years in order not to let them [al-Qaeda and the others] infiltrate our territory. [We should protect our border] until they are completely eliminated.”
Moreover, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s winning a third term would most likely infer a burden on Jordan's side of the border with Iraq, in light of the potential protest movement that this victory might generate in Anbar, among other locations.Hello, Ticker
Jinyan Cao Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 19, 2016
Portfolio ticker inside Android Robinhood app
One of the guiding principles the Robinhood’s app engineering teams value above all else is user experience. We believe that a delightful and intuitive user experience helps distinguish our app from the others and highlight the shift from the traditional financial behemoths to the agile mobile-first brokerage that is Robinhood. We are thankful that our UI/UX-driven engineering efforts are well received by both our customers and the industry as a whole, and they resulted in two design awards for our iOS and Android apps in the first year of their respective launches. However, we are not done yet. We constantly look for ways to evolve and refactor our app in the face of new standards and expectations. We search for new open source and framework libraries and tools because we believe that the less code we write and thus need to maintain, the better and more flexible it is for us down the road. We listen to our customers’ suggestions and feedback in order to improve our app. We do all of these while at the same time maintaining the high standards that we set for, and our customers expect from, all of Robinhood engineering.
To this end, Robinhood app engineering teams focus on creating high-performance mobile architectures and UI modules so that our apps run smoothly and efficiently across all devices. One such module that we built pretty early on was the ticker text module, named after the stock price tickers that you normally see on Wall Street. When we were building the ticker module on Android, we had a few main requirements:
High performance: animation should not cause any lag in the UI, particularly during scroll and fling.
Low memory usage: e.g. do not use multiple views underneath.
Easily pluggable: the core logic should be properly encapsulated so the UI module can be easily reused across screens.
Simple, extensible API: very minimal efforts required to redefine how the text is rendered or animated.
Minimum possible Android SDK version requirement
With these goals in mind, we developed the first version of our ticker module and shipped it with our initial Android public release. After a few minor stumbles and some iterations, we are glad to announce that we are offering Ticker to the open source community!Read Story Transcript
What started out as an "annoying" cough, led to the discovery that a tiny toy pylon had been lodged by Paul Baxter's lung for the last four decades.
Baxter, now 50, remembers playing with the pylon when he was around seven years old. But when his doctor sent him for a bronchoscopy in Preston, England a couple years ago, he never imagined he'd find it inside of him. Baxter's doctor pulled the pylon from his bronchi — the passage leading into his right lung.
Baxter is planning on keeping the toy traffic cone as a souvenir, but won't be letting his young grandchildren near it anytime soon. (Paul Baxter) Baxter's case is detailed in a report published this month in The BMJ. It's titled: "An airway traffic jam: a plastic traffic cone masquerading as bronchial carcinoma"
Baxter spoke with As It Happens host Carol Off about the discovery of the pylon. Here is part of their conversation:
What did your doctors think they were dealing with when you first went to see them about this cough of yours?
My doctor just thought it was a chest infection and she just wasn't happy with the rattling noise in me lungs... She thought it was a buildup of mucus. So that's why she sent me for the x-ray, just to I think give myself peace of mind that it was nothing serious.
What did they find in the x-ray?
They couldn't see anything specific but there was like a darkening — like a bit of shadow in me right lung. She wanted to investigate that further. That's why they ended up sending me for the camera down me throat.
"It's literally gone down the wrong pipe, if you will." - Paul Baxter
What did they find?
He said, "Yes. You have got something in your lung." He says, "But I can't reach it." He says, "It's something that's orange in colour and I don't know what it is."
So I had to go back and they put the longer camera down and they managed to grab hold of whatever it was at the bottom of me lung and pull it back out.
It came out of me mouth and it was this little, like, it was a miniature traffic cone that I used to have as a child.
Baxter remembers playing with this pylon when he was a kid. (Courtesty Dr. Mohammed Munavvar) Now normally, you swallow and it goes down into your stomach and passes out in the natural ways. He says, "You probably inhaled a breath and it has gone down with your breath into your lung." It has literally gone down the wrong pipe, if you will.
It was stuck there for 40 years.
Do you remember having a toy like that?
Oh yeah. I do. I do. I used to have all sorts. I had me fire engines, and me police cars, and me normal cars. I used to have all the stuff that a normal boy used to play with.
But you don't remember inhaling one?
No I don't.
So when the doctors pulled out this traffic cone out of your lung, what did they say? How did they react?
We all just started laughing. We couldn't believe it. They never expected anything like that, I obviously didn't expected anything like that.
The doctor said, "Yes, it's not common." He has known things to end up in people's lungs, but they've only been there, for what, a couple years at the most before either they've had to have an operation to have it removed or it comes out naturally. But for something to sit in someone's lungs for four decades, it has never been known.
How's your cough now?
My cough is fine. It was just a normal winter cough — you know what I mean when people get a cold in winter. That's what it was. It was just annoying me. I just wanted some antibiotics to clear it. And that's when it all kicked off.
What are you going to do with it? Are you going to keep it as a souvenir?
I'm just keeping it. It's just in a little pot.
Any kids or grandkids around?
Me grandkids haven't seen it yet. I've kept it away from them. I don't want them to swallow it as well. I'm not passing it on that way.
This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity. For more on this story, listen to our full interview with Paul Baxter.Under the Radar Blog Archives Select Date… January, 2019 December, 2018 November, 2018 October, 2018 September, 2018 August, 2018 July, 2018 June, 2018 May, 2018 April, 2018 March, 2018 February, 2018
Verdicts may be near in Blackwater case
The jury mulling the fate of four former Blackwater guards charged in connection with an alleged massacre of Iraqi civilians in 2007 has given its first sign, amid its fifth week of deliberations, that at least some verdicts could be near.
In a written question Wednesday from the foreman, the jury asked whether a charge of using a firearm in a crime of violence would apply if jurors conclude that one or more of the men committed involuntary manslaughter. The question suggests that the jury is prepared to convict at least one of the three men facing that firearms charge in conjunction with manslaughter charges.
A fourth Blackwater contractor is charged with first-degree murder but does not face the firearms charge because of a procedural quirk.
After a brief hearing Wednesday afternoon, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ruled in favor of the defendants and stated his plan to instruct jurors that involuntary manslaughter doesn't qualify as the kind of violent crime that triggers the weapons enhancement. Jurors are likely unaware of it, but the weapons charge carries a 30-year mandatory minimum sentence.
Prosecutor Paul Martin had asked Lamberth to insert the phrase "or involuntary manslaughter" into the list of charges that could allow the firearms count.
"We aren't asking for much more than three words and a comma," Martin told Lamberth, provoking laughter from defense attorneys because of the dramatic difference in prison time such an adjustment could mean.
Defense lawyers cited cases from various parts of the country holding that crimes like vehicular homicide, assault and drunken driving are not considered crimes of violence even though they can result in injury to a person.
Opening arguments in the case took place in June, nearly seven years after the shootings that left 17 people dead and a score or more injured. Closing arguments came at the end of August.Here at VOOT we are always up for a bit of a chuckle... and recently wrote a letter of complaint to a national biscuit supplier complaining that not enough of their 'Broken Biscuits' were actually broken... Here is our letter - and their rather brilliant (and hilarious) reply......
To: Michael Riley - Freemans Confectionery Supplies
Subject: Broken Biscuits
Dear Michael
I today purchased a box of your ‘broken biscuits’ for a meeting at work.
The meeting was with our Bank Manager and we were hoping to negotiate some favourable terms for an overdraft facility to help us through the ‘credit crunch’.
On opening your biscuits I was horrified to discover that not all of the biscuits were in fact broken, and despite me hastily snapping as many biscuits as I could the damage had already been done. Our Bank Manager has refused our overdraft and cited our ‘biscuit extravagances’ as evidence of our poor business management, claiming that in difficult times there is no shame in serving up broken biscuits or even Wagon Wheels to our visitors.
This is clearly going to impact on our business heavily and I wanted to ask you to please make it more clear on your packaging of the ‘Dunkables’ range that some of the biscuits may indeed not be broken to avoid further potential embarrassment to businesses like us, or even old ladies who may serve them up to family and friends while pleading that the old age pension is still insufficient to cover living costs.
Kind regards
Nigel Short
THE FANTASTIC REPLY FROM FREEMANS CONFECTIONERY...
To: Nigel VOOT
Subject: RE: Broken Biscuits
Dear Mr Short,
WITHOUT PREJUDICE
Thank you for your electronic mail. Prima facie you seem to be making a serious allegation of misrepresentation. On behalf of Freemans Confectionery Supplies I would like to submit my humblest apologies for any discomfort you may have experienced from the circumstances of "the bank manager incident". Whilst you have my sympathy no liability is admitted, no refunds will be entertained and no compensatory damages will flow.
I agree that there are few things less pleasant than having painstakingly engineered low expectations into a third party - circumstances conspire to render them pleasantly surprised by the quality (or quantity) of your offering. I am minded of similar circumstances arising out of my wedding night. I was, of course, a much younger man then, but I digress.
Short, you sound like a man of the world. Hard headed and to the point so I'll make no bones about it. We pride ourselves here on our low standards of customer service and anyone who imperils that hard won reputation is a danger to the organisation. Accordingly, following an appropriately Stalinesque inquisition we have summarily dismissed the biscuit breaking operative responsible for this outrageous negligence and had them blackballed from any equivalent employment for life. I know one shoudn't be hard on single mothers, especially in the current economic climate (to which you have alluded) but we take strong exception to any breach in our quality standards.
I hope this 'no nonsense' approach is to your liking. I know it won't soften the bank manager's heart but lets face it that was never going to happen. A propos the old folks - what with index linked pensions and cold weather heating allowances we are mollycoddling the old malingerers already. They would be better served by prudently lining their shoes with newspaper rather than spending their leisure hours frittering away their lavish state pensions on bingo and broken biscuits.
Yours faithfully,
Michael Riley
p.s. The giving of Wagon Wheels is now strictly proscribed under Article 12 of the Human Rights Act.Organizers of #ShoutYourAbortion hosted the Monday night event in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision striking down Texas abortion restrictions.
A group gathered in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood Monday evening to celebrate the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down regulations that reduced abortion clinics in Texas.
About a hundred people gathered Monday night, hours after the Supreme Court’s momentous 5-3 ruling, outside Neumos for the hourslong gathering that featured a public-art installation showing images of women who have had abortions.
The event is part of the #ShoutYourAbortion movement to encourage women to tell their abortion stories to personalize and destigmatize the procedure.
Images of dozens of women in T-shirts saying “Everyone knows I had an abortion” were projected onto the music venue’s East Pike Street wall for the installation. Venues in cities across the country, such as Los Angeles and Portland, were set to show the installation Monday night, too.
Amelia Bonow, co-founder of the movement, led the group of Capitol Hill supporters, many of whom held signs at the street corner reading “Abortion is normal” and cheered as she gave emotional testimony.
“Let’s call this what it is — we dodged a bullet,” she said to the crowd of the Supreme Court’s ruling, advising that they use it as momentum for more change. “This decision could have gone either way, which is so devastating.”
Since the ruling, which sided with advocates who said the regulations in Texas were a veiled attempt to make getting an abortion more challenging, local advocates of women’s health and reproductive rights have voiced support.
The rules in Texas required doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and forced clinics to meet stricter standards for outpatient surgery. As a result, many clinics closed, leaving a huge area without a clinic that performs abortions.
“It (the ruling) gives me a little bit more faith in a country at a time I didn’t have faith,” said Liz Speigel, 31, of Seattle’s Beacon Hill, who is one of the women featured in the Capitol Hill art installation.
She initially had some hesitation about joining the effort, she said, thinking she should keep her abortion and experience private. But once she learned about the movement, she felt she could contribute to a larger message by opening up.
“It’s not an easy thing to talk about,” she said.
Seattle writer Lindy West with her friend Bonow created the #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag, which social-media users across the world have adopted.
Stacey Jurss, 33, of Shoreline, who helped take photos for the installation and is also a subject, called participating in the installation cathartic.
She followed through with a pregnancy after being sexually assaulted years ago, but later became pregnant again. At that point, she said, she knew what it took to raise a child and chose abortion.
“I had my daughter and it’s changed my life,” she said. “But I have gratitude that I could decide it.”A relative of a woman killed along with three of her children in Tisdale, Sask., says the suspected killer took photos of the bodies and sent them to the children's biological father.
Cousin Tim Funk said the suspect, Steve O'Shaughnessy, was controlling and jealous of his girlfriend, Latasha Gosling, 27.
Funk told The Canadian Press that O'Shaughnessy used a cellphone to send pictures of Jenika, 8, Landen, 7, and Janayah, 4, to their father.
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When he received them, the man immediately called the RCMP and officers found the bodies of Gosling and her children early Wednesday in a mobile home.
The body of the suspect, who also went by the name Steve Manley, was found in a home in Prince Albert about five hours later. Beside him was a six-month-old girl who wasn't injured.
Mental illness
Relatives of O'Shaughnessy said he had struggled with mental illness for a number of years.
O'Shaughnessy worked in the Saskatchewan oil patch and lived in Tisdale, Nipawin and St. Walburg, CBC News has been told. (Square-pics.com)
He and Gosling had been in a relationship for about three years, according to the dead woman's sister, Laura Goss.
They had been living together in Tisdale. In recent years, he had lived or worked in Nipawin and St. Walburg.
His sister, Selina Siwy, discussed that in an online forum.
"You all don't know the whole story behind the situation," she said. "We have been trying to get him help for years and we thought he was in the clear."
According to posts O'Shaughnessy made on social media, he had worked in the oil patch and had a baby girl with Gosling. It's believed to be the same baby found with him at the home in Prince Albert.
Siwy wrote online that her family loved her brother and Gosling and her children, and are now in a state of shock.
"We loved him then and we love him now," she said in a post on the Square-pic.com website. "We loved Latasha and the kids as our own as well."Story highlights Major interest groups have come out against the House GOP health care bill
They say it rolls back health care options established by Obamacare
Washington (CNN) The nation's leading hospital and doctor groups are lining up against the Republican health care bill, saying they fear millions of Americans will lose coverage.
The influential industry organizations, which helped the Affordable Care Act pass in 2010, are particularly worried about the bill's potential impact on lower-income and vulnerable Americans. These folks have been helped by the law's expansion of Medicaid and its subsides that are more generous for those lower on the income ladder.
The GOP bill would eliminate the funding for Medicaid expansion and curtail federal support for the entire Medicaid program. Also, it would replace the Obamacare subsidies with refundable tax credits that would likely provide less assistance for lower-income policyholders who buy their own coverage.
"It appears that the effort to restructure the Medicaid program will have the effect of making significant reductions in a program that provides services to our most vulnerable populations, and already pays providers significantly less than the cost of providing care," wrote Richard J. Pollack, CEO of the American Hospital Association.
The association voiced concern about the lack of Congressional Budget Office score that would estimate the bill's impact on coverage levels.
Read MoreEveryone likes you, Tim. But they're not sure you know what you're doing. Another senior AOL content executive -- Mike Porath, editor of AOL News -- is leaving the company.
Mike's departure follows on the heels of the exits of Bill Wilson, head of the whole content division, and Mike Rich, who ran AOL Music, Moviefone, et al.
Bill Wilson got canned, but the other departures appear to have been voluntary. In the case of Mike Porath, moreover, uncertainty over AOL's future content direction contributed to the decision.
These departures increase the uncertainty inside the content division, which insiders say is causing concern and confusion among the troops. The root of the problem, say insiders, is that AOL's senior management has not yet articulated a clear content strategy, one in which they explain how all the parts will fit together.
CEO Tim Armstrong has expressed a strong desire to turn AOL into the Time, Inc. of the 21st Century--a content production engine with great premium brands, super search-engine-optimization, a booming local news business, and a revolutionary freelance assignment and management tool that will give voice to thousands of aspiring journalists around the world. Tim has spoken often of AOL's commitment to journalistic excellence as well as its commitment to finally figuring out the sustainable low-cost online content-production and distribution model that is eluding most traditional media companies.
And that sounds good. Insiders believe that Tim's heart is in the right place. They also believe that AOL may eventually be able to cobble its myriad divisions and properties and strategies into a more unified whole.
But there's a huge gap between theory and execution, and right now, AOL's content strategy is a mess.
Saul Hansell: Wait, who am I reporting to this week? The recent executive departures, for example, leave Saul Hansell, head of AOL's content-farm Seed.com, sort of reporting to Dave Mason, the head of a video production company called StudioNow that AOL bought a few months ago. Neither Dave nor Saul have control over AOL's premium sites, which is where much of the content that Seed and StudioNow produce will presumably appear.
The Seed.com content-farm model, meanwhile, is currently only facilitating one aspect of freelance content production, which is advertising assignments and collecting copy. To figure out what assignments to post on Seed, Seed folks have to liaise with the editors of AOL's premium sites, who don't really know how to interact with them. For the copy to actually appear on AOL pages, meanwhile, it needs to be edited, and the editors of AOL's premium sites are currently having to edit it by hand.
AOL's South by Southwest experiment, for example, in which the company set out to interview each of 2,000 rock bands, produced a boatload of copy that the editors of AOL's premium music sites are said to have worked all hours to edit and post over the course of a week. Editing is a big part of the cost of quality content production, so if Seed.com contributors need to be heavily edited, the "low cost" aspect of the production engine won't work.
Then, to make matters worse, Tim Armstrong was quoted as suggesting that the SXSW effort was evidence of AOL's ingrained mediocrity, one in which he had had to personally intervene at the 11th hour to fix. The article apparently caused enough consternation internally that Tim had to hastily call a meeting to tell the troops that he had been misquoted.
Hi there! I'm a Patch editor. I'm the future of AOL! I think. The central tension within the content division seems to be the lack of a clearly articulated strategy. AOLers are not clear whether AOL's Google management intends to pursue a Demand-Media-like content farming strategy, in which editors and writers are perceived as annoyingly-high costs, or a premium content strategy, in which editors and writers are viewed as rare and valuable talent who can build big standalone brands.
If AOL's strategy is the latter, the question is how Seed.com, Patch.com, StudioNow, and AOL's other new content production initiatives will fit into it. At branded publications, editors rule: They assign stories, edit copy, and decide what goes where. One can certainly envision editors using Seed in the normal course of business (as a freelancer-management tool), but it's not clear where this would leave Saul Hansell, a career New York Times veteran who presumably didn't join AOL to run a back-room payment-and-assignment operation.
If Seed, Patch, et al, are the primary engine of AOL's content strategy, on the other hand, where does this leave the expensive editors and writers who are working to develop brands like Fanhouse, Spinner, Engadget, Daily Finance, and other premium properties? If AOL's goal is to spew out thousands of pages of SEO-able content each day--and if AOL's premium advertisers can be persuaded to buy mass-produced dreck for the same prices they pay to buy premium content--why bother to have expensive (and no doubt temperamental) writers and editors on the payroll? Why not be, well, more Google-like about it, fire all the content people, and just invest in algorithms?
And then there's the larger problem: Tim and AOL's senior management have yet to make hard decisions about what to keep and what to dump. AOL is still a grab-bag of mostly unrelated businesses: Mail, MapQuest, ICQ, AIM, blogs, News, Finance, an ad network, a social network, a local news business, a content farm, an ISP, and a portal--all assembled in the service of an ancient online business model that no longer exists. Lack of focus is still a major problem at AOL, and if the company doesn't sharpen its focus quickly, it will continue to be a jack of all trades and a master of none.
AOL does appear to have an opportunity to create the Time, Inc. for the 21st Century. The tools, building blocks, and scale are there. But it's not going to happen without a very clear strategy, one in which each part knows exactly what its role is in the supporting the whole -- and in which everything that doesn't support that strategy is closed or sold.
Until that strategy is in place, AOLers (and investors) will remain uncertain and confused. And AOL will continue to piss away talent, traffic, and opportunity.
Meet the Googlers running AOL →The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) – in coordination with the National Defense Forces (NDF) – has launched a wide-scale offensive at the Prophet Younis Mountains in the Latakia Governorate’s northeastern countryside after enduring a six week long attack by the Islamist rebels to recapture the territory they lost during their first Al-Ghaab Plains offensive in June of 2015.
On Sunday morning, this new Syrian Armed Forces offensive got off to a great start, as the latter was able to capture the hilltops of Tal Al-Madourah, Tal Al-Zi’ytariyah, and Tal ‘Antouz after intense firefights with Harakat Ahrar Al-Sham, the Syrian Al-Qaeda group “Jabhat Al-Nusra” and the Free Syrian Army’s “Coastal Brigades” in the Prophet Younis Mountains of Latakia.
This Syrian Armed Forces offensive was conducted after another failed assault by Harakat Ahrar Al-Sham, Jabhat Al-Nusra, and Liwaa Suqour Al-Ghaab (Al-Ghaab Hawks Brigade) to infiltrate into the Jubb Al-Ahmar area of the Prophet Younis Mountains.
To the west of the Prophet Younis Mountains, the Syrian Arab Army’s Special Forces continued their assault on the FSA-controlled city of Ghannam in northern Latakia, destroying two vehicles belonging to the aforementioned units before they launched another ground assault in the area.
Northeast Latakia has recently become the target for the Syrian Armed Forces, |
that, you have a better chance of the pitcher catching more of the plate, because he doesn’t want to walk you.
If I didn’t get what I wanted, I wasn’t afraid to take. I wasn’t afraid to hit with two strikes, so if I was looking in — and the pitch was away — I was willing to take it for a strike. Going deep into counts is a good thing. I always felt that when the count got to 3-2, it was time for the pitcher to put up or shut up. I had made him work, I had seen most of his pitches, and it was time for him to either make the pitch he wanted, or to make a mistake.
DL: Was there a certain style of pitcher who gave you trouble?
KS: Guys who threw really hard, but I think that’s true with everybody. I hit.300 against Nolan Ryan, but he was tough. He wasn’t comfortable to face and I didn’t hit any home runs against him. Guys who could change speeds very well — especially with a good changeup — and also threw hard, were tough. Guys like Andy Messersmith and Don Sutton were pretty harsh. So was Oil Can Boyd. He had a great changeup. I got my 2,000th hit against Boyd, but his changeup was exemplary. It was one of the best. His motion was exactly the same on his changeup as it was with his fastball.
DL: What was it like to hit against Luis Tiant?
KS: Luis was a challenge. I don’t think I hit him all that well. He had a lot of different pitches. The first time I faced him was in a spring game, in Florida, and the first pitch he threw to me was right over my head. It was, “Welcome to the American League.” That was always in my mind when I faced him.
DL: Were you ever concerned about your strikeout numbers?
KS: No, but there was more of a stigma in those days about striking out. I think there were only two years where I struck out over 100 times, and in one of them I hit the most home runs I ever hit in a year [35]. I also walked over 100 times that season. Over the course of my career, I walked more than I struck out. I take pride in that.
DL: In the eyes of many, you were an underrated player. Who did you play with, or against, who was underrated?
KS: One person who comes to mind is Dwight Evans. First of all, he was probably the best right fielder in the league when we played. He was an excellent fielder. His on-base percentage was good, because he drew a lot of walks. He also hit a lot of home runs, well over 300. I think he was underrated maybe because there were so many star players, including Hall-of-Famers, around him.
I was maybe underrated because I didn’t say too much. I just played. I’ve always said that I’d rather be underrated than underpaid. I used to tell my agent that I felt I was one of the top 5% or 10% of the players in the league and I wanted to be paid that way. He made sure that I was.
DL: Is there anybody playing today who reminds you of Ken Singleton?
KS: Maybe somebody who just retired and will certainly go into the Hall of Fame. That’s Frank Thomas. He hit for power, he hit for average and he drew a lot of walks. He was very disciplined at the plate. I heard my name mentioned in conjunction with his, and that was an honor. I consider myself to have been a good player, but the great players are in the Hall of Fame.The Toronto Raptors were one of the biggest surprises in the NBA last season, and a large portion of that was due to the improve play of shooting guard DeMar DeRozan. Kyle Lowry put up big numbers as well, but there was no doubt that DeRozan shared the No. 1 scoring role with Lowry throughout the entire season.
He has an incredible amount of potential, but will he be able to take the next step towards becoming a star in 2014?
There are some serious concerns surrounding DeRozan’s future as far consistency goes, and he has a lot to improve in when it comes to that aspect of his game. His shooting percentages are a concern as well, and he still needs to improve as a playmaker and defender. That being said, there are also a lot of positive signs that show his improvement.
He raised his scoring average per game from 18.1 points per game to 22.7 last season. That type of rise is very impressive and shows that he has already become one of the most potent scorers in the league.
His overall and 3-point shooting percentages were concerning at 42.9 percent and 30.5 percent respectively, but shooting is something that hard work and good coaching can help fix over time.
Looking at his shooting chart, it isn’t too hard to find what his main issue has been and what has been driving his shooting percentages down. His 3-point shooting has been absolutely awful outside of the corners, and he shoots very low percentages from mid-range as well.
Part of the issue with his mid-range game is that he takes bad shots, and developing a bit more patience and willingness to pass the basketball will help that in a major way.
If DeRozan is looking to take his offense to the next level, he’ll need to improve his mid-range and perimeter shooting. He has the ability to get to the rim nearly at will, and he needs to exploit that ability to the fullest this coming season.
His free-throw percentage was 82.4 percent last year, and that is just one more reason that he needs to attack the basket.
Defensively, he has the ability to be a lockdown type of defense presence but he has a lot of work to do to get there. He ended up averaging 1.1 steals per game, but for a player as athletically gifted as he is, it simply isn’t getting the job done.
There is no denying his speed and quickness, and he is capable of jumping into the passing lanes and using his quickness to make plays defensively. The Raptors have seen him play strong defense at times, and they are going to be pushing him to take the next step on the defensive end of the court.
Perhaps the most needed improvement to his game would be in the playmaking category. He took a step forward by increasing his assist per game numbers by 1.5 last season, but he needs to work even hard at putting his teammates in better positions to score.
After seeing how deadly he was scoring last season, defenses are going to be looking to shut him down and force the ball out of his hands. The best way for him to beat the defense and make them back off of him would be to develop the ability to shred them with his passing ability.
All of that being said, there are a lot of people expecting DeRozan to take the next step of claiming that “star” title that he has been working towards. There is no denying the physical ability that he has to be something special, but he needs to develop a much more all-around game before he reaches his full potential.
He is a hard worker and he has a great coaching staff to work with, and that is what will end up making him take the next step for the Raptors in 2014.
Evan Massey is a Staff Writer for HoopsHabit.com.This is the last page!
When Hazel and I started ARH back in like 2011, we just wanted to make a webcomic. While we always hoped that it would gain a readership like this, we never expected how much it would change our lives, and the lives of so many of its readers.
Since then, we have experienced and grown and seen so much. We have met so many people, made so many friends, and grown as people. Always Raining Here was our first taste at making comics, which we now intend to do for our careers. We want to keep making comics because of this little comic that we started on a whim that snowballed into our first project.
Of course, we wouldn’t have come this far without you guys. Your reaction has made this whole ride more than worth it. Thank you everyone who commented every week, who cried and laughed and frantically made image macros of comic panels, who taped printed photos of characters faces onto body pillows and shopped 4l milk jugs into every frame. Your F5 buttons can rest now!
Always Raining Here: Epilogue and other things!
It contains a 6-page extra that you can’t read online that takes place after the end, along with a bunch of cute mini comics!
If you would like to keep reading about Adrian and Carter’s daily life we release a short story about their adventures every month on our Patreon.
If you can’t subscribe to our Patreon, so we will be releasing a selection (not all of them) of short stories publicly.
Adrian and Carter in Gym Class
Oct 31 (Halloween 2015 Short)
I’ll be releasing more in the future too. If you want to stay in touch with us, I highly recommend following our social media accounts to get information on when we update!
Other Projects:
Light Novels:
Decoy and Retrofit – Fall 2016-Fall 2017
Decoy and Retrofit is a post apocalyptic scifi story about two childhood friends who reunite while stealing a truck full of alien technology. This is a prose short written by Bell and illustrated by Hazel that has been released on Patreon and in Sparkler Monthly online magazine. Rated 18+ for disturbing themes and sexual content. Please proceed with caution.
Prison Tower - 2016/2017
Theo is a prison guard who is assigned to watch a mysterious prisoner in an isolated tower. While the prisoner seems to be friendly, cooperative, and compliant towards the guards, Theo has a sneaking suspicion he is a witch.Rated: 16+ for sex and violence You can read the beta of Volume 1 on Patreon under the $5 tier.
Webcomics:
Unnamed Scifi Comic – NOT SURE YET
This is the big one.
It’s going to be scifi.
It’s going to have robots.
There will be boys kissing.
That’s all I have for you right now. We’ll probably be posting the first teasers for that this fall.
Thank you to everyone who read Always Raining Here. We love that so many people enjoyed it with all their heart. Making comics is better with you.
We’ll see you again soon!
Love,
Hazel + BellTankers!
The Twilight of the Gods event is taking place from September 1 - 11 on the Clan Wars Event Map, which follows the standard rules of the Global Map. All Clans are free to take part in the event, whether your Clan was created before or after the event begins. Check out the event's regulations below!
All battles will be fought with vehicles up to tier VIII.
At the beginning of the event, the Event map will be wiped and World Redivision mode will be activated.
All actions made by players on the Event Map will be cancelled
The income for ransacked provinces on the Event Map will be restored
All Chips and Headquarters from the Event map will be available for the first turn of the event
Please note: Vehicles destroyed during the event will not freeze, as vehicle freeze time is turned off.
World Redivision mode will be activated from September 1 to September 2:
All provinces will be available for landing
Espionage and counter-espionage will be turned on
Revolts and ransacks will be turned off
Maximum number of 32 claims for participation in landings
If a battle against a province owner during the landing tournament ends in a draw, the province goes to the Clan challenger.
Once World redivision ends on September 2, the Twilight of the Gods rules will be enforced:
Revolts and ransacks will be turned on
Maximum number of 64 claims for participation in landings
Special Event Rules
Rules for default regions of the Event Map
The day after World Redivision, 24 closed gates to Asgard ( ) will appear on the Event Map, situated randomly
closed gates to Asgard ( ) will appear on the Event Map, situated randomly Around closed gates, some provinces will revolt, and the rest are not
The Clans on regular provinces around the gates can attack provinces with closed gates and conquer them
The Clans that own revolt provinces around closed gates can attack provinces with closed gates as well as defend revolt provinces. The following day, whoever owns provinces with closed gates and Clans with provinces around them may fight for gates ownership
After primetime, the gates are open ( ) and revolts in nearby provinces end
) and revolts in nearby provinces end The gates remain open for the next 24 in-game hours
The chips of the Clan that conquers the province with the opened gate will be transferred to one of the starting provinces of Asgard after winning in Clan primetime
The algorithm is repeatable, with the appearance of gates and revolts occurring according to it. New gates appear on a random province each time
Asgard Rules
Asgard is a special event map region on which Clans fight for the opportunity to take part in the final battle between Light and Evil power on Ragnarok day
The gates will transport players to a province in Asgard with a corresponding prime time.
The number of gates leading to starting Asgard provinces exceeds the number of starting Asgard provinces
On the starting Asgard provinces, an intermediate landing tournament will be held between Clans that came through gates
Clans cannot place their headquarters on Asgard provinces. All actions require the use of all chips transferred to the Asgard starting province
The event's main goal is to conquer one of the three central provinces of Asgard
Rules for Final Battle During Ragnarok Day
On the last day of the event ( September 11 ), the borders between Valhalla provinces and other provinces will be closed
The Dark Gods Clan attacks all three Valhalla provinces
Terms of Victory Point Crediting
Condition Victory Points Clan chips transfer to Asgard 1,000 Conquer any basic Asgard province 2,000 Conquer any common Asgard province 2,000 Conquer any Valhalla province 10,000
Victory Point (VP) information becomes available after first event battles. VP data will be updated every hour.
Terms of Fame Point Crediting
The basic amount of Fame Points (FP) that players will get during the event equals the sum of the battle participants' base experience (not including Premium account or multipliers) divided by 15.
Clans participating in revolts or landing battles get a basic amount of FP for each battle, except for battles with the province owner.
All boosting coefficients that apply during the event are displayed in the table below. The final amount of FP is tallied with the addition of fame point bonuses and coefficients. If several conditions are completed, the coefficients are added together.
Condition Fame Point Bonus Participation in battles for landing tournaments or revolts during the Twilight of the Gods event Base Amount Participation in a battle for a province (attacking an opponent’s province, defending a province, encounter battle) x5 Participation in a battle against a province owner during a revolt or landing tournament x5
Coefficients by province type have the following values:
Province Coefficient Basic province on ordinary map 1.0 Revolt province on ordinary map 1.0 Gates to Asgard 2.0 Basic province in Asgard 4.0 Common province in Asgard 4.0 Valhalla 10.0
Coefficients by battle type and by type of province recalculate between each other.
Please Note: Exploitative and/or disruptive play may lead to Fame Point and/or account sanctions at Wargaming's discretion.
If disputes regarding FP charging appear (stipulated battle suspicion, etc.), World of Tanks administration may request a battle replay, screenshots or any other information regarding the situation. If the required information is not provided, the decision will be made by the World of Tanks administration. We strongly recommend turning on the replay recording option in your game settings.
Information about player position in the Alley of Fame updates every hour.
To find out more about the benefits of being in a Clan, check out this video. Or find a Clan at the Recruiting Station!Like Roku before it, Amazon is working with TV makers to release smart televisions with the company’s own software filling in as the main operating system. Today we’re getting a much better idea of what that looks like with the inexpensive Element Amazon Fire TV Edition 4K TV lineup. These TVs will also be sold under the Westinghouse brand (instead of Element) depending on market. They’re available to preorder at Amazon for prices ranging from $449 (43-inch model) to only $899 for a 65-inch display. You’ll be able to find them at stores sometime next month.
Unlike the TCL sets we recently saw, these TVs don’t support Dolby Vision or HDR. They’re just regular old 4K screens that run Amazon’s Fire TV software. I can’t speak for the display quality, as I only spent a few minutes looking at the Element and Westinghouse Fire TV Editions in a brightly lit conference room. Their prices and third-tier brands suggest that they won’t compete with today’s top UHD TVs, but they might be plenty good enough for some consumers. And the software side of things is really promising.
An included voice remote supports both voice search and Alexa, so you can control your smart lights or check the weather using Amazon’s assistant. As is the case with Amazon’s Fire TV streaming devices, Alexa will show you many results visually instead of just speaking them back. You’ve got to use the voice remote, however, as the TV won’t just be listening for “Alexa” constantly. (And maybe mics in TVs are a bad idea.)
Back in December, Amazon overhauled its Fire TV software with a new look that’s far superior to the old version. Now it’s fast, easy to understand, and looks a little more modern than Roku’s OS, which also hangs its hat on simplicity. You can get a good sense of the software from each company in the video below.
But remember that this is a little different than just the Fire TV Stick running Fire TV software; this is a TV using Fire TV as its core operating system. So it does more than just stream. If you plug in an antenna, the TVs will automatically download local listings with Gracenote and you’ll see nice show artwork as you channel surf between networks. There’s a straightforward on-screen programming guide with channel names instead of numbers, and TV channels get mixed into your “Recents” area of the Fire TV software, letting you quickly hop between Netflix and a sports game that might be airing on CBS or Fox.
Since the TV comes with 16GB of internal storage, you can also pause and rewind live TV from your antenna. That’s a feature that Roku TVs only added in November, so you can see just how aggressively and quickly Amazon is catching up. And those same voice controls on the remote also let you switch inputs, adjust volume, and other critical TV functions. (You can just say “Go to NBC” instead of a channel number to switch live TV channels, also.) My only gripe with the remote is there’s no headphone port. I love that private listening feature on Roku, but you’ve still got the option to use Bluetooth headphones.
I’ll be taking a closer look at one of these TVs soon, and that’s when I’ll be able to speak to the 4K picture quality. But just like Roku TVs, the selling point here is simplicity. If you want a frustration-free TV experience with all the apps you need — and if you don’t require the best image quality — I get the sense you’d be very happy with this Fire TV Edition and future models to come. But if you’re particular about specs, here they are:Can Bad Campaigners Make Good Presidents?
John F. Kennedy once said there was no experience that could have adequately prepared him for the presidency.
That presumably included a hard-fought campaign for the job against sitting Vice President Richard Nixon — one of the closest-ever contests.
So, why should we assume that presiding over a well-oiled campaign has anything to do with running the White House?
Maybe we shouldn't, but that meme is gathering momentum among the pundit class on the heels of a lackluster and occasionally bewildering GOP nominating convention, followed by Mitt Romney's miscued remarks on Libya and the infamous hidden camera "47 percent" video:
James Fallows, writing for The Atlantic, called the Romney campaign's Libya debacle the candidate's "3 a.m. phone call" moment, a reference to a 2008 Hillary Clinton campaign ad that has become, as Fallows says, "shorthand for the unseen emergency.... When faced with a 3 a.m. test, [Romney] reacted immediately rather than having the instinct to wait," he wrote.
Jill Lawrence, writing for National Journal, was even less kind in her assessment of the campaign missteps.
"It's hard to imagine a worse argument for competence than the Romney campaign's performance over the past few months," she wrote.
Even conservative columnist Peggy Noonan called the campaign "incompetent" and a "rolling calamity," though she stopped short of blaming the candidate himself.
The question of whether a bad campaign can still produce a good president is largely an academic one. After all, lousy campaigns don't tend to produce presidents of any sort, says George Edwards, a political science professor at Texas A&M University.
Still, a partial answer might be found by turning the question on its head: Do good campaigners make good presidents?
"Campaigns are relatively modest operations compared to the federal government," Edwards says.
"In a campaign, you're dealing on a daily basis only with people who want you to succeed, and you are appearing in front of people who mostly support you," he says. "Being president is not like that. Just ask Barack Obama."
John Geer, a professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University, thinks the pundits are reading too much into the recent Romney fumbles.
"I am not yet convinced that we should call Romney a bad campaigner," he says. "The '47 percent' thing — that was just bad luck. That's not really a mistake."
Even so, Geer thinks presiding over a complex and multifaceted national campaign is like simulator training for the Oval Office.
"There's a belief among many that campaigning is different from governing," he says. "I'm not sure that's true. A campaign is a huge undertaking, and if you can run that, you can run the White House."
That's why Geer bucks much of the current thinking that the campaign season is too long. On the contrary, he says, long campaigns are good for the country.
"Presidential campaigns are hard and they are grueling, just like the presidency," he says. "A long campaign gives us a glimpse of how the candidate acts on the good days as well as the bad ones."Secret military operations over the Pacific have caused LAX to divert flights. Airport officials claim that the Federal Aviation Association (FAA) has closed the Pacific Ocean west of the Los Angeles airport for a week. The closure comes as the military says it will be using the area for “special operations.” Therefore, airport officials say that residents near LAX may notice increased noise over the city as flight paths are updated to exclude a Pacific Ocean path.
ABC 7 reports that LAX was told by the FAA that the Pacific Ocean west of the airport was closed for commercial flights for the next week. The report indicates that special military operations will be taking place over the ocean which require the removal of all flights from the area. As a result of the injunction, LAX public relations says residents east of the airport will notice increased noise at night.
“We clearly understand that neighbors and communities east of the airport will experience noise and we apologize for that.”
According to the Daily Mail, LAX typically moves to “Over-Ocean Operations” from midnight to 6:30 a.m. in a bid to keep the area as quiet as possible for surrounding residents. However, for the next week, the airport will be forced to make over-resident landings in the late-night hours, as the military will be performing secret operations over the Pacific Ocean.
Flight Aware shows the change in flight pattern as the FAA closes the ocean west of LAX for commercial traffic due to a secret military operation. [Image via Flight Aware] Airport officials say that they do not know what the military will be doing in the area over the ocean, only that they were told by the FAA that commercial flights could not be in the area. The spokesperson for the airport says that all they know is that airplanes cannot be flying at low altitudes over the next week to the west of LAX.
Though the military is not releasing information regarding the operations that will be taking place in the Pacific over the next week, it is noted that if it is a training procedure it won’t be the first time Los Angeles was a target. Military helicopters have been videoed numerous times weaving through buildings in downtown Los Angeles. The LAPD claims that the maneuvers were part of a special ops urban warfare drill.
Another video shows numerous military helicopters landing at the Los Angeles Coliseum.
The first report of the military drills in Los Angeles was six years ago in which military helicopters came so close to buildings that people inside of the buildings were able to see armed soldiers in camouflage outside their window. During that time, the military claimed that the operation was a training procedure that was in preparation of an overseas mission, no more details were provided.
Though residents may be leery about what the military is doing over the ocean so close to home, many residents seem to think the secret operation is a good thing. One resident of Inglewood, Steve Devosion, says he feels safer knowing the operation is taking place, noting that he would question the military more if they weren’t doing anything.
“And plus if it’s a military thing it’s a good thing, that means they’re making it safer for us so I wouldn’t let it bother me. I’d be more interested in them not doing something about what’s going on than them doing something about what’s going on.”
What do you think about the military’s secret operations over the Pacific Ocean and the closing of flights over the area west of LAX?
[Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images]RIVIERA BEACH (CBSMiami) — A 90-year old’s home was destroyed by police conducting a raid but it appears they got the wrong house.
The elderly woman shared her story of terror and what police are doing to clean up the mess.
She’s called Riviera Beach home for 25 years, but back on December 18th around 1 p.m., the 90-year-old woman, who asked not to be identified, had some uninvited guests.
“I don’t know how the cops got in here. The noise woke me up when something said boom! Like a bomb or something,” said the 90-year old.
There was shattered glass, a busted door, and traces of a flash bang device.
CLICK HERE to watch Eliott Rodriguez’s report
Riviera Beach Police said after evidence of criminal activity, they got a search warrant.
“Cops standing over here talking about where’s the drugs? I said what? What drugs? Ain’t no drugs in here,” she said.
Police searched the home with drug sniffing dogs but came up empty-handed.
“I’ve never been arrested, never been in jail,” said the 90-year old.
Riviera Beach Police said the search warrant was executed at the correct address and while the resident may not have had any knowledge of drugs being sold from her home, it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
The department has since put up temporary repairs and has decided to pay for new windows and doors.
The resident is supposed to get a new door later this week – and new windows by February 28th.The move follows long negotiations between the smaller governing parties (the Centre, Liberal and Christian Democrat parties) who have long argued for more rights for undocumented migrants, and the Moderate Party, which has opposed the idea.
The Moderates have argued that giving such entitlements would legitimize people who have no right to be in Sweden.
The parties say there are still a number of questions to resolve, including the issue of who will pay for illegal immigrants' healthcare or the kind of care and education to which they will be entitled.
Social Affairs Minister and Christian Democrat leader Göran Hägglund said the changes would cost "a few hundred million kronor" per year, but added:
"Compared with the total cost of healthcare, that's nothing."
Education Minister and Liberal leader Jan Björklund said he hoped that the children of illegal immigrants would be able to start attending Swedish schools from 2012, adding that his preliminary calculations suggested that this would cost taxpayers 50-100 million kronor per academic year. He said this compared to the total cost of 100 billion kronor for running Sweden's compulsory schooling.
Centre Party leader and Industry Minister Maud Olofsson said that the deal would also allow illegal immigrants to start companies:
"We have now included in the agreement that it should be easy to come to Sweden regardless of whether you are a businessperson or an employee," she said.
The minority government will need support from at least one opposition party to pass the measures. Olofsson said she hoped the Green Party would support the moves, despite not having been involved in negotiations. A parliamentary vote is not expected until early 2012.Syracuse Air Show to return in 2019 Video
SYRACUSE, N.Y. (WSYR-TV) - After a two-year hiatus, the Syracuse Air Show will be back in 2019.
Over 35,000 people filled the grounds of the Syracuse Hancock Airport to see a variety of grounded aircrafts and catch amazing displays in the sky above.
Many air show fans have been asking whether or not there will be the Blue Angels or the Thunderbirds in 2019.
Hancock executive director, Chris Callahan, says it will be the first thing that the airport will request-- whether the Blue Angels or the Thunderbirds will put Syracuse on their 2019 list.
The Navy cancelled the Blue Angels appearance in Syracuse less than two weeks before the show because of the deadly crash of one of their pilots in a training session leading up to the Great Tennessee Air Show.
"The loss of the Blue Angels suffered, we took it really hard for them, for the team, for the families and we had a great show. But we're excited, we think in 2019 it'll be time to bring a team back, give people the opportunity to see what they can do because it's beyond amazing,” Callahan said.
As excited as she is for the next air show, Callahan says with so much going on at the airport through next fall, including the huge terminal renovation project, 2019 is realistically the earliest they could pull it off.
“We want to be able to dedicate our time and effort to planning the best air show possible, so it makes sense. The reality is as well these military teams require essentially a two-year lead time so the timing works for us and our schedule and the teams’ schedule as well,” Callahan said.
Callahan says they hope to hear sometime early next year whether the Blue Angels or Thunderbirds will put Syracuse on their schedule for 2019.ASHBURN, Va. -- It's not a war of words Washington Redskins corner Josh Norman wants to get into with the Pittsburgh Steelers. It's a jersey swap.
Not that it'll happen. Two years ago, Steelers coach Mike Tomlin began prohibiting the team's players from engaging in them. But the overall point from Norman was simple. He has a healthy respect for two of the players he'll face Monday night: quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and receiver Antonio Brown.
Editor's Picks 'Mind games' between Antonio Brown, Josh Norman appear likely The matchup between Antonio Brown and Josh Norman will be a physical spectacle on Monday Night Football. But the mental battle is just as crucial, Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger said.
"Oh my gosh, Big Ben, another great one," Norman said. "You look at the quarterbacks in this league, and Big Ben has been up there since he's been in the league. He's one of the great ones. I'll walk up to him and be like, 'Hey, can I get your jersey?'
"That's how much respect I've got for him. I don't ask for jerseys like that, until someone shows me they are great at what they do. Big Ben is that. That's the utmost respect I have for a quarterback."
Norman has been a focal point ever since he signed with Washington in the spring, following Carolina's decision to rescind the franchise tag it had placed on him. Part of it stems from his contract, worth $15 million a year, the highest for a corner. He has been in headlines for his matchup with Odell Beckham Jr., based on what happened last year and because they play twice this season.
Arizona corner Patrick Peterson poked fun at him on Twitter about a video from a Redskins practice that ended up on social media. But when it came to Roethlisberger and Brown, there was nothing but love from Norman. In fact, Norman can be a quiet player on the field, teammates say. Even Norman said he wouldn't trash talk with Brown, because he likes him.
"Watching him and what he's able to do is freakish," Norman said. "When you look at the receivers in the NFL you don't have to stop nowhere other than Antonio Brown. It starts and ends with him. That's going to be a tall task to take on, and I respect that. I'm looking forward to what he brings, because that matchup is going to be a physical one and a fun one. I have nothing but respect for that guy."
Monday will mark the first time Norman covers Brown in a game -- they didn't match up in a 2013 meeting -- but that respect extends as well to Roethlisberger, whom Norman called "cerebral."
"He can make all the throws," Norman said. "Shoot, his name speaks for itself: Big Ben. You can't take him down. He's good with his feet. That's the thing people don't realize and understand, that he can create things on the go, and he gets back there and he doesn't get flustered."
Earlier in the day, Roethlisberger said he didn't want to get lulled into any sort of verbal exchange.
"If you're trying to do that, that's when the game kind of falls apart, and the defender gets you," he said in a conference call with the Washington media. "That's what they want. I've been playing long enough not to fall into that trap, whether it's a corner, whether it's a linebacker or a trash-talker."
But, Norman said, that's not what he's looking for Monday night, his first regular-season game in a Redskins uniform. For him, it's not about reminding everyone what he can still do on the field.
"I don't have to do that, because I've been doing that since day one," Norman said. "It's just them. It's not trying to prove them wrong. It's trying to prove I'm right in what I do and my approach. I don't care about the other white noise."Australia and Indonesia will create a special hotline in the wake of the phone-tapping revelations to "resolve any issues" and "avoid unintended consequences", the Australian foreign minister, Julie Bishop, has said.
Bishop met her Indonesian counterpart, Dr Marty Natalegawa, in Jakarta on Thursday, saying both had agreed to meet regularly and maintain frequent contact following the downgrading of diplomatic relations between the two nations.
The hotline would be designed to quickly resolve any issues resulting from Indonesia officially downgrading its relationship with Australia, said Natalegawa. He conceded that some aspects of the downgrade between the two nations were "being decided in a very ad hoc and not systematic way".
In November, documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden showed that Australian spying authorities had attempted to listen in to the private phone calls of the Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyno, and had targeted nine members of his inner circle, including his wife.
Bishop reiterated Canberra's regret, first expressed by the prime minister, Tony Abbott, over the repercussions of the phone-tapping scandal revealed by Guardian Australia and the ABC.
"We regret the hurt caused to President Yudhoyono and to the Indonesian people," Bishop said. "The Abbott government will not undertake any act or use our assets or resources, including intelligence assets, in any way to harm Indonesia."
Yudhoyono has temporarily suspended co-operation with Canberra in a number of key areas, including joint efforts to combat people smuggling of asylum seekers and all joint military exercises. The Indonesian ambassador to Australia has also been recalled. Yudhoyono has laid out a six-step plan to restore relations, culminating in a binding "code of ethics" between Jakarta and Canberra.
Speaking after the press conference, Natalegawa said there was no "specific deadline or timeline" in place but "we have the six steps to be gone through, and we are now on step one".
He added: "There has been a change of behaviour now in the way [Bishop] stated deep regret over the events that led to our situation now. I think there's improvement or shift.
"I'm not saying whether I'm satisfied or not satisfied. I will report this [to the president]. It is a process to regain trust, to reclaim that level of comfort in co-operating with each other. This needs a process and it cannot be changed in an instant. Clearly, the meeting today is not harmful, the meeting is part of a contribution in relieving the relationship. But the road map remains a long way to go." Natalegawa said the Indonesian ambassador to Australia would only be returned once it served "our interests".
Bishop said she hoped any code of ethics forged between the two nations would "focus on the broad range of areas of co-operation, on the importance of this bilateral relationship, the significance of it to both countries and to ensure that we can take this relationship to the next level of trust and mutual understanding."We have entered a public dispute against the management of a number of Subway branches in Brighton - motto ‘Eat Fresh!’ - after a former worker approached Brighton SolFed for support.
The worker was sacked without notice in July and is owed a considerable sum in contractual notice pay, holiday entitlement, overtime and for working a so-called training week in which no formal training was given and no prior indication that he was expected to give his labour for nothing but pure Subway profit. The worker tried to resolve these and other issues while in work by taking to the management and the appropriate authorities but, as we’ve heard so often before, this achieved nothing. Shockingly, the worker’s wife was offered a position at Subway Brighton which she declined after providing her ID, and instead had her national insurance number stolen and used illegally |
peace by sending 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan to intensify the massacre that has left nearly 6,500 of his civilian brothers and sisters dead (as of September, 2007). He stands silent on the more than 98,000 of his civilian brothers and sisters who have been murdered in Iraq. He threatens War against Iran, Syria and already destroyed Lebanon. He remains silent on the murder of his brother Oscar Grant III by police officer Johannes Mehserle in California. He perpetuates what Dr. King called “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift”.
“Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten….America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. If it loses the will to finish or slackens in its determination, history will recall its crimes and the country that would be great will lack the most indispensable element of greatness–justice” Dr. Martin Luther King, 1967.
The President-Elect refuses to bring George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger and the rest of the War criminals to justice as he looks forward from the mountain top and points the way to spiritual death.
Would Dr. King, if he held public office, have voted for invading Iraq, invading Afghanistan, sending arms and money to Israel and would he remain silent as his poverty stricken brothers and sisters were slaughtered?
The words of Martin Luther King have been hijacked by those would would use his message to further their own narcissistic goals. His peaceful supplication has been betrayed by lies and a sickening adulation of meaningless oratory. His greatest statements of love and humanity have been relegated to sound bites for mass consumption by a deceived public who have put their faith in a man who represents all that Dr. King was fighting peacefully against.ON A past visit to the little fishing port of Tanmen, on the island-province of Hainan in southern China, pigs were being driven onto the foredecks of wooden trawlers, while water butts were being lashed down at the stern. Farther down the quay, similar boats were about to unload their catch after a month at sea: not fish but giant clams, Tridacna gigas, up to a metre across, which required two or even four men to carry. The bivalves spilled out of the holds. Giant clams are one of Buddhism’s “seven treasures”, along with gold and lapis lazuli. China’s new rich prize their shells as showy ornaments. Each can fetch as much as $3,000, so each haul was worth a fortune. And it was all illegal.
Nowadays Tanmen is transformed. The harbour is still crammed with fishing boats—calling on the spirit world for luck, one exuberant crew let off strings of firecrackers and threw joss paper up in the air as their vessel steamed out of the harbour. But the clam boats have gone, and some of the piratical air too. The quay has had a makeover, with new awnings under which fishermen’s wives grill squid for day-tripping tourists. “It’s over,” one of the women declared. “The authorities have banned the clam fishing. It’s big fines and 15 years in jail if they come after you.”
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The ban is surely welcome. From an analysis of satellite imagery, John McManus of the University of Miami last year concluded that 40 square miles (104 square km) of some of the most biodiverse coral reefs on Earth have been destroyed in the South China Sea thanks to giant-clam poachers. In the shallow waters of the reefs, crews use the propellers of small boats launched from each mother-ship to smash the surrounding coral and thus free the clams anchored fast to the reef. Though the practice has received little attention, it is ecological hooliganism, and most of it has been perpetrated by boats from Tanmen.
The fishermen have not been the reefs’ only adversaries. China’s huge and (to its neighbours) controversial programme since late 2013 of building artificial islands around disputed rocks and reefs in the South China Sea has paved over another 22 square miles of coral. When the two activities are taken together, Mr McManus says, about 10% of the reefs in the vast Spratly archipelago to the south of Hainan, and 8% of those in the Paracel islands, between Hainan and Vietnam, have been destroyed. Given that Asia’s Coral Triangle, of which the South China Sea forms the apex, is a single, interconnected ecosystem, the repercussions of these activities, environmentalists say, will be huge.
Yet the Chinese authorities’ conversion to environmentalism is not absolute. A few streets back from the waterfront in Tanmen, elegant boutiques sell jewellery and curios fashioned from the giant clams—and clam shells are still stacked outside. And the provincial money that is so clearly being lavished on Tanmen sits oddly with the illegality of its townsfolk’s way of life. Tanmen used to be isolated on the far side of a wide river. Now a bridge connects it to the posh resort district of Boao, famous for a forum, a kind of Asian Davos, which China’s leaders grandly host each year. Most striking of all, in 2013 President Xi Jinping himself showed up in Tanmen. Boarding one of the trawlers he declared to the crew, according to state media, “You guys do a great job!” The media did not report that a year earlier the trawler in question had been caught in the territorial waters of Palau, and in the confrontation with local police that followed one of the crew members had been shot dead. In Chinese propaganda, Tanmen’s fishermen are patriots and model workers.
So what is going on? Over the years Tanmen’s fishermen have become part of China’s power projection in the South China Sea, an unofficial but vital adjunct to the Chinese navy and coastguard. The biggest trawlers are organised into a maritime militia ready to fight a “people’s war” at sea. Though generally unarmed, they undergo training and take orders from the navy.
They are facts on the water, and have been involved in China’s growing aggression in the South China Sea. In 2012 boats from Tanmen were part of a navy-led operation to wrest control of Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines, chasing Philippine fishing vessels away. In 2014 they escorted a Chinese oil rig that was being towed provocatively into Vietnamese waters. On land, Vietnamese expressed their rage by ransacking factories they thought were Chinese-owned. At sea, boats from Tanmen rammed and sank one of the rickety Vietnamese vessels coming out to protest. Andrew Erickson of the US Naval War College calls them China’s “little blue men”, an echo of the “little green men” who invaded Ukraine pretending not to be Russian soldiers.
Clamming up
Mysteriously, though, the giant trawlers of the Tanmen militia are now rafted up, their crews sent home. Perhaps China is keen to lower tensions in the region. After all, it has accomplished most of the terraforming it wanted. Bill Hayton of Chatham House, a think-tank in London, notes that towing the oil rig towards Vietnam was a propaganda disaster. And after a damning ruling last year from an international tribunal against the sweeping nature of its claims to nearly the whole sea, China has tried to get along better with the Philippines, which brought the case. (This week China denied reports that it was planning to build a weather station on Scarborough Shoal.)
Yet perhaps self-interest as much as patriotism fires the fishermen’s behaviour. After all, boats from Tanmen would not have been quite so thrusting without lavish subsidies for construction and diesel. For the government, their costs have spiralled—and only exacerbated the overfishing in China’s surrounding waters. A policy introduced in January aims to cut the catch from China’s fishing fleet, the world’s largest, by a sixth, in the name of sustainability. That will hit Tanmen’s fishermen hard, making them less willing to defend China’s claims. Francis Drake would have understood: pirates are patriotic, but usually only when it pays.According to reports, Apple is planning to cut its laptop, the MacBook, by around $100-$150. It's as much a response to the competition from netbooks as to the recession.
The main source of the rumors is the usually reliable Appleinsider.com site. It says Apple's plans to develop a tablet computer -- perhaps like a much larger iPod Touch -- will wind up taking longer than expected. (Source: appleinsider.com)
That's a blow to plans that the tablet will stop users defecting to netbooks, the increasingly popular slimmed-down laptops which offer basic functionality, notably web surfing, at a budget price.
Until the tablet is available, Apple is reportedly hoping to deter defectors by dropping prices, most notably on the 13 inch MacBook. The cuts, which may also extend to the iMac desktop, will likely be in the $100 to $150 range. (Source: cnn.com)
Price War Unlikely
Price cuts would be a major change in tactics for Apple. When it avoided significant reductions in the prices of its last range of new models, it appeared clear the firm was not interested in competing on price and instead wanted to position itself as a premium brand.
If the price cut rumors are true, they will inevitably be seen as a response to the recent stinging advertising campaign by Microsoft which uses 'ordinary shoppers' to directly attack Macs as overpriced.
Unfamiliar Territory for Premium Apple Brand
Whether the price cuts would work is another question. Even with the full $150 reduction, the 13 inch MacBook would still cost around $849. That's more than double some of the most popular netbooks, and still exceeds many if not most PC laptops.
However, while Apple may be eager to promote its newly priced computers as offering good value, the problem is that the firm will likely never cut costs enough to satisfy buyers driven mainly by price, simply because Apple's brand strategy does not allow its products to appear 'cheap'.Construction workers work on a high-rise condominium project on Biscayne Boulevard, in downtown Miami earlier this year. Alan Diaz/AP
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — The productivity of American workers rose in the July-September quarter at the fastest pace in two years while labor costs slowed after a big jump in the spring.
Productivity increased in the third quarter at a 3.1 percent rate, the Labor Department reported Tuesday. That followed three quarterly declines and was the best showing since a 4.2 percent increase in the third quarter of 2014. Labor costs edged up at a 0.7 percent rate in the third quarter following a much faster 6.2 percent jump in the second quarter. The productivity figure was unchanged from an initial estimate a month ago while the 0.7 percent rise in unit labor costs was slightly higher than an initial estimate of a 0.3 percent gain.
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The rebound in productivity was expected to be temporary.
Economists believe the jump in productivity in the summer will be short-lived. They are forecasting that productivity will return to the anemic gains seen over the past nine years. Since 2007, annual productivity increases have averaged just 1.3 percent. That is just have the 2.6 percent average gains turned in from 2000 through 2007 when the country was benefiting from the increased efficiency from greater integration of computers and the internet into the workplace.
Productivity, the amount of output per hour of work, is the key factor that supports rising living standards. Rising productivity means increased output which allows employers to boost wages without triggering higher inflation.
The revised estimates for productivity and output follow the government's revisions to the gross domestic product, the economy's total output of goods and services, last week. The revision boosted GDP growth in the third quarter to 3.2 percent, up from an initial estimate of 2.9 percent.
Productivity growth has been weak since the Great Recession. The 1.3 percent average gain from 2007 through 2015 compares to 2.6 percent from 2000 to 2007 and a 2.2 percent average from 1947 through 2015.
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has pointed to the slowdown in productivity growth as a key challenge facing the country.
Economists believe that businesses need to start focusing more on raising the efficiency of their existing workforce rather than just hiring more workers to meet demand. Analysts expect companies to put more emphasis on increasing productivity as the labor market hits full employment and the pool of available qualified workers diminishes.The federal government’s $10-billion reliance on temporary workers and independent contractors is turning stable work in Canada’s public service into a “gig economy” that will discourage the best of the millennial generation the Liberals want to attract, a new report on contracting says.
The report by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, called Programmed to Fail, concludes outsourcing costs the government money, jobs, morale, productivity, accountability, jeopardizes the privacy of Canadians and puts it “at risk of employing a permanently precarious public service.”
“Who wants to work for the government to do dull transaction work? They want to be challenged,” said PIPSC president Debi Daviau. “If you want loyal public servants out of this millennial generation, you have to return to being a workplace of choice.”
The government doesn’t consistently track or keep records on the number of contractors, temporary or term workers employed. It spends about $10 billion annually on “outsourced services” with $8 billion spent outside and the rest for services between departments.
PIPSC conducted two surveys in 2015 to get a handle on the departments’ reliance on outsourcing. One survey was sent to all IT workers and another to all members in 60 departments and agencies. About 10,000 employees responded.
Nearly half of all respondents said contractors work on their teams or work units. About 60 per cent said contracts of those they work with are routinely renewed; 41 per cent said contractors were there between one and five years; and 17 per cent reported contractors had worked there for more than 10 years.
Daviau wants contracting reduced and stricter guidelines imposed. She isn’t, however, looking for $10 billion worth of contracts to be turned into full-time public service jobs. Rather, she argues the work being farmed out could be done in-house by existing employees if they were given the chance or training.
In the survey, 83 per cent of respondents said no training was offered to existing employees before vacancies were filled by contractors. About 54 per cent said they would have done the work if offered the chance.
In fact, 89 per cent of respondents said contracted out jobs were not posted internally. This was even higher among IT workers — 91 per cent of whom said such positions were not posted.
The report singles out Shared Services Canada, where most federal IT employees are concentrated, as one of the biggest users of outsourcing. The computer services agency outsourced its $400-million project to collapse 63 email systems into one and has faced delays, cost overruns and security lapses.
“Little wonder then that the federal department with the highest number of IT workers has the lowest morale, and is the most notorious for the failures to date of its signature outsourcing project: the consolidation of government email systems,” the report said.
Along with IT, the government is outsourcing science, research and engineering. The storage of taxpayers records, the duties of federal veterinarians, water quality research; seed crop inspection; and remediation of contaminated federal sites have all be contracted out.
The report blames the dependency on a decade of budget cuts, freezes and a cumbersome staffing process that takes months to hire anyone full-time.
With no money, departments cut staff training and are forced to contract for projects that crop up, or to meet a deadline. Short-term workers also don’t have to meet the same standards, merit or bilingual requirements as anyone applying for permanent jobs.
Daviau says this lack of training and hollowing out of work, both skilled and unskilled, has affected management, job opportunities, the work environment and career progression.
Unless the government changes course, the Liberals won’t be able to attract the millennials it is targeting to replace the ast wave of retiring baby boomers, the report contends.
“Decreasing outsourcing more aggressively … will be essential if existing and especially new public servants are to be given the chance to grow and advance in their public service careers,” the report said.
The report warns that outsourcing won’t be easy to kick. Contractors are making decisions and increasingly have the knowledge and corporate memory that public servants no longer have. That creates an even bigger management problem when public servants managing contractors don’t have the same knowledge or experience.
The impact of outsourcing is a big issue for PIPSC for the current round of bargaining. The union, which represents 55,000 professionals, is seeking language to curb the reliance on contracting embedded into employees’ contracts — a move that Treasury Board negotiators have so far resisted.
The union wants to throw the spotlight on contracting like it did with the Conservatives muzzling of scientists. That campaign attracted international attention and put the role of science in government on the national agenda.
The union kicked off a new “Ready” campaign Friday to highlight the key issues it will be negotiating at the bargaining table. This includes new ground rules for departments to justify outsourcing that it wants enshrined in employees’ contracts. PIPSC wants more controls on outsourcing, particularly services involving the privacy and security of Canadians’ personal information.
The Liberals promised during the election to reduce contract spending and return it to 2005-06 levels. The government’s first budget called for a $170 million decrease, but Daviau argues at that rate it will take a decade to reach the 2005-06 target.
The PIPSC report is the latest to raise red flags about the government’s reliance on contracting. Studies have been done by the Public Service Commission, Treasury Board and auditor general.
Contracting is allowed for short-term or temporary work to fill in for people on leave, or to handle fluctuations in workloads, special projects or a demand for expertise not available in the bureaucracy.
But the growth of the “gig economy,” coined in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, left millions of workers taking lower-paying, part-time work. The shift is driven by reducing costs and not having to have to pay workers benefits, office space or training.
Some say the trend is good for unleashing innovation, freeing workers to select jobs they are interested in and letting them avoid being under an employer’s thumb for career advancement.
For PIPSC, it raises questions about what a good job will look like in the public service and quality of services Canadians get. Daviau argues it also flies in the face of the Trudeau government’s promise to grow the middle class.
“Outsourcing removes much-needed expertise from the public service, gives rise to more, not fewer, management problems and leads to an unproductive dependence on outside consultants, she said.
“It works against growth of the middle class and promotes insecure, part-time contract jobs without benefits over permanent, full-time jobs with benefits.”On Monday, the Seattle City Council approved a slate of land use changes spanning improvements to the design review process to rezoning large swaths of the Uptown neighborhood. Other changes included putting a temporary moratorium in place for certain uses in the Aurora-Licton Springs Urban Village and adding targeted amendments to the Comprehensive Plan. All of the legislation was unanimously approved (Councilmember Bruce Harrell was absent).
Uptown Zoning and Development Regulation Changes
A significant rezone was adopted for the Uptown neighborhood. The rezone and companion changes to development standards were an outgrowth of a neighborhood-wide urban design framework. Zoning changes were focused on creating a more walkable, livable, and dense Uptown. This is reflected through regulatory requirements built into the new Seattle Mixed-Uptown (SM-UP) zone that was widely applied to the neighborhood.
SM-UP zones have custom regulations for:
Street-level uses, street-level facade requirements, and enhanced parking standards;
Maximum and minimum development density;
Maximum building width, facade modulation, and maximum blank facade standards;
Incentive zoning for childcare facilities, streetscape improvements, open space, and historic preservation; and
Podium site coverage and height, tower floorplate maximums, and number of towers allowed.
Some zoning changes will simply get the standard Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) bump by modestly increasing building height a story and floor area allowances for existing zones (e.g., Lowrise 3 (LR3) to Lowrise 3 with an M suffix (L3 (M)). But all of the rezones unlock MHA requirements, which differ between residential and commercial development.
Residential developments will be expected to contribute between 7% and 10% of the dwelling units as affordable or pay affordable housing development fees to the City at a rate of $20.75 to $29.75 pre square foot. Likewise, commecial development be expected to contribute 5% to 10% of total floor area as affordable housing or pay affordable housing development fees to the City at a rate of $8.00 to $29.75 per square foot. The rezones are estimated to deliver up to 600 affordable housing units over the next 20 years.
In committee, a variety of amendments were considered but not make the final cut, including:
Further increasing building heights along the Mercer Street and Roy Street corridors (between the two streets) from 85 feet to 125 feet. This amendment would have further rezoned the KCTS site to 125 feet. Other companion changes to development regulations would have followed to specific floor area ratio maximums, upper-level stepbacks, parking restrictions, and use of incentives.
Elimination of a special development standard departure for projects in the Uptown neighborhood.
Adding an extra floor area incentive for on-site development of mandatory affordable housing instead payment of affordable housing fees to the City.
Reduction of upper-level stepbacks to an average of five feet instead of ten feet for portions of a structure above 45 feet or 65 feet along Roy Street, Queen Anne Ave N, 1st Ave N, and 5th Ave N. The upper-level stepback requirements remained at ten feet feet.
Amendments that were successful in committee, included:
Further increasing building heights in the “heart of Uptown” from 65 feet to 85 feet (this is reflected in Labels 7, 13, and 15 in the image above as SM-UP 85 (M1)).
Expanding the amount of extra floor area that can be achieved by providing art space and preserving designated landmark structures.
Adding an extra floor area incentive for any developments that would include co-development of a public school within SM-UP zones.
Adding an extra floor area incentive for family-sized units with two or more bedrooms. At least 10 family-sized units would need to be constructed meeting minimum unit size requirement as well as private and common amenity requirements. This is similar to incentives adopted for family-sized units in the University District, South Lake Union, Downtown, and Chinatown-International District.
Requiring Transportation Managment Programs (TMPs) for all developments that would create 50 or more single-occupant vehicle trips in a PM hour or multifamily residential developments that would create 50 or more vehicle trips in a PM hour or 25 or more vehicles parking on the street overnight. Each TMP would be unique and necessitate a developer to come up with alternatives to driving alone, such as providing more bike parking and subsidized transit passes to future tenants.
Establishing a parking maximum for office uses at no more than one parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of gross floor area in office use.
Additionally, a companion resolution was adopted designating the Uptown as the “Uptown Arts & Cultural District,” directing Office of Arts and Culture to work with the neighborhood to support and advance the arts and artists, and encouraging the local community to promote and sustain the arts.
Design Review Improvements
The City Council adopted a very different set of improvements to the design review program from what was originally envisioned and transmitted by the Seattle Department of Construction Inspection (SDCI). Some big ideas still won out in the end, such as:
New requirements for early community outreach;
Reforming the approach to setting thresholds for design review;
Adding site characteristics as a element in determining the type of design review process required;
Expanding design review to include more development types and zones;
Revising the composition of design review boards and encouraging the participation of youth on them through the Get Engaged program; and
Limiting the number of design review meetings for projects.
In committee, the base legislation was heavily revised. Changes included:
Further delaying the effective date of the design review changes to July 1, 2018 instead of 60 days from adoption.
Allowing an additional 0.5 floor area ratio or 10 feet in building height for protection and retention of an exceptional tree as part of development standard departures.
Giving more authority over design review to special review and landmark preservation distric boards. Under existing code, departures from development standards must go to a design review board, but the new option would consolidate that authority to the governing special review or landmarks preservation distric board eliminating the need to go to two bodies for review.
Streamlining the design review process for projects outside of Downtown and industrial zones that would ordinarily go through full design review to instead be processed through administrative design review if the applicant elects to construct mandatory affordable housing on-site. Additionally, projects providing mandatory affordable housing on-site would be eligible for an absolute maximum number of design review meetings where meetings caps otherwise would not apply.
Revising thesholds for design review and eliminating Hybrid Design Review in favor of Administrative Design Review and Streamlined Design Review.
A slate of other very technical amendments were made largely adding more specificity and clarification.
Much of the discussion on amendments in committee focused on adjusting design review thresholds and whether to keep or eliminate Hybrid Design Review from the proposal. Public opinion was highly mixed on Hybrid Design Review which would require an applicant to have a project reviewed by both administrative SDCI planning staff and local design review board in a two-step process. The idea behind the process to was to blend Administrative Design Review and Full Design Review processes together in theory making the process quicker but still having direct public participation.
Early in the summer, SDCI had envisioned Hybrid Design Review as a full fledge element of the design review program. But comments on a draft proposal swayed the department into limiting it as a trial pilot program by the time legislation was introduced to the City Council. Ultimately, the Planning, Land Use, and Zoning (PLUZ) Committee decided to eliminate the Hybrid Design Review process in favor Administrative Design Review and Streamlined Design Review, which are both existing processes.
Standing by the objective to improve the design review program, the PLUZ Committee considered two alternative approaches to using Administrative Design Review and Streamlined Design Review instead of Hybrid Design Review. The difference boiled down to size thresholds, as shown as Options 10A and 10B above. Option 10B was the more aggressive option in terms of reducing design review timeframes. The PLUZ Committee, however, settled on Option 10A which was still projected to modestly save time through design review over the SDCI proposal.
Administrative Design Review and Streamlined Design Review are still required to include early community outreach as part of the review process. The changes would overhaul how Administrative Design Review and Streamlined Design Review would also otherwise work. Streamlined Design Review would not just be limited to townhouse and rowhouse developments anymore.
The new thresholds would be as follows:
One thing to note about the thresholds is that there are certain exceptions that apply. Lower thresholds could trigger design review if a project is proposed on or before December 31, 2023 as follows:
Any development that is 5,000 to 8,000 square feet and located on a property that was rezoned from single-family residential to Lowrise 1 (LR1) or Lowrise 2 (LR2) zones(this represented as Footnote 2 in the table above); or
Any development that is 5,000 to 8,000 square feet and located on a property that was rezoned from single-family residential to Lowrise 3 (LR3), Midrise (MR), Highrise (HR), or any Commercial (C) or Neighborhood Commercial (NC) zone (this represented as Footnote 3 in the table above).
The bulk of the design review changes will come into force mid-next year. SDCI will adopt administrative changes to help implement the new design review program, including the adoption of future rules and developing the early outreach program.
Pedestrianizing Aurora-Licton Springs
Last month, Councilmember Debora Juarez sponsored a temporary moratorium on new heavy commercial, manufacturing, and warehouse uses in the Aurora-Licton Springs Urban Village. Councilmember Juarez proposed the moratorium as a means to reserve development capacity within the neighborhood for more intensive mixed and pedestrian-oriented uses until proposed rezones envisioned for the urban village could be adopted.
The MHA program has identified a variety of possible rezones for the Aurora-Licton Springs Urban Village, including rezones of all Commercial 1 (C1) and Commercial 2 (C2) zones to Neighborhood Commercial 2 (NC2) and Neighborhood Commercial 3 (NC3) zones. This would effectively reflect the same prohibition on heavy commercial, manufacturing, and warehouse uses that the moratorium contains. Some of the NC2 and NC3 zones could receive Pedestrian zone designations, which are paired with minimum density, active ground floor use, and building transparency requirements as well as restrictions on parking. NC2 and NC3 also generally have higher design requirements over their C1 and C2 counterparts. The proposed rezones could help realize a more pedestrian-oriented residential and commercial district, something that many in the area have been advocating for quite some time.
Before a final vote on the legislation, Councilmember Juarez emphasized the importance of the legislation and expressed gratitude to community members for bringing the issue to her attention. She reiterated that the moratorium will not force any existing businesses to move and that vested development applications would continue to move forward. Councilmember Juarez also remarked that the moratorium would help realize overarching goals of creating a denser, more walkable residential and commercial district.
The moratorium will remain in effect for up to one full year. The MHA rezones are anticipated to be in force in August 2018 according to a work plan for permanent land use controls.
2016-2017 Comprehensive Plan Amendments
A final set of amendments to the Comprehensive Plan were adopted as part of the City’s annual review. The changes are considered to be minor in nature. Three sets of amendments were made to the Comprehensive Plan, including:
Referencing the “Parks Development Plan” as the “Parks and Open Space Plan”—the name was changed this year when the 2017 Parks and Open Space Plan was adopted;
Adding a new environmental justice Land Use Policy that would require consideration of air pollution impacts on residential populations; and
Revising and adding new cultural and economic vitality policies to the Chinatown/International District Neighborhood Plan.
The cultural and economic vitality policies for Chinatown-International District direct the City to develop anti-displacement and affordability strategies for commercial businesses, cultural identity strategies for Little Saigon, and expand access to community facilities like libraries and other public amenities.
Councilmember Johnson mentioned that a proposal to rezone and redesignate a Beacon Hill property on the Future Land Use Map had been considered as part of the annual minor update process. The rezone and resignation would have allowed the 2.6-acre site to be redeveloped with multifamily residential uses. However, Councilmember Johnson said that the site was too small and could have set an unwanted prescedent for similar requests in the future if adopted.
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On a late August morning, Kevin Systrom, chief executive of Instagram, took an oath before testifying at a hearing of the California Corporations Department, which sought to determine if Facebook’s acquisition of the photo sharing service was in the best interest of Instagram investors. Facebook requested the hearing as a way to speed up the approval of its acquisition.
When asked if his company had received any offers besides Facebook’s at the time of the negotiations, Mr. Systrom said, “No, we never received any offers,” according to transcripts of the hearings. He said Instagram had “talked to other parties, but never received any formal offers from anybody else.”
Ivan V. Griswold, a lawyer for the state regulators, asked again: “Immediately before the negotiations, did you receive any offers from invest —.” Before he could finish his question, the transcripts show, Mr. Systrom cut him off.
“We never received any formal offers or term sheets,” Mr. Systrom said. “No.”
Yet the accounts of several people close to Twitter and Facebook, and documents reviewed by The New York Times, contradict the statements he made under oath. Mr. Systrom and Mike Krieger, the other founder of Instagram, held several meetings as late as March with top Twitter executives, according to people on both sides of the talks, who requested anonymity because the talks were private and because they were concerned about legal repercussions. These people said the sides had verbally agreed weeks earlier on a price for Instagram of $525 million in cash and Twitter shares.
Mr. Systrom told Twitter on March 20 that he and Mr. Krieger had thought about the offer and had decided to “remain independent.” Less than three weeks later, Twitter found out, along with the rest of the world, that Instagram had agreed to be acquired by Facebook in a $1 billion deal negotiated personally by Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg. The deal included $300 million in cash and the rest was in Facebook stock. Instagram was privately owned by its founders, Mr. Systrom and Mr. Krieger, who had a majority stake in the company, and several venture capital funds.
The people familiar with the negotiations said Twitter executives were shocked that they had not been given an opportunity to present a counteroffer. They said Twitter was prepared to make higher offers.
Facebook and Mr. Systrom declined to comment about the statements made to regulators or the talks with Twitter. Gabriel Stricker, a Twitter spokesman, also declined to comment.
Although it might seem unimportant whether wealthy investors made a few million dollars less than they could have, those investors often represent funds that include workers’ pensions and mutual funds. The case could also be seen as another example of a large tech company’s sidestepping regulators.
Statements made by other people involved in the Instagram deal don’t add up, either. When Facebook submitted its applications to California regulators, its general counsel, Ted Ullyot, wrote that although the board had considered possible alternatives, there was a “lack of interest in acquiring the company expressed by other potential acquirers of the company.” Through a spokesman, Facebook declined to comment.
Mark Leyes, director of communications for the Corporations Department, said the department — which is to protect consumers and investors from self-dealing in transactions — had “not received any complaints or protests of our original fairness hearing proceedings in the Facebook/Instagram acquisition.”
In general, said Eric Talley, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “if there is sworn testimony, there are perjury risks.” Also, he added, “there are fraud risks in which an inaccurate statement to your investors could violate antifraud laws at both the state or federal level.”
Dr. Talley said there were many reasons people might try to hide information from investors, including “deal sweeteners,” in which someone might be allowed to remain head of a company or be given more cash.
Mr. Systrom, who previously worked on mergers and acquisitions at Google, was careful about his interactions with Twitter from the start. He asked to meet in restaurants around San Francisco, rather than in either company’s office, according to people briefed on the talks. When he was handed the term sheet by a Twitter employee, a nonbinding document outlining the terms of a proposed acquisition, he read it and then handed it back, asking Twitter executives to hold onto it over the weekend as he weighed the details, those people said.
It is possible investors would have been better off selling in an open auction, to Twitter or even to Google or Microsoft.
The deal with Facebook closed at $735 million in early September, after Facebook’s stock plunged because of investors’ fears that its revenue growth prospects were weak. Given that the privately traded Twitter is expected to make $1 billion in revenue next year, which would increase its valuation considerably, Instagram investors might have made millions of more dollars.
It is unclear why Facebook didn’t mention Twitter’s interest. A clue might be found in the company’s amended S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, outlining details of the Instagram acquisition: Dr. Talley said it used language often reserved for antitrust cases.
The wording in the updated S-1 filing, which included a termination fee of 20 percent if the deal fell through, “suggests that there really was some concern about antitrust clearance from the F.T.C.,” Dr. Talley said, referring to the Federal Trade Commission. “These antitrust questions would not have been raised if Instagram was selling to Twitter or Google.”
An F.T.C. spokesman, Mitchell J. Katz, declined to comment.
There also is the issue of what Mr. Systrom and regulators consider a “formal offer.” Although lawyers make differing arguments, Mr. Systrom was asked by regulators on several occasions if he had received other offers, formal or otherwise, and each time he said no.
Facebook has tangled with regulators before. What it does with its customers’ data attracted the attention of the F.T.C., which accused it last year of “unfair and deceptive” practices. The agency’s settlement with the company required Facebook to submit to privacy audits for 20 years.
Facebook has also sparred with the S.E.C. over its depiction of its mobile strategy in its filing to go public.
At the end of the hearing, regulators asked Mr. Systrom a third time about other offers: if there had been “any other inquiries from third parties about a possible acquisition of Instagram” after the Facebook deal was announced. Although Twitter executives had since tried to contact Mr. Systrom, he replied, “I and the board have not received any.”
E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com→ Washington’s Blog
As I noted last year, you can tell how interested Congress and the White House are in uncovering the truth by looking at how much money is actually budgeted for investigation:
The government spent $175 million investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster. It spent $152 million on the the Columbia disaster investigation.
It spent $30 million investigating the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The government only authorized $15 million for the 9/11 Commission.
And how much has the government authorized for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission? You know, the commission charged with getting to the bottom of what caused the financial |
10) and Bradley Roby (5-11) also will probably get some looks.
Denver probably will defend Jones the same way it defended Bengals’ receiver A.J. Green with a cornerback, typically Talib, playing man-to-man coverage on short and intermediate routes with safeties Darian Stewart or T.J. Ward protecting against the deep route.
The biggest mistake a once-feared Panthers defense made against the Falcons was leaving their cornerbacks, an overmatched Bene Benwikere and two rookies, in too many one-on-one situations, allowing Jones to run free deep as Ryan hit him for big play after big play. Sometimes they sent linebacker help to shade Jones underneath, but that was no aid when he turned the burners on against Benwikere for several deep catches.
Ryan and Jones became the first quarterback-receiver duo to reach at least 500 passing yards and at least 300 receiving yards in an NFL game.
“You’re talking about two Pro Bowl players. It’s hard to stop them,” Broncos nose tackle Sylvester Williams said. “It’s not surprising at all.”
Denver embraces playing against pass-heavy offenses. The Broncos lead the NFL in sacks with 17. Outside linebacker Von Miller (5.5) and defensive end Derek Wolfe (four) have more sacks combined than 21 NFL teams. They also rank in the top five in total defense, passing defense and points allowed per game.
Meanwhile, Atlanta boasts the NFL’s top scoring offense, averaging 38 points a game. Ryan completed 14-of-16 passes for 415 yards and three touchdowns on passes longer than 10 yards downfield against Carolina, according to ESPN Stats and Info. And Jones gained 120 of his 300 yards after the catch. Denver Broncos More Broncos news
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Despite the gaudy numbers, previous success is no indicator of future success against Denver’s defense.
Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers learned that last season when the Broncos held him and his then-undefeated Packers to 77 passing yards. Tom Brady was battered, bruised and hit at least 17 times in the AFC championship game that Denver won in January. Cam Newton felt the pressure, getting sacked nine times in back-to-back losses to the Broncos in Super Bowl 50 and this season’s opener. Andrew Luck of the Colts felt it too, as did the Bengals’ Andy Dalton and the Bucs’ Jameis Winston. None has crossed the 200-yard passing threshold against the Broncos defense this season.
“They were just better than us. We just couldn’t do anything against them,” Bucs receiver Mike Evans said about Denver after Sunday’s game. “They’re a simple defense, and we were getting the looks we thought we were going to get, we just couldn’t beat them.”
A lot of teams have left a game against the Broncos feeling that way.
Atlanta presents more problems. If a team overcompensates to stop Ryan, Jones and its passing attack, the Falcons can beat you with a running back duo of Devonta Freeman and Tevin Coleman. To go along with Atlanta’s top-ranked passing attack, Atlanta has the No. 6 rushing attack.
“We’re looking forward to the challenge, man,” Williams said. “I’ll take our secondary any day of the week.”
300 club
Sunday, Falcons receiver Julio Jones became the sixth player to gain 300 or more receiving yards in an NFL game:
Rank. Player | Yards | Team v. Opponent, Date
1. Flipper Anderson | 336 | Los Angeles Rams vs. New Orleans Saints, Nov. 26, 1989
2. Calvin Johnson | 329 | Detroit Lions vs. Dallas Cowboys, Oct. 27, 2013
3. Stephone Paige | 309 | Kansas City Chiefs vs. San Diego Chargers, Dec. 22, 1985
4. Jim Benton | 303 | Cleveland Rams vs. Detroit Lions, Nov. 22, 1945
5. Cloyce Box | 302 | Detroit Lions vs. Baltimore Colts, Dec. 3, 1950
6. Julio Jones | 300 | Atlanta Falcons vs. Carolina Panthers, Oct. 2, 2016
Cameron Wolfe, The Denver PostAs a moto-journalist since 1984, I’ve witnessed motorcycle and tire technology soar each year... but there hasn’t been a commensurate decrease in crashes. And in 1986 I got scared: Senator John Danforth’s legislation to limit horsepower had me imagining our sport decimated by politicians, and the vision made me sick. Luckily, I was in a position to do something about it: I wrote The Pace. And every weekend my group of friends, most of whom had won at least a class championship at Willow Springs International Raceway, rode The Pace. These were seriously talented riders, but like you, we each had to work Monday morning. Our pace evolved from the dual desires to enjoy a modern sportbike and survive a potentially deadly sport in a dangerous world. It was the best of times, and riders around the planet read and adopted The Pace. So here we are more than 20 years later. The Pace’s message continues to ring true in many ways but I want to review and strengthen the best of the message and make amendments to the worst. Let’s call it Pace 2.0. REAL-WORLD RIDE ROADRACING CHAMPIONS FIND find and maintain a pace that keeps them near the front. The stakes for street riders are higher due to the ever-changing and uncontrolled environment; finding an enjoyable, survivable pace on today’s exemplary bikes takes mental forethought and physical skills. Physical skills start with scanning eyes that feed information to calm and smooth hands. Mental forethought begins with relentless concentration and the constant thought, “What’s next?” Every ride, practice for the inevitable emergency when suddenly everything counts. SPEED: Street crashes often are a result of going too fast for conditions. Master brake control for safety!
Street crashes often are a result of going too fast for conditions. Master brake control for safety! HAZARDS: The street offers many challenges: Ride your own pace and never feel pressured to ride someone else’s.
The street offers many challenges: Ride your own pace and never feel pressured to ride someone else’s. COMFORT: Feeling uncomfortable with your street pace is often a prelude to a crash. Use a track to push your limits.
Feeling uncomfortable with your street pace is often a prelude to a crash. Use a track to push your limits. TECHNOLOGY: Bikes and tires are improving … are you? Experts designed your bike: Ride it better, it will work better.
The Pace 2.0 Illustration by Kevin Hand
The Good The separation of street and track has to be stressed in riding groups. One leader, changing as frequently as desired. Passing within the group only after a wave-by. Keeping an eye on your friends because you’re riding with your friends, not against your friends. Your goal is not money and a trophy, it’s to get to breakfast every Sunday, tour Europe at a fun pace, enjoy a modern motorcycle on great roads, ride with your friends. Riding against your friends is what a racetrack is for. Go to a track day. Enter a club race. Reserve the street for riding with your friends at a pace that allows you a margin of error for the unexpected, because not only is street riding much less predictable than track riding, but there are many more immovable objects to hit should things go wrong. Limiting straightaway speed makes sense from so many angles. Radar traps usually hide on the straights and going fast in a straight line is just so... simple. Rushing corner entrances on the street continues to lead the list of causes of single-bike crashes, and riders who do it in right-hand corners with oncoming traffic die. Give yourself a straight-line speed limit when you’re out sport riding. There are a few states that have mandatory jail time for speeds over 100 mph, so setting your own limits might save major hassle. Want to go seriously fast all day? Visit your local racetrack... Bonneville... Maxton... El Mirage... the dragstrip. On the street, know that lots of speed all the time will eventually catch you out.
THE ART OF SMOOTH: The tire will take a tremendous load, but not an abrupt load. Focus on smooth initial throttle application/brake pressure, especially at lean angle or on suspect surfaces. Also, focus on brake release: You’ll find you're in control of your bike’s rebound and compression damping. Illustration by Kevin Hand
I’m a fan of small, constant corrections. Talk about all this stuff in your group. Talk about mistakes you make or see. What makes you uncomfortable? Be tactful, but don’t put up with idiots in your group. Reduce their idiocy or move them or yourself out. This sport is edgy enough; don’t hang around with riders making bad decisions. The Pace considers body position, and discussion of this circles back to outright speed in an environment that is basically uncontrolled, the opposite of what is found on a racetrack. Roadracers hang off their bikes to run less lean angle and street riders can do that, too, except that I’ve seen riders hang off their bikes on the street and then increase their speed until they’re running “fun” lean angles. Because of hanging off, these “fun” lean angles can be at extremely high speeds. When a surprise happens, the extra speed is a killer. Dragging a knee on the street is insane and a clear indication of mistaking public road for the track. The track is the place with an ambulance 60 seconds away... room to run off... tech inspection... corner workers... rules governing direction... no oncoming traffic. Do I sound preachy? I hope so. So, The Pace talks about not hanging off, first as a speed control, and second to appear less guilty to officers of the law. I shift my body to the inside of the bike, moving my head a bit to load the inside footpeg to help the bike turn, saving the big hang-off move for unexpected gravel/hazards or a surprisingly tight corner. Relaxed and mellow and innocent, sir. All that said, I have two friends who hang off in the corners and have the discipline to run sane speeds. Can an article teach judgment and discipline? No, hospitals teach that.
DOWNSHIFT LIKE A REAL PRO: Even with a slipper clutch, blip the throttle to bring up rpm to match the lower gear before releasing the lever. Also, don't snap out the lever too quickly. Real pros use two fingers and pull in only enough to disengage the clutch plates. Illustration by Kevin Hand
The Bad In The Pace I wrote that you might not see a brake light flash all day. This is misleading. Readers could interpret this to mean that using the brakes is wrong, and I should have been much clearer. Yes, riding up Angeles Crest Highway with almost no corners below 50 mph, seeing the brake light would be uncommon because we weren’t hammering the throttle on the straights. But if you went with us to tight-and-twisty Stunt Road in Malibu, you’d see lots of brake lights. Brakes. Yes. To not only control your speed, but your steering geometry, too. That is the biggest and most important clarification in The Pace 2.0: The use of brakes. You go to the brakes anytime you need your speed controlled more than is possible by simply closing the throttle. The faster you ride, the more brakes you will use, all things (like lean angle) being equal. If you’re in the habit of slamming on the brakes at every corner entrance, you are definitely not riding The Pace and that big speed and abruptness will eventually hurt you. If you use a little brake pressure to trail-brake (brake while turning) into the occasional corner, you’ve got the right idea. Pace 2.0 Updates The Pace 2.0 wants you to add this to your riding portfolio: “I can go to the brakes any time during my ride.” Yes, even leaned over in your favorite corner. In my book, Sport Riding Techniques, on fastersafer.com and at Yamaha Champions Riding School, I give each tire 100 points of total grip. If you’re leaned over and using 98 points (98 percent of the front tire’s grip is going to cornering forces), you have two points left for braking. Most riders aren’t subtle enough with initial braking to be able to use the remaining two points, so this subtlety is something Pace 2.0 wants you to master. Know that your ability to squeeze on one or two points of brakes is the difference between the bike running wide across the centerline because of no brake application (no speed or geometry control), or the bike steering into the corner and delivering you safely to breakfast.
MULTI-TASKING: This sport rewards subtlety and punishes abruptness. Learn to move quickly but smoothly. THE HANDS OF the onboard engineer can do a lot to make a perfect bike evil and an evil bike perfect. Your left hand is the slipper clutch, your right hand is the compression and rebound damping adjuster. Your palms will be heavily loaded under braking, but your elbows shouldn’t be locked. Holding light, steady throttle midcorner keeps the bike on line.
For those who say their bike stands up in the corner when they brake, this is almost always a result of too much initial lever force, which bottoms the fork and flattens the tire (and its contact patch) too abruptly, upsetting the bike. This sport is more subtle than these riders understand. Same with initial throttle. Make your first application of power so smoothly that the suspension loads and the tire loads, and the contact patch expands...smoothly. More rubber, more grip. Traction loss is rarely a simple case of using too many total points; far more often it is a case of points being added too quickly. Read that sentence again, please. Quit grabbing, stabbing, hammering—and quit “flicking” the bike into the corner. Add braking, throttle and steering points in a linear manner so when you do creep up to the tire’s maximum, it has a chance to gently slide and warn you about its limit. In the second article, on The Pace, my views on trail-braking started to evolve because racing was teaching me so much. For speed on the track or safety on the street, you must be able to use some brake pressure at lean angle. On the street in corners you brake for, do your best to “leave the brake light on” at corner turn-in so you are taking advantage of slightly better steering geometry provided by fork compression. The Pace 2.0 needs you to understand the formula Radius = mph (and mph = Radius), and not just in theory. You need to feel it. Find an empty parking lot and ride in a circle at a given lean angle, one that you’re comfortable with. Pick this lean angle, and then gently accelerate while doing your best to hold that very same lean angle. Then do it again and gently decelerate, again holding the same lean angle. Increase your speed and your radius increases, slow your speed and your radius decreases. Steady throttle holds it. After this exercise, you’ll realize how insane it is that some new riders are being taught to increase throttle and push on the inside handlebar if they enter a corner too fast.
"TRAIL-RIDING Forward weight transfer on a motorcycle steepens rake and shortens trail, which, if used effectively by the rider, makes turn-in feel like magic. A COMPRESSED FORK aids turn-in through improved geometry and a bigger tire contact patch (see below). But it has to be in the effective travel range: Releasing brakes before turn-in extends the fork and the bike wants to run wide. Get to the turn-in point with excessive brake pressure and the fork is too collapsed, again forcing the bike to run wide. Learn to use the brakes for both speed and geometry control.
Getting your brain in gear before your bike goes into gear is a big part of 2.0. Call it being in the moment or having a plan or focusing. Most important is clearing your head and asking: What’s next? That two-word question, repeated often during your ride, might go further to reduce crashes than anything except better brake use. What’s next? Write it on your triple clamp, mutter it out loud, whisper it every five seconds, maybe yell it out to your friends just before the faceshields snap shut. Riders of longer, heavier bikes should master both front and rear brakes because, in an emergency, each brake does about 50 percent of the work. I’ve headed Harley-Davidson’s “Back to the Track” program for years and can tell you firsthand that the best stops and speed control on a cruiser/dresser/bobber utilize both front and rear brakes in roughly equal measure. Perhaps the biggest myth lies in the sportbike world where riders have heard “never touch the rear brake.” The advice should be “never stab the rear brake.” Yes, in an emergency situation, it might only provide a small percentage of the overall stopping power due to a sportbike’s weight transfer, but this sport is all about small percentages. If you miss the car in your lane by one foot, you’ve missed the car, right? Add rear-brake finesse to your riding portfolio.
CONTROL FORK DIVE: Under hard braking the fork will collapse about five inches. But it’s the pace at which it collapses that really counts. To retain grip in an emergency, train yourself to never, ever, grab or stab at the brake lever. Use your car, truck, van or bicycle to always practice this “never stab.” Illustration by Kevin Hand
Twenty Years We’ve all evolved over the last 20 years, but bikes have evolved more quickly than most riders. What I believe and teach (and do on every ride or drive) really counts when the pace is up or the grip is down. Let me close 2.0 with this: Most of us don’t approach our riding improvement seriously enough. Get relentlessly focused on your riding, don’t put up with riding errors, don’t think “good enough” is: When you add speed to mistakes, you don’t just hit the ball into the net. Our riding mistakes not only hurt bodies and wallets, but our sport, as well. Consider giving this article to your friends, or adopting it for your club. More important: Carefully evaluate the riding advice out there and seriously study how you ride your pace. It may help save our sport. Riding well is the most wonderful feeling in the world, the reason we’re all hooked, and that’s what The Pace celebrates. You’re riding quick and controlled. Your friends file through a tight, left-right-left with the fluidity of a rushing stream. Your mirror is filled with friends riding your pace, using their eyes, brakes, throttle and body to ride with you. You arrive together. You and our sport are healthy tomorrow. The best. Control the Contact Patch
Contact patch examples. Illustration by Kevin Hand
OF THE TWO tires above, which has more grip? Correct, #2. More rubber touching the road is more grip. And the best riders in the world are constantly working to be riding on #2. You can, too. Imagine coming into a corner on the brakes: Your front contact patch is expanded and you’re on the #2 tire, lots of rubber on the road. But before you turn into the corner, you jump off the brakes, the fork springs rebound and suddenly you’re on the #1 tire. And then you ask that tire to take a cornering load! Leaving a bit of brake pressure on at the turn-in point will give you more rubber on the road. It’s called trail-braking and you need to do it to win championships or ride your chosen pace all your life. You’re trailing off brake pressure as you add lean angle, trading “braking points” for “lean-angle points.” And riding on the #2 tire is faster and safer. The same applies for corner exits. Apply throttle smoothly midcorner to transfer weight rearward and you will always be accelerating on the #2 tire with more grip.As much as Rep. Devin Nunes tried to obfuscate the questions asked by Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, he had to admit there were no FISA warrants to surveil Trump Tower by President Obama and the Trump administration submitted no evidence to support his allegations that Obama spied on him.
Chris Wallace asked, "You said earlier this week that you had, your words, "no evidence" of the Trump claim that he had been wiretapped in Trump Tower by President Obama during the campaign. Then, on Friday, you got a response to questions from the FBI on this issue of whether they had any evidence of surveillance there. I know you can't say much about it, but based on what you receive from the FBI on Friday, do you want to amend your statement that there’s no evidence of wiretapping?"
Rep. Nunes replied, "No."
As soon as Nunes said functionally admitted that Trump is lying, he tried to pull a Kellyanne Conway and muddy the question by bringing in information that Wallace never asked about. It's an old tactic that has been perfected by Conway and her team of Trump apologists.
Rep. Nunes regurgitated the same fictitious talking points that every Trump surrogate has memorized on this issue: while there is no evidence Obama spied on Trump, Gen. Flynn was illegally surveilled and "unmasked" by the intelligence community, so something is rotten in Sweden errr...Denmark.
Wallace ignored his lengthy answer and said, "Well, I just -- I just want to make that point because you -- you -- there is no evidence that there was any wiretapped -- I'm not talking with President Obama doing it, but his administration -- no evidence of any wiretapping of Trump Tower?
Nunes replied, "No -- no -- there was no FISA warrant that I'm aware of to Trump -- to tap Trump Tower. That’s correct."
Wallace, "And that's after you received this information?"
Nunes. "That's accurate."
There you have it. When will Trump apologize to President Obama already?
Yeah, I know, he never will. He'll pull the same Birther move he used and will tell the press, "while there were many reports saying he was surveilled, he successfully ended the controversy by not finding any."
↓ Story continues below ↓
When Wallace followed up by playing a video of Trump telling the world that he's going to supply new evidence that President Obama did surveil him, he asked, "As I said, we’re going to get to the unmasking issue, which is a serious issue, in a moment. But is -- do you know what he's talking about? Is there any evidence of any surveillance, electronic surveillance --"
Rep. Nunes didn't respond to Trump's words, but reiterated the Trump administration's talking points that they don't have the information yet about how the Intel community is "unmasking names."
They are trying to equate the leaks their administration has to Trump's lies about Obama.
As Jake Tapper has already said, they are still trying to prove the world is flat.
I'm surprised Wallace didn't bring up the international incident Sean Spicer caused by reading off Judge Napolitano's bogus claim that the Britain's GCHQ were tasked to surveil Trump, more "fake news" that forced the White House to issue an apology, though Spicer denied it. Lies upon lies upon lies.
I imagine Wallace either felt there wasn't time to get to that or didn't want to get Fox News involved in the story at this time since they have egg on their faces.
Either way, Rep. Nunes begrudgingly confirmed that Trump lied about President Obama on Fox News.
The question remains: how much more of this will it take before even Fox News viewers stop believing the Trump White House?But the pattern of involvement by C.I.A. officers raises new questions about the agency's role in the case, and is likely to be the subject of scrutiny at a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on international security on Thursday. Mr. Abdel Rahman helped to recruit Arab Muslims to fight in the American-backed war in Afghanistan, and his lawyer and Egyptian officials have said he was helped by the C.I.A. to enter the United States.
Mr. Abdel Rahman, who is blind and walks with a cane, was tried and acquitted in connection with the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat, but remained under house arrest in Egypt until 1986. He was later charged with inciting a 1989 riot in Egypt.
Although he was widely known for his connection to the Sadat assassination, Mr. Abdel Rahman was not placed on a State Department watch list of those ineligible for entry to the United States until 1987. At least one and perhaps two of his visa applications were nevertheless approved by the C.I.A. officers even after he was added to that list of 2.7 million foreigners.
The C.I.A. declined to discuss any role played by its officers in reviewing Mr. Abdel Rahman's visa applications. But a spokesman for the agency said tonight, "The C.I.A. has never sought in any way to facilitate the entry of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman into the United States."
The spokesman, who insisted that his name not be used, also said that the agency had "no indication that the C.I.A. ever employed or used Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in any capacity whatsoever."
American officials had acknowledged last week that the diplomat at the United States Embassy in Khartoum who signed the May 1990 visa request that allowed Mr. Abdel Rahman to enter the United States was in fact a C.I.A. officer.
But in interviews this week, the officials from Congress and the Administration said that incident was merely the last in a series of seven incidents in which the Egyptian cleric and C.I.A. officers crossed paths in United States embassies in Egypt and Sudan beginning in 1986.
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Altogether, the officials said, it is clear that C.I.A. officers granted Mr. Abdel Rahman three visas, in Cairo in 1986 and 1987 and in Sudan in 1990. In a fourth incident after 1987, a notation on an application found in the United States Embassy in Cairo indicates that Mr. Rahman's application was approved, but it is unclear whether that visa was ever issued to him, said the officials, who were summarizing the State Department report.
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The officials said it was nevertheless evident in that case that Mr. Abdel Rahman had not been rejected because of his connections to terrorism.
Only once, in July 1987, did a C.I.A. officer recognize the Egyptian cleric for his ties to possible criminal activities and reject his application for that reason, they said.
"These guys, in most of the cases, didn't recognize him," a Congressional official said of the C.I.A. officers. "Only one time he got turned down because of who he was." Deep Flaws in System Cited
The official and others from Congress and the Administration nevertheless stressed that the State Department investigation of the matter had found no clear evidence of wrongdoing by the C.I.A. officers. They said the C.I.A. employees may have committed some blunders, but that much of the fault lay with deep flaws in the system maintained by the State Department to identify foreign nationals who should not be permitted to enter the United States.
"Just because you work for the agency, I don't know that you should know every bad guy in Egypt who walks through the door," said a Congressional official who was given a classified briefing on the case.
The extent of C.I.A. involvement in reviewing Mr. Abdel Rahman's visa applications at minimum exposes what Congressional officials described as the extensive assignment of C.I.A. officers to even low-level United States embassy jobs.
The Congressional officials said that while the practice is somewhat sensitive and not widely known, it is not unusual for a low-level C.I.A. officer to be assigned a post as a consular official, as they had been in each of the seven cases. They said the duty is regarded as potentially valuable for inexperienced C.I.A. officers because it brings them into contact with foreign nationals, while embassies are often eager to fill the posts, which are not widely sought by regular Foreign Service officers.
Mr. Abdel Rahman's lawyer, Barbara Nelson, had said earlier that the sheik traveled to the United States on tourist visas in 1986 and 1987. But officials of the Immigration and Naturalization Service have said they have no record of either trip.
The report by the State Department's inspector general, Sherman Funk, was said by the Administration and Congressional officials to provide the first authoritative account of Mr. Abdel Rahman's efforts to acquire a United States visa.Cal running back Vic Enwere appeared to have secured a catch over the middle, but he got drilled in the back before he could tuck away the ball.
After the loose ball was batted around several times, defensive back Josh Drayden snagged it out of the air to complete the play and bring the practice to a close.
It was a fitting way for Saturday’s practice to end as the Bears’ defense generally dominated a scrimmage sequence that included 19 series of live 11-on-11 action.
The defense stopped the offense on 14 of 19 series, recording six three-and-outs and four turnovers.
“We call them takeaways,” senior inside linebacker Raymond Davison III said. “It’s not even about holding them or getting off the field. We want to get the ball back to our offense.
“That’s something we want and something we know will help to change the paradigm of the defense.”
Cal’s defense has widely been considered the weak link for a program that has been in a tailspin. The Bears have ranked among the nation’s bottom five in both points allowed and total yardage yielded in three of the past four seasons.
The Bears allowed 42.6 points per game (127th out of 128 teams) and 518.3 yards from scrimmage (125th) last season before a transformation that brought in head coach Justin Wilcox, who has been a defensive coordinator in 11 of his 16 seasons in college coaching, and defensive coordinator Tim DeRuyter, who has helped to install a 3-4 defense and change the culture of the maligned unit.
“As a group, we want to be great,” Davison said. “We’re tired of hearing Cal’s defense is this or that. We have a chip on our shoulder, and we want to make a difference.”
That was certainly obvious during Saturday’s practice, during which sophomore defensive back Jaylinn Hawkins had two interceptions and Drayden added the practice-ender. The most game-changing play, however, came a little earlier in the session.
Quarterbacks Chase Forrest, Ross Bowers, Chase Garbers and Brandon McIlwain pretty evenly split snaps, and Bowers had the best statistical day. The sophomore completed 10 of 15 passes for 145 yards and drove the offense from the opposing 20-yard-line to 6 yards away from a touchdown.
On a fourth-and-goal play from the 6-yard line, Bowers got hit as he was throwing. The ball wobbled behind the line of scrimmage, and Drayden picked it up at about the 20 and raced 80 yards.
“I saw the ball behind the line of scrimmage, so I scooped it up,” Drayden said. “You know me, I don’t like to fall on it. I don’t think any DB wants to fall on it. We want to pick it up and run.
“When I was running, I was thinking: ‘I know D-Rob (Demetris Robertson) is on the field. Don’t get caught by D-Rob.’ Once I saw (James) Looney got the block, I knew we made it.”
Rusty Simmons is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rsimmons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Rusty_SFChronWASHINGTON The Pentagon has not started complying with a law requiring the payment of monthly bonuses of up to $500 to soldiers forced to remain on active duty beyond their enlistment period, military officials said. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman acknowledged the five-month delay in paying the bonuses and said the Defense Department is working on a plan to start paying the almost 13,000 soldiers currently under the Army's stop-loss orders. Although Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants to end the policy, the number of soldiers affected has risen since the middle of 2007. Congress added $72 million to pay for the bonuses in its plan for the budget year that started Oct. 1. The money was to be paid after the Pentagon submitted a plan outlining how the payments would be made. But no plan has been provided, Rob Blumenthal, a spokesman for the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Friday. "It is unacceptable that the Department (of Defense) has failed to construct a plan for issuing these payments," said Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. "Stop loss is nothing more than a backdoor draft, and … if the Defense Department is going to insist on holding servicemembers under stop-loss orders, then they should be compensated for their service." Paul Rieckhoff, executive director and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said the Pentagon is "dragging its feet" on implementing the pay bonus. Since 2002, the military has relied on stop loss to keep its most skilled and experienced troops in the service. The Army is the only service that has used it in the past five years, according to a Congressional Research Service report released last month. The number of soldiers affected by stop loss peaked in 2005 at 15,758. Gates first directed the Army to minimize the use of stop loss in January 2007. However, after falling to 8,540 in May 2007, the number of soldiers on stop loss has risen to almost 13,000 in December 2008, Army records show. That's almost 10% of the total number of soldiers deployed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Congressional Research Service report shows. Gates directed Army leaders in January to present a comprehensive plan for ending the stop-loss policy, Whitman said. Gates is due to be briefed on those plans this week, Whitman said. "Senior officials are disappointed that the recent trend has been going in the wrong direction with respect to the numbers (of soldiers currently stop-lossed)," Whitman said. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read moreBy next Monday Walt Disney World will have fixed one of its top-5 blunders (according the the tastes of our blog staff) by removing the "Under New Management" Iago and Zazu duo from its Tropical Serenade. In celebration we bring you one of our favorite Tiki Room-related stories. Enjoy the story of Diana Lai and how she was hired by Walt Disney himself to be one of Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room VIP Hostesses before the Disneyland show opened its doors to the public. Diana's step-son Dano was fortunate enought to convince her to write down her story.
"I pestered my stepmother in 2004 to write about her experiences of being the VIP hostess of the Enchanted Tiki Room when it first opened. I did this with the intentions of sharing the story with fellow Tiki Centralites who might find her story interesting. Unfortunately, the email she sent me was saved to a file without ever posting. With her upcoming 65th birthday approaching I have resurrected the saved email and am finally posting." —Dano
Dano,
OK, you win. It is 5:00 a.m., I cannot sleep any longer and don't want to wake the kiddies by working in my scrapping center, so I have time to write some Tiki talk.
In May of 1963, when I was a freshman at Whittier College, I saw a flyer posted that would be outlawed today. It said that Oriental students were needed for a new attraction at Disneyland. I thought that it sounded like glamorous summer work, so I went there to apply. There was a pile of papers to complete first, including written verbal and math tests. I was told that I would be called when to come back for an interview.
A week later, I returned to be interviewed by Walt Disney himself! He told me all about his latest achievement, Audio-Animatronics, and said that he needed a VIP hostess to inform important visitors to the Magic Kingdom about the workings of the Tiki Room, his newest project "baby" in Adventureland. At the conclusion of the long interview, he said he liked two things about me: that I had background experience through hula that gave me understanding of the culture and Hawaiian language of the tikis in the Lanai patio behind the juice bar of the Tiki Room, and that I was educated and articulate enough for him to personally train to introduce his "baby" to special guests at his theme park. I was very flattered that he also thought me a "pretty little miss" suitable for his newest project. The show was originally planned to be walk-through in a restaurant setting, but the adjacent Tahitian Terrace was refurbished, and the Enchanted Tiki Room was developed as a separate attraction.
Needless to say for a 19-year old, I drove home floating on air about getting to talk to Walt Disney in person. I saw him on television every Sunday night. The next day I got a phone call asking me to report to Operations as soon as possible to sign a contract. I had been earning 95¢ an hour as hostess at 5 Lanterns, a Chinese restaurant, so I was thrilled to be offered $2.00 an hour, if I were to pay Teamster dues. That powerful union controlled the ride operators, and even after dues, that was a huge increase in wages for me.
Next came a big surprise. I was sent to Wardrobe to be fitted for a sarong and sandals, the uniform for Tiki Room girls. After passing the customary inspection for costumed park employees, I was directed to the Tiki Room. Walt Disney met me there and took me down to the basement of the building, where I was amazed by the technology behind the show. He told me that the mainframe computer with giant reels |
policy decisions. We’re referring, of course, to the Congressional Budget Office, which was created by Congress in 1974 to provide “impartial information about budgetary and economic issues,” CBO says. And CBO estimates that in 10 years there would be 6.4 million “future unauthorized residents” without the legislation and 4 million with it — a “net decline in future unauthorized residents” of 37.5 percent.
We arrived at those numbers by reviewing two different CBO reports.
In a June 18 report, CBO said on table 2 (page 15) that there would be a “net decline in future unauthorized residents” of 1.6 million by 2023 and 2.5 million by 2033 under the bill as approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. That report also said “the net annual flow of unauthorized residents would decrease by about 25 percent relative to what would occur under current law.” That means the CBO projects there would be 6.4 million more residents living in the U.S. illegally in 2023 and 10 million more in 2033 under current law, but those numbers would drop to 4.8 million in 2023 and 7.5 million in 2033 under the bill as approved by the committee.
That’s far less than the “20 or 30 million” people that Cruz says will be living illegally in the U.S. “in another 10, 20 years” if the Senate immigration bill becomes law.
But that’s not all. The bill was amended on the Senate floor to add more funds for border security, and as a result, CBO, in a July 3 letter to the committee chairman, said “the number of unauthorized residents in 2023 would be lower by about 800,000.”
So, CBO now projects the total “net decline in future unauthorized residents” would be 2.4 million by 2023 if the latest version of the Senate bill becomes law. That means, in 10 years there would be 4 million “future unauthorized residents” under the Senate-passed bill — a “net decline in future unauthorized residents” of 37.5 percent from the 6.4 million CBO projects under current law. (The CBO did not provide a revised figure for 2033.)
These are not facts, but they are projections from the nonpartisan source Congress uses in making policy decisions. And these projections indicate that Cruz’s statement is way off base.
After saying there is “no data that can prove or disprove this statement,” Rushton went on to say that the senator’s figures are conservative — if you consider what happened after the last time the nation overhauled the immigration laws, in 1986. He’s referring to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan and provided legal status to about 3 million people who had been living in the U.S. illegally.
Rushton, July 23: Basic arithmetic shows that in the 27 years after the United States offered amnesty to those here illegally without guaranteeing border security, illegal immigration increased by 367% — from 3 million to 11 million. … A 367% increase in illegal immigration from the current 11 million would equal just over 40 million. Senator Cruz’s statement predicted that level would rise to 20 or 30 million, so it’s a conservative estimate based on historical experience.
Rushton’s math is wrong and his logic is lacking.
True, there are about 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates there were 11.1 million people living in the U.S. illegally in 2011, down from 12 million in 2007. And it is widely accepted — including by the Senate Judiciary Committee — that the 1986 immigration law resulted in the legalization of about 3 million people. So those figures are correct. But that’s a 267 percent increase from 1986, not 367 percent.
More important, Rushton’s logic assumes the conditions for illegal immigration are the same today as they were in 1986 and that will result in the same outcome. That’s a flawed assumption.
Let’s consider border security. In 1986, there were 3,000 border agents in the Southwest and “technology at that time consisted literally of hand held flashlights, Vietnam-era sensors, very little lighting on the border, and certainly none of the outstanding technology that our agents work with today,” according to the May 22 congressional testimony of David V. Aguilar, a retired acting commissioner of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection who said he “spent 35 years working the borders of our country at many levels within the organizations responsible for the security of those borders.”
Today, he said, the nation has “unprecedented resources” at the border. Aguilar testified that there are more than 21,000 border patrol agents, “the highest level in its 88-year history”; there are more than 650 miles of border fence; and technology includes “integrated fixed towers, mobile surveillance units, and thermal imaging systems.”
The Senate-passed bill would double those numbers, adding 20,000 border agents and 700 miles of fencing, as a result of an amendment passed on the Senate floor by a 69-29 vote with Republican support.
And, as we saw in the CBO projections, enhancing border security is expected to make a difference in the flow of immigrants who cross the border illegally in the future.
— Eugene Kiely, with Madeleine StevensTexas Abortion Restrictions Shutter Two More Clinics
Several Texas abortion clinics are shutting down Thursday, in part due to restrictions passed by state lawmakers. They join a growing list of clinics that have closed since the law was passed.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The last two abortion clinics in Texas' Rio Grande Valley, along the Mexican border, are closing today. New restrictions passed by the Texas Legislature last year require that doctors at abortion clinics obtain admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. Well, many hospitals have been reluctant to grant those privileges and as NPR's Wade Goodwyn reports, today's closures have women's health advocates concerned.
WADE GOODWYN, BYLINE: The closing of the last two abortion clinics in the Rio Grande Valley means that for thousands of women, the nearest access to abortion will be in Corpus Christi, 150 miles away. And to get there, women will have to go through U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints. The sheer distance has raised concerns about the ability of poor young women to make the trip. And the checkpoints have women's advocates worried that undocumented pregnant women won't even try to seek access, that they'll try to do themselves instead. Andrea Ferrigno is the vice present for Whole Women's Health, which runs the two clinics.
ANDREA FERRIGNO: Unfortunately, I think this is going to become quite the public health crisis. I think the most unfortunate part of it is that there is going to be casualties before we see anything get better.
GOODWYN: Last October, U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel threw out the hospital admitting requirements, but the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Yeakel and left the restrictions in place as the appeal works its way through the courts. Wade Goodwyn, NPR News, Dallas.
Copyright © 2014 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.Imagine a digital-audio encoding and decoding system that delivers far better sound quality than that of any previous analog or digital technology, including 192kHz/24-bit and quad-rate DSD. Now imagine that this system’s bit rate is between 0.8 and 1.5Mbps, down to one-tenth that of conventional “hi-res,” allowing it to be streamed or downloaded in standard FLAC or Apple Lossless file formats. Finally, consider the possibility that this system would be based on a single file format that is backward compatible with existing delivery systems and playback devices, from smartphone streaming to downloads that feed the highest of high-end home DACs.
Sound like an impossible dream? Read on, and I’ll show you how Meridian’s Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) pulls off this remarkable feat.
MQA in Practice
Before getting into the technical aspects of MQA, let’s review the basics. Master Quality Authenticated is an innovative and sophisticated new method of encoding digital audio that simultaneously improves fidelity and lowers the bit rate. It’s a suite of technologies that addresses the limitations of conventional digital audio by rethinking the entire chain, from acoustic source to playback device. It was developed by Meridian Audio co-founder Bob Stuart and longtime collaborator Peter Craven of Algol Applications.
In practice, MQA is delivered to listeners as a conventional lossless file, such as FLAC or Apple Lossless at 44kHz or 48kHz at 24 bits. If you play the file though a DAC without an MQA decoder, you’ll hear better-than-CD sound quality. If you play the file through a DAC with MQA decoding, you’ll hear the sound in the studio’s original bit rate, which could be anything from 44.1kHz to 384kHz (or higher), provided that your DAC can handle the studio’s sample frequency. This single-file hierarchical aspect of MQA has important implications for the technology’s adoption by record companies and content distributors.
The decoder can be implemented in many ways—partly integrated into a DAC chip, or as a bit of software in a phone, for examples. Every decoder will indicate to the listener when an MQA file is playing. Here’s where the “Authenticated” part of Master Quality Authenticated comes in; the MQA light or icon assures that what the listener is hearing on playback is exactly what the engineers heard in the studio. How does this happen? MQA ties the studio’s analog-to-digital converter and the listener’s digital-to-analog converter into what is effectively a single system. In addition, MQA’s rich metadata carries information about the particular analog-to-digital converter and encapsulation used to make the recording or transfer so that the decoder can play it back correctly. And if the decoder knows what DAC it’s driving, it can also optimize its sound. This is why MQA can claim to authenticate the studio experience for the listener.
As of this writing, more than fifty companies—from major players to niche high-end firms—plan to support MQA with compatible playback devices. Meridian has already launched its first MQA-capable DAC, the $299 Explorer2. The lossless streaming service Tidal is behind MQA in a big way; it will begin streaming MQA files in Q2 of this year. MQA allows Tidal to give its customers real high-resolution streams in a format that fits Tidal’s existing distribution infrastructure. In an e-mail exchange, Pål Bråtelund, Strategic Partnership Manager at Tidal, said: “At first, I thought the last thing the industry needed was another codec. But then Bob [Stuart] played some recordings I knew extremely well, and I instantly understood that MQA may be what makes people talk about great recordings and great music rather than about ‘hi-res.’”
For Tidal, and also for the world’s record companies, MQA solves the big problem of multiple inventories for different playback applications. A single MQA file works for every listener on every device. This backward compatibility and single inventory are powerful incentives for record companies and content distributors to adopt MQA—quite apart from the improved sound.
So now let’s address that confounding issue of just why MQA sounds better than any other format extant, and how it can do so at such low bit rates.LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Put the blame on Blame for breaking Zenyatta's magnificent winning streak -- and a lot of hearts, too.
Jockey Mike Smith wept. Owners Jerry and Ann Moss stood in stunned silence. Trainer John Shirreffs trudged slowly back to the barn, hands in his pockets.
Nineteen times the people behind Zenyatta led horse racing's superstar to the track. Nineteen times they'd celebrated with her in the winner's circle.
Jockey Mike Smith blamed himself after the race for Zenyatta's first loss, by a head to Blame. AP Photo/David J. Phillip
Not this time.
Blame beat Zenyatta by a head in a thrilling finish at the Breeders' Cup Classic on Saturday night, handing the 6-year-old mare her first defeat.
Zenyatta threaded her way through traffic from last place while the crowd of 72,739 urged her on as she unleashed a monstrous closing kick under the lights at Churchill Downs.
It was so close, a matter of inches, the result had to be resolved by a photo -- a picture that saddened not only Zenyatta's owners and trainer but millions of fans around the world.
It was so close, Ann Moss said she was hoping her horse had "stuck her tongue out" at the finish.
Smith blamed himself for the loss. He walked off the track with his head down, dirt stuck to his face.
"It was my fault," he said, sobbing. "She should've won."
Blame went to the front in mid-stretch, then fought off another gutty run by the massive mare, who lagged well behind 11 rivals -- all boys -- in her customary style.
Sent off at 5-1 odds, Blame ran 1 1/4 miles in 2:02.28 and paid $12.40, $4.40 and $3.80. Zenyatta returned $3.60 and $2.80. Fly Down was another 3½ lengths back in third and paid $8.60 to show. Preakness winner Lookin At Lucky finished fourth.
But the star, even in defeat, was Zenyatta, the sentimental even-money favorite.
She played to the crowd at every chance on her way to the starting gate. She high-stepped her way to the paddock, playfully pawing the ground as they roared. Ann Moss held her finger to her lips as a signal for the fans to quiet down.
"People who didn't know anything about horse racing became fans because of her," Blame's jockey Garrett Gomez said.
Zenyatta proved she could beat the boys last year when she rallied from behind to win the $5 million Classic at Santa Anita. It was one of her 17 wins on synthetic surfaces in her home state of California.
This time, though, she was facing the deepest, most talented field of her career on a surface where she had limited experience. Still, trainer Shirreffs had said she preferred it to synthetic tracks.
This was the third time she ran on dirt and in her two previous races, she beat other girls at Oaklawn Park in Arkansas.
But Blame had home-court advantage. He won twice before on dirt at Churchill, where Zenyatta had never raced.
"She ran an excellent race and just came up a little short," Shirreffs said. "She ran her heart out."
But Zenyatta's late-running style proved her undoing this time. She got away slow from the starting gate and spotted early leader First Dude 15 lengths over the opening half-mile.
At the back of the pack, Smith was coaxing Zenyatta to start making up ground. But it was a struggle. She was getting hit in the face with clods of dirt, something that doesn't happen on a synthetic track.
"She wasn't used to it," he said. "Although she's run on dirt twice, they were really short fields and really never got nothing in her face before."
Smith furiously tore through six pairs of goggles to keep a clear view of things.
"I just wish I would have been in the race a little earlier because I think the outcome would have certainly been different," the Hall of Fame jockey said.
Few would disagree.
When Zenyatta finally kicked into gear, Smith had plenty of horse left. She started her rally turning for home, dropping down to the inside rail with three furlongs to go and Blame on her outside.
Smith then angled her to the outside for clear running room, and the crowd exploded.
This was the famous come-from-behind run they had braved a cold November evening to see.
Zenyatta charged through the lane, gaining on Blame with every stride of her powerful legs. Gomez, aboard Blame, knew only Zenyatta could deny him the win.
"I was asking him as much as I could without asking him for everything," he said. "I was trying to save just enough so if she did get to me I had something and some kind of response."
It was just enough.
The loss might have cost Zenyatta a shot at Horse of the Year honors. She lost to Rachel Alexandra last year. This year's vote, announced in January, will come down to Blame vs. Zenyatta.
"I thought the battle for Horse of the Year was fought about a half-hour ago, and Blame won it," said Seth Hancock of Claiborne Farm, which co-owns Blame.
"She's a great horse, Zenyatta is. But she had her shot to get by, and she didn't do it. So I don't think you can vote for her."
Zenyatta's 19 consecutive wins tied her for most all-time with Peppers Pride, who retired last year after running against much lesser competition. Peppers Pride never raced outside New Mexico and all her wins came against fillies and mares.
"Zenyatta didn't lose anything," winning trainer Al Stall Jr. said. "I don't think you'll find anybody criticizing anything she's ever done, much less today. It was just two very good horses, and everybody talked about it coming down to these two for a long time. We were fortunate to have the right horse on the right day at the right time."
Instead of another merry jaunt to the winner's circle, the Mosses looked momentarily dazed.
"I thought she'd get there, but she just missed," he said. "She lost to a really good horse. We're real proud of her. She tried hard, she's the greatest."
All the great ones lose eventually.
Upset -- like Blame, another aptly named winner -- beat the unbeaten Man o'War; Triple Crown winner Secretariat was beaten; and Cigar won 16 in a row, but couldn't pull out one more.
During the two-day Breeders' Cup championships, American horses earned 12 victories while Europe-based horses won twice.
European import Goldikova successfully defended her title in the $2 million Mile for the third consecutive year against 10 rivals, including nine boys. Dangerous Midge won the $3 million Turf, and Pluck won the $1 million Juvenile Turf.
Big Drama led all the way to win the $2 million Sprint; Chamberlain Bridge won the $1 million Turf Sprint; and 37-1 long shot Dakota Phone won the $1 million Dirt Mile.
Uncle Mo won the $2 million Juvenile, giving trainer Todd Pletcher his third win of the weekend.
In the Juvenile Turf, Rough Sailing was euthanized after breaking a major bone in his upper leg when he slipped and fell going into the first turn. Jockey Rosie Napravnik wasn't hurt.Mainstream society has by and large been dominated by men for at least the past few millennia. But under-the-radar communities where women are at the center of the culture have long existed. Prevalent mostly in rural areas, matriarchal societies differ from the mainstream in many ways — some surprising, some less so.
Matriarchy is defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as a family, group, or state governed by a woman; or a system of social organization in which descent and inheritance are traced through the female line. Contrary to popular misgivings, the matriarchy is not a system where women lord over men; rather, as founder of the International Academy HAGIA for Modern Matriarchal Studies Heidi Goettner-Abendroth put it to Dame magazine:
The aim is not to have power over others and over nature, but to follow maternal values, i.e. to nurture the natural, social and cultural life based on mutual respect.This post is tangentially related to CHP.
Version control is a key tool when programming. Recently, much work has gone into distributed version control systems (DVCS) that dispense with the requirement to have a single central repository, and allow a distributed, loosely-connected network of repositories. There are many DVCS systems out there, but I use darcs (which happens to be written in Haskell) whenever I can. All my Haskell code lives in darcs repositories, and this post is intended to detail a little of how I use it.
Darcs and CHP
Here is the structure of my darcs repositories for CHP across my three development machines (no prizes for guessing my machine naming scheme) for the past few weeks:
Each box is a repository, with the thin arrow-less lines indicating the directory structure. The empty-headed arrows indicate the ways in which patches are pushed and pulled (they are pushed in the direction of the arrow, and pulled in the opposite direction). The directions of the horizontal arrows are far from arbitrary; while both my laptop and university machine can SSH into my home machine (middle), neither of the outer two can be contacted via SSH. Hence they also cannot push and pull directly between each other.
I have about ten repositories in that diagram, which is probably typical for CHP. I tend not to do much work in the top three (the main repositories on each machine, akin to trunks), they are mainly pass-through repositories as I shift patches around. All the work is done in the lower repositories (branches, if you like), which may exist on several of the machines (e.g. the split repository for the recent 2.0 split) and have patches passed between them regularly, or may exist only on one machine. I am usually logged in to two of the machines at once, so that I can push my patches across and test them on several different GHC versions (until last week, all three machines had distinct versions of GHC: 6.8, 6.10, 6.12).
For my other major Haskell project, Tock (which I will also make a post about soon), I could make a similar diagram, but extended on to it are the repositories of the maintainer, Adam. He accepts my emailed patches into one repository to examine them, then he pushes to his main repository, and then later on pushes the patches to the webserver. So my working copy can be about seven repositories away from the publicly visible “trunk”, but it’s absolutely painless for both of us. There is a limit on how many branches is sensible of course, but darcs makes branching so easy that the branch of a branch is no trouble, even when that might make you uneasy in older version control systems.
I should probably make the CHP repository available on a webserver somewhere — please say if that’s something you’d be interested in. But such a public repository is unlikely to be much more up to date than the latest release. This is a combination of keeping my work in branches, and of my fairly regular release policy. You can see from the above diagram that I don’t necessarily release from the top middle repository (which is the closest I have to a “trunk”), although generally all the changes do eventually reach that repository.
Branch and Merge: Hunky
Darcs has easy branching and merging (especially compared to VCS systems like Subversion). One use I often make of branching is to get a clean copy of the repository. darcs get. foo will create a clean copy in the foo directory — i.e. a copy without any unrecorded changes. This is useful, for example, when you discover a bug and want to know if it was there before you made your current changes.
Darcs record has a particularly useful hunk-oriented interface. It interactively shows you all the changes you’ve made, and you can pick which ones you want to form a part of the current commit. This nicely reflects the fact that just because you made two changes to the same file, it doesn’t mean they have to end up in the same commit: for example, they may be fixing different bugs, but you happened to notice the presence of one while fixing another. So you can fix them both, then record them separately. This page shows an example. And I gather that hunk-splitting (which would make them even better) is coming in the next major release.
Other uses for Darcs
It’s not just Haskell code — in fact, even my home directory is a darcs repository (with my settings files recorded in it):
neil@beast ~: darcs show files../.nanorc./.hscolour./.bash_everywhere./.emacs./.ssh./.ssh/config
That way, when I get access to a new machine, I just darcs get from my home machine and I have the settings for my favourite editors and for bash (once I source that bash file in my.bashrc on the local machine). It’s an amazingly useful idea (thanks to Adam Sampson), and it means that if I modify any settings on any machine, I can record a patch and push it to my main home machine, then pull it onto all the other machines at a later date. So all my editor macros and so on can be easily kept up to date on all my machines, and I can rollback any change I make later on, if needed.
Summary and Donations
I imagine many Haskell programmers are already using darcs, and are aware of its usefulness. The Darcs team are currently running a bit of a fund-raising drive. If you use darcs as much as I do, perhaps you can consider donating a little by way of thanks. If you’re not a darcs and/or DVCS user, hopefully this post shows why it’s useful.
AdvertisementsLeftist Ideologues Use Big-Lie Technique to Slam School Choice
Led by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a left-wing think tank founded by John Podesta, who later served as chairman of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, the political left is attempting to smear the modern school-voucher movement as the offshoot of a racist scheme to keep black children in segregated Southern public schools in the 1960s. That is such a gross distortion as to be a damnable lie.
CAP’s propagandists focus on the shameful attempt of one Virginia jurisdiction, rural Prince Edward County, to thwart court-ordered desegregation by closing its public schools in 1959. While the county’s whites could obtain public tuition grants to attend an all-white academy under a hideously misnamed “freedom of choice” plan, black civil rights leaders declined to participate in taking such handouts obviously designed to perpetuate a segregated system. Not until President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy joined Virginia leaders in marshaling support behind a stopgap Prince Edward Free School in 1963 did black children have access to formal schooling. In 1964, the Supreme Court finally ordered the Prince Edward public schools reopened. A CAP-affiliated “news” blog called ThinkProgress opened the smear campaign on January 10, 2017, by praising U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) for exposing the “racially charged history” of school choice vouchers. That blast came in the context of Warren harshly criticizing Betsy DeVos, who was then the education secretary nominee. Warren insinuated because DeVos is strongly pro-voucher, she would surely would be weak on civil rights enforcement. On July 12, CAP followed up with a turgid 11-page white paper titled, “The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers,” which was mostly devoted to the sad Prince Edward saga (as was the ThinkProgress piece). Hypocrisy alert! Warren herself co-authored a book in 2003 that advocated for a school voucher system, in part to save middle-class families from buying homes beyond their means in order to be zoned to desirable public schools. Moreover, the progressive Senator didn’t envision just a partial subsidy but rather private-choice vouchers paying “the entire cost of educating a child.” In advocating for a voucher system, was Warren aligning herself with a long-rotting racist scheme? Or is her perception of history no more clear-minded than her unsubstantiated claim of Native American heritage? As a young writer just out of journalism school, I lived with and through a significant portion of the education history in question, settling into Prince Edward residency as a news-bureau chief for the Richmond Times-Dispatch just as the Free School was coming to fruition and remaining there through the death throes of the unwise and unjust school-closing scheme. Therefore, I am confident I know more about what went down in Southside Virginia than Elizabeth Warren ever will. In regular chats with town and county officials, police officers, everyday citizens, and leaders of the local black community (notably, the Rev. L. Francis Griffin), I came to understand that most whites saw the civic and social structure they and their forbears had always known crumbling around them. Fear, more than hatred, occupied their hearts. In adopting the wrong-headed course of closing the public schools, their leaders took their cue from the policy of “massive resistance” to racial integration espoused by Virginia Sen. Harry F. Byrd—the Democratic boss of a formidable political machine—in the wake of the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education decision. Never once did I hear one of Prince Edward’s inner circle mention the voucher concept, first broached by economist Milton Friedman in his 1955 paper “The Role of Government in Education,” as the inspiration for their resort to a phony free-choice plan based on state tuition grants. If they had, the hypocrisy would have been even thicker than Liz Warren’s. Friedman championed universally available private-choice vouchers with the goal of breaking down statist barriers and creating opportunities for all within an educational marketplace. The segregationists’ objective was to use government dishonestly to preserve white privilege. Any doubt about that in a young reporter’s mind was erased upon awakening August 6, 1964, and finding that a substantial part of Prince Edward’s white adults had gone to local banks in the dead of night to collect $180,000 in tuition-grant payments. The county’s leaders put together this hush-hush payout for whites only because they feared the NAACP was on the verge of securing a court injunction on further payment of tuition grants to Prince Edward residents. Civil rights lawyer Samuel W. Tucker aptly described this sleazy operation as a “midnight raid on the public treasury.” By complete contrast, the vouchers envisioned by Milton Friedman have advanced in the light of day and with major backing from minority families. Consider: An African-American state legislator and Jesse Jackson supporter, Polly Williams, pioneered the advent of private-choice vouchers for disadvantaged Milwaukee schoolchildren in 1990. Choice has expanded greatly in the city and state since then.
Research studies have shown voucher recipients attending private schools are more likely to be in racially integrated classes than are their peers in public schools.
Polls have consistently shown that black and Hispanic parents overwhelmingly favor vouchers—and by larger margins than do parents from other racial/ethnic backgrounds.
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a landmark 2002 case (Zelman v. Simmons-Harris) vouchers are constitutional, the case before it was from Cleveland, where the vast majority of children benefitting from choice came from low-income black or Hispanic homes. In truth, vouchers (or “opportunity scholarships”) are impeded by a legacy of bigotry rather than being propelled by one. An honest history lesson CAP could teach—were it interested—would show how anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments inserted into many state constitutions in the late 19th century continue to block some families from freely choosing faith-based schools, Catholic or otherwise. Of course, CAP is blind to that injustice because its allegiance is to those with vested interests in government-monopolized education. Robert Holland (holland@heartland.org) is a senior fellow for education policy with The Heartland Institute.Looking for news you can trust?
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You may have heard: Legal weed is coming to the Golden State.
In November 2016, California passed Prop 64, or the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, making it legal for any adult over the magical age of 21 to possess or grow pot under certain amounts. Hippies cheered. And on January 1, pot shops in California are set to open their doors…sort of. Turns out, it’s complicated. Prop 64 allows cities and counties to set their own laws regarding weed, and many are passing legislation prohibiting dispensaries and outdoor grows.
Meanwhile, Silicon Valley venture capitalists are throwing their money at cannabis; the federal government says pot is still illegal; and licensed, small-scale pot cultivators across California are freaking out about the state’s newest set of cannabis regulations, which will allow Big Ag to jump into the market in January.
So, as you can see, a lot is happening in a relatively short amount of time, and you probably have questions about what legal pot will mean for California and the rest of the country. (After all, California currently ships 80 percent of its weed out of state via the black market.)
For some ideas, here are questions our own staff has: Where will I be able to buy legal pot? Will a black market for weed still exist? As far as regulation goes, what side are Republicans on? And will there be cannabis ice cream?
What do you want to know? Fill out this form. We’ll get the answers.
We may share your response with our newsroom and publish a selection of questions which would include your name, age, and location. Your email address will not be published and by providing it, you agree to let us contact you regarding your response. We respect your privacy and will not use your email address for any other purpose.
Photo credit: UrosPoteko/GettyOn Tuesday, NFL players, owners, executives, and the NFL Players Association met in New York. The meeting ran longer than expected -- more than three and a half hours -- but it doesn't sound like much got done besides the two sides engaging in a "productive" conversation.
After the meeting, the NFL and NFL Players Association released a statement in which they called it a "productive meeting" and "pledged to meet again."
New from the NFL and NFLPA pic.twitter.com/lMQMhlDGAB — Brian McCarthy (@NFLprguy) October 17, 2017
And that means the two sides did not come to an agreement regarding the national anthem.
If the expectation was getting closure on the anthem issue for the NFL, there will be disappointment. Nothing final today, it sounds like. — Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) October 17, 2017
Told that meeting between players and owners was "best the communication has ever been between players & owners." No finality, though. — Judy Battista (@judybattista) October 17, 2017
Apparently, the topic was barely broached.
Main takeaway: It feels like the league and players are making an effort to push the dialogue here off the anthem and to social causes. — Albert Breer (@AlbertBreer) October 17, 2017
So, don't expect a rule change.
The anthem was a very small part of players' meeting with owners. "I don't think they can make a rule change," says 49ers safety Eric Reid. — Jenny Vrentas (@JennyVrentas) October 17, 2017
Colts safety Darius Butler confirmed that the two sides engaged in "good dialogue."
Colts S Darius Butler on today's meeting: "It's not going to be fixed overnight, no resolution made right now, but it was a good dialogue." — Jenny Vrentas (@JennyVrentas) October 17, 2017
In attendance on the players' side were retired receiver Anquan Boldin, Colts safety Darius Butler, Chargers left tackle Russell Okung, Dolphins players Kenny Stills, Julius Thomas, and Michael Thomas, Giants linebacker Mark Herzlich, Jets players Kelvin Beachum and Demario Davis, Eagles players Malcolm Jenkins and Chris Long, 49ers safety Eric Reid, and Redskins' cornerback Josh Norman.
They were joined by DeMaurice Smith, Eric Winston, and Don Davis from the NFLPA, and Roger Goodell and Troy Vincent from the NFL. The following team representatives attended the meeting: Cardinals president Michael Bidwill, Falcons owner Arthur Blank, Bills owner Terry Pegula, Texans owner Robert McNair, Jaguars owner Shad Khan, Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Giants owner John Mara, Steelers owner Art Rooney, Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, and 49ers owner Jed York.
Colin Kaepernick said he was not invited.
Official statement from Colin Kaepernick's legal team. He was not invited to today's NFL/NFLPA meeting pic.twitter.com/eliRuRC5Xa — Jason La Canfora (@JasonLaCanfora) October 17, 2017
According to CBS Sports NFL Insider Jason La Canfora, players weren't happy that Kaepernick didn't receive an invitation.
There was some real anger and dismay among players that Colin Kaepernick was not formally asked to be at meetings today, I'm told... — Jason La Canfora (@JasonLaCanfora) October 17, 2017 The fact Kaepernick wasn't invited here came up in the meetings, with players believing his central role in movement basically demands it — Jason La Canfora (@JasonLaCanfora) October 17, 2017
La Canfora expects Kaepernick to play a role moving forward.
Have thought for quite a while it was odd Kaepernick did not have a seat at the weekly social activism table w/the NFL that he created... — Jason La Canfora (@JasonLaCanfora) October 17, 2017 Hard to imagine a situation where these talks are occurring b/n owners and players each week for a month now and NFL not invite him to join — Jason La Canfora (@JasonLaCanfora) October 17, 2017
The meeting came after the first six weeks of the 2017 NFL season included widespread demonstrations during the national anthem. In the preseason, those protests were a continuation of Colin Kaepernick's protest against racial inequality, which he started last year during the NFL preseason. But after Donald Trump advocated for teams to fire players who kneel during the anthem, the protests shifted to a show of unity against Trump, who also pushed for the league to enact a new rule.
"Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, 'Get that son of a bitch off the field right now," Trump said on September 22. "Out. He's fired. He's fired."
"You know, some owner is going |
as president of the United States.
That was because he was born outside the United States and, therefore, not native-born, as presidents must be constitutionally.
McCain was, in fact, born in a U.S. military hospital in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father was serving in the Navy. That was, in fact, American-controlled territory at the time.
More importantly, his parents were both American citizens, so he could have been born on Mars and still been an American at birth. And a sense of the Senate resolution took care of any lingering doubts.
Now come the rumors about Barack Obama's birthplace, that he was really born in his father's native Kenya, so like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was born in Austria, he can't become a U.S. president.
Same rule would apply as for McCain. Obama's mother was an American. So is her son.
The Obama campaign has provided at The Ticket's request what it says is a copy of the Illinois senator's official birth certificate, reproduced here, showing he was born in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961, at 7:24 p.m., which means he was late for dinner, just like a politician. Click on the photo to enlarge for reading.
Now, about the citizenship of all those people planting these rumors.
(UPDATE: In reaction to some of the comments left below challenging the veracity of the document, Ben LaBolt, an Obama campaign spokesman, sent the following reaction to The Ticket: "I can confirm that that is Sen. Obama's birth certificate.")
--Andrew Malcolm
Still an opportunity toclick here and receive automatic Twitter alerts on each new Ticket item. Or follow us @latimestotWhen you want to have a place for house guests to sleep but don’t have a spare room in which to put them, a sofa bed can be a lifesaver. This original piece of transforming furniture has often been mocked as uncomfortable, ugly, and inconvenient. But today, a new generation of sleeper sofas is turning that perception upside down with style and surprising functionality.
The DOC sofa bed from UK company Bonbon is an elegant solution to the small-space conundrum. By day it’s a regular-looking (and rather stylishly modern) sofa, but by night – or just when your old college roommates are visiting – it transforms into a bunk bed with room for two. As the video above demonstrates, the action to take the DOC from sofa to bunk bed is surprisingly simple.
Italian furniture manufacturer Campeggi might just be onto something with their push-button convertible sofa. Rather than moving cushions, pulling hard on a reluctant mattress and trying desperately to smooth everything into place, this sofa lets you extend a single finger to take it from couch to bed. The drawbacks, of course, include having to keep it near an electrical outlet and the potential for inconvenient breakdowns – but it might be worth it to never have to deal with a standard sleeper sofa again.
Not all sofa beds are alike, as evidenced by the Adam horizontal wall bed unit from Bonbon. Designed to fit into an office or den setting, the actual bed pulls down from the wall to cover the sofa. The clever setup is a bit different than the typical convertible sofa, but the Murphy bed-type solution still allows for a multi-functional space.
Likewise, the Altea Relax creates a room that can be made for socializing or for sleeping – all using a minimal amount of floor space. The Altea Relax incorporates a wall storage unit along with a pull-down bed, and the lower sofa segment also features a handy storage space under its surface.
While not exactly a sofa that transforms into a bed, the DS-1164 from Swiss furniture maker de Sede is both a sofa and a bed. The elegant piece of furniture features “bed heads” which can be moved around into any configuration to create a comfy lounging or sleeping spot, no matter what time of day it is. As if it wasn’t hard enough to get out of bed in the morning already.
This modular convertible sofa from Dutch designers Zuiver is a fun departure from the usual bed-or-sofa binary design. It allows each individual segment to be moved up or down as desired, creating entirely new pieces of furniture every time. When entirely unfolded, the sofa could easily be used as a comfy temporary bed.
The stylish Stefano sofa bed completely redefines the functionality of a sofa bed, lending a superbly unique form factor to the classic piece of furniture. Rather than a sofa out of which a bed is pulled, the Stefano is a folding piece of soft foam that takes the form of a sofa when folded and a bed when unfolded. With no moving parts, the Stefano is simple enough for anyone to operate.I'm not very tech savvy, but I certainly know more than my parents, so I try to help them over the phone whenever something goes wrong with their computer or Blu-ray player or the attack robot I bought them for their last anniversary. It's really tough for someone to talk about computers if they didn't have them growing up, because there's a language barrier; they just don't have the vocabulary. Everyone who has ever had to help their parents fix a computer knows this. And, if you work in Tech Support, you have to deal with the computer illiterate parents of the entire world. And other just general, run-of-the-mill idiots. Like me. As I said, I know more about computers than my parents, but not a lot. I still have to call a professional when something goes wrong with my computer. This is what one of those calls typically looks like:
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Me: Hey, my computer's not how it usually is.
Tech: Alright, sir, I'm happy to help. Why don't you tell me what's wrong with it?
Me: It's just broken. And it's usually not. That's the weird thing.
Tech: OK, what's... Tell me what you're doing, describe what things look like.
Me: I'm talking on a phone, things are looking good.
Tech: Talk about your computer.
Me: I hate it!
Tech: Sir, look at your computer screen at the parts that aren't working, and tell me what you're doing and what you see when they don't work.
Me: Well, I want to open a browser, but when I use the browser and click on the browser, the browser doesn't come up. What do you think it means?
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Tech: I think you're calling too many things "Browser." I would like you to pick one thing to call "Browser." Doesn't matter which, just decide one of the things on your computer is the browser, and then give different names to anything that isn't that.
Me: I'm going to call the clicky thing that fits in my hand the "browser," because I use it when I browse the brows- Oh, shit. I'm still doing it.
Tech: That's fine. Why don't you just restart your computer?
Me: Help me! The screen is different now.According to a study prepared by the congressional Joint Economic Committee and verified by independent experts, the House Republican budget authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) would raise taxes on families making less than $200,000, even while it gives millionaires a tax cut:
So although households earning $100,000 to $200,000 a year would save about $7,000 from the lower tax rates in the GOP plan, those savings would be swamped by eliminating major deductions, according to the report by the Democratically controlled congressional Joint Economic Committee. The net result: Married couples in that income range would pay an additional $2,700 annually to the Internal Revenue Service, on top of the tax increases that are scheduled to hit every American household when the George W. Bush-era cuts expire at the end of the year. Households earning more than $1 million a year, meanwhile, could see a net tax cut of about $300,000 annually.
“Ryan seems to want to have his cake and eat it, too, and this report shows that you can’t,” added Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-NY). “If you want to cut taxes on the rich and not raise the deficit, you’re going to have to basically clobber the middle class.”
According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, the Republican budget would also slam those making less than $30,000 per year, because it doesn’t extend some of the tax cuts for low-income Americans that President Obama has signed into law:
Republicans, meanwhile, contend that these analyses are unfair because they have yet to lay out their entire plan, including exactly which tax deductions and loopholes they plan to do away with. But as the Tax Policy Center’s Roberton Williams said, “unless [Republicans] go after the tax preferences that benefit the wealthy, it’s really hard to undo the regressivity of the rate changes. You’ll be shifting the burden of the tax code toward the middle class.”Malcolm Morrison, The Canadian Press
TORONTO -- North American stock markets sold off Thursday as weak trade data from China raised fresh questions about the pace of growth in the world's second-largest economy.
The declines were also fuelled by a fresh round of disenchantment with formerly high-flying biotech and technology stocks.
The S&P/TSX composite index fell 127.58 points to 14,308 as China's exports fell 6.6 per cent in March from a year earlier, well below analyst expectations of single-digit growth. Imports to China contracted by 11.3 per cent.
The Canadian dollar dropped 0.48 of a cent to 91.5 cents US.
U.S. markets tumbled while biotechnology companies fell sharply as Biogen Idec, Gilead Sciences and other biotech companies extended a recent slump. After making big gains last year, biotechs have been crushed in recent weeks as they come under pressure to lower prices for their drugs.
The Dow Jones industrials plunged 266.96 points to 16,170.22 while a selloff in tech stocks deemed too rich ahead of their first-quarter earnings pushed the Nasdaq 129.79 points lower to 4,054.11. The three per cent drop was the worst since November 2011.
"What is interesting is we are still seeing the Nasdaq pulling back more than the others so people are still retrenching out of the real high flyers," said Colin Cieszynski, senior markets analyst at CMC Canada.
"Tech does not look good and is looking like it's in a major correction."
Facebook dropped 5.2 per cent while Google retreated 4.1 per cent.
The S&P 500 index lost 39.09 points at 1,833.09, giving up its gains for the year.
The Chinese trade data raised worries the world's second-biggest economy will have trouble meeting its official target of 7.5 per cent growth this year. It also pushed some analysts to lower already reduced expectations for growth.
Barclays lowered its first-quarter gross domestic product forecast to 7.2 per cent year over year from 7.3 per cent.
Negative investor sentiment on U.S. markets spread to the TSX where the health care sector gave back 3.35 per cent with Valeant Pharmaceuticals (TSX:VRX) down $5.29 or 3.76 per cent to $135.36.
Canadian tech stocks also helped push the TSX lower with BlackBerry (TSX:BB) down 28 cents to $8.38.
Financial stocks were also a major weight, down 1.06 per cent amid reduced earnings expectations for the big U.S. banks. Analysts at Thomson Reuters expect financial sector earnings to decline by 2.8 per cent and revenue to fall by one per cent.
The energy sector was 0.13 per cent lower while the sluggish Chinese data helped push the April crude contract on the New York Mercantile Exchange down 20 cents to US$103.40 a barrel.
Copper was up a cent to $3.05 a pound. The metal has already fallen 11 per cent this year amid lower expectations for Chinese economic growth. The base metals sector gave up early gains to move down 0.76 per cent.
The gold sector dropped about 1.4 per cent while bullion prices headed higher with the June contract up $14.60 to US$1,320.50 an ounce.
Shares in Goldcorp Inc. (TSX:G) dropped after it upped its offer for Montreal-based Osisko Mining Corp. (TSX:OSK), in an attempt to trump the gold miner's friendly deal with Yamana Gold announced last week. Goldcorp said its revised offer values Osisko at $3.6 billion or $7.65 per Osisko share. Goldcorp fell $1 to $26.84 while Osisko edged up three cents to $7.58.WHEN IT became obvious that Richard Hammond, James May and I were going to carry on making a car show, I knew only one thing for sure. It would not be based in a hangar, on a former RAF airfield, in the British countryside.
Twelve years earlier, the producer Andy Wilman and I had been to the BBC and sold them the idea of hosting just such a car show from just such an airfield. They liked the plan and the two of us were charged with the task of finding one. And frankly, we’d have had more options in 1940.
Time and again, we’d identify a site only to be told that the RAF still needed it for, er, glider training, or its annual brass band parade practice, or parachute storage.
And when we did find somewhere the RAF didn’t want any more, we became entangled in disputes about newts, bats, grasshoppers, ancient thoroughfares, rare stones and unusual grasses.
Browse NEW or USED cars for sale on driving.co.uk
And then with the neighbours about noise. We’d tell them it’d just be Terry Wogan, once a week, in a reasonably priced saloon but they were having none of it and soon there’d be an action committee and housewives chaining themselves to railings.
Dunsfold in Surrey, the location we eventually found, was a one-off. There was no point looking for something similar for our new Amazon show because such a thing doesn’t exist. We considered northern France, which is near, and South Africa, because they don’t care about newts down there. Or health and safety. Or any of the other irritants that plague our lives in Britain.
But then the lawyers pointed out that we couldn’t host the show from a static location because, although it had been our idea, the BBC owned it. It was all a bit of a problem.
The eureka moment came when I was watching an episode of True Detective. In it, there was a scene where a Baptist minister, displaced by a fire at his church, had set up shop in a tent in a field.
“Yes,” I exclaimed to my colleagues the next day. “We shall host our new show from a tent that will be in a different part of the world every week.”
Richard Hammond, who likes being damp and cold in Buttermere, was very excited at the prospect. And James May was excited too, but only because someone had just bought him a new penknife.
So we agreed. We’d be rootless, peripatetic, like music teachers in the Seventies. Or gypsies. Maybe after the show each week we could sell pegs.
It sounds simple. But it isn’t. First of all, the tent would have to be big enough to house a stage, a lighting rig, a crane, five cameras, a car, a tech gallery, a 4K data logging server — which is bigger than the USS Enterprise and more complicated — and an audience of at least 250 people. Any fewer and we’d have the same atmosphere you get at a village cricket match.
“The cost of our tents meant we’d have only enough left in the kitty each week for two pints of petrol and a box of James May’s beef Hula Hoops”
This meant the tent would have to be huge. A Las Vegas circus marquee, only bigger. And do you have any idea how much it would cost to fly such a thing from location to location? Especially if we folded it away when it was wet and therefore heavier than a mountain?
It turned out we couldn’t fold it away when it was wet because the fabric would rot. And then we discovered that we couldn’t break it down in one place, load it on a plane and have it built somewhere else in a week. So we’d need two tents, which would leapfrog one another from location to location. And then the director pointed out that we’d need a solid floor for his cameras to rove around on, on their little wheels. And that would mean two solid floors, each of which would weigh more than Asia.
Our budget — contrary to what you may have read in various hysterical reports — was not much bigger than it had been at the BBC. Yet the cost of our tents meant we’d have only enough left in the kitty each week for two pints of petrol and a box of James May’s beef Hula Hoops.
Happily, a magnificent company called DHL then rode into the equation, offering to meet our transport costs in something called a “sponsorship deal”. Finally, The Grand Tour was ready to roll.
Choosing the first location was easy. The three of us, in our former lives, had toured the world with a live show and learnt one thing: South Africa offers by far and away the best audiences in the world. Crack a gag at a Friday night event in London and you get a chuckle. Crack the same gag in Norway and you get a taste of what it might be like to be in space. But crack it in South Africa and they laugh for about a year.
So we found a field in a place called the Cradle of Humankind — because it’s, er, the cradle of humankind — and up went Tent One.
1 billion The number of miles Clarkson claims were clocked up by presenters and crew filming the first series of The Grand Tour
Except it didn’t, because South African customs had decided to impound just one of our containers: the one containing the tent’s feet. That was a bit like the time Vietnamese customs officials confiscated one of our walkie-talkies. It renders the whole operation pointless. However, as is the way when you are far away, it’s always easy, in a quiet corner with the senior man, to find a resolution.
I’m going to be honest with you: as the filming day dawned, we were all nervous. No show of this kind had ever been recorded in 4K. A Dutch company had built a multi-camera server and was fairly sure it’d work. But would it? In a field? In Africa?
And how would the audience react to all the new features? The Star in a Reasonably Priced Car, the Cool Wall, the Stig — all that had been left behind at Dunsfold and replaced with other stuff. Would that be like the Rolling Stones suddenly appearing on stage in tweed suits and doing Abba songs because of some uninteresting intellectual property issues?
And then there were the films we’d made. The newspapers had got it into their heads that, because we had £400m an episode, we’d be reporting each week from a different planet. “Oh look, James has been crushed by the atmospheric pressure on Jupiter. Haha. And Hammond is on Mercury … on fire. Hahahahahaha.”
Would everyone be disappointed to find the films had all been shot on Earth? And that they were still full of three middle-aged men falling over? With the occasional car sticking its nose into the frame?
Our biggest worry, however, was the make-up girl. The job had plainly gone to the lowest bidder, who turned up with a bag full of Artex and some trowels. Hammond was first in the chair and after half an hour emerged looking like he’d just arrived from Easter Island. It simply wasn’t him any more.
She’d heard that 4K was extremely high-definition television that shows up every wrinkle and spot, and had decided that the best solution to the problem was to encase our faces in a plastered box. Speech was impossible because we couldn’t move our mouths. James had breathing difficulties. I couldn’t get my head off the floor because it weighed so much.
Some chisels were found and soon we began to emerge from our tombs, like skeletons unearthed at an archaeological dig. Would anyone notice when we appeared on the screen? It was another thing to worry about.
“That’s really what’s at the core of The Grand Tour: our relentless and unending need to belittle and humiliate one another”
It’s hard to be sure whether our fears were founded because, of course, the audience was South African. Which means they laughed and cheered and clapped every time one of us even looked like we might be on the verge of saying something amusing or interesting.
The acid test will come when we get to Germany. That’s many weeks away, though. Next up, it’s Los Angeles. Then there will be a two-week stint in Britain. And after that we will whizz round Europe for a bit.
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It’ll be strange. For 12 years, we got up on a Wednesday and drove to Surrey, where we were surrounded by familiar faces and familiar things. Now we will be somewhere different all the time. In front of a different audience, with different values and different tastes.
The only constant will be James and Richard, whom I hate. But that’s really what’s at the core of The Grand Tour: our relentless and unending need to belittle and humiliate one another.
Yes, we shall be in a different place each week, in a tent, doing new stuff. But when James comes back from the lavatory, having not shaken himself properly, you can be sure Richard and I will bring it up.
So hopefully, whether we are in Scandinavia or the Middle East or the United States of America, it’ll be a case of meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
Contents
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The Grand Tour begins on Amazon Prime on November 18, 2016. Click here to sign up and watch.BOSTON — New England’s top professional sports teams have thrown their support behind legislation that would guarantee protections for transgender individuals in public spaces in Massachusetts, advocates for that measure announced on Monday. The supporters hope the teams’ muscle could help persuade legislators that the bill has broad appeal.
Freedom Massachusetts, the coalition supporting the bill, said it had the backing of football’s New England Patriots, hockey’s Boston Bruins, basketball’s Boston Celtics and soccer’s New England Revolution. The Boston Red Sox of Major League Baseball announced their support of the effort last fall.
In a state where sports fandom takes on an almost religious zeal, the supporters are hoping the support of the teams will help push the bill to a vote and to passage.
“I think that having not only New England’s most prominent cultural institutions, but also frankly the most iconic public accommodations that come with that — Fenway Park, TD Garden — really sends the message.” said Kasey Suffredini, a leader of the campaign. “This issue has become mainstream and widely accepted.”I know that correlation is not causation, but how come every time I go on vacation Neil Olshey signs a center?
By now you've heard that the Blazers have committed most of their Mid-Level Exception to Chris Kaman for two years, although only the first is fully guaranteed. I heard while on a family outing. I'm now sitting in a dark corner of a hotel room among sleeping children, typing one-fingered on a mobile phone because the Internet connection doesn't work, asking myself the same questions you are:
1. WHAT?!?!?
2. Did you say MLE or BAE? Because if you said BAE then maybe...oh. It is MLE, huh?
3. What about Spencer Hawes????
4. WHAT?!?!?!?
I'll treat these questions at length when I return from vacation (and to a full-sized, ten-fingered keyboard) but here's my quick take.
Hawes would have been a better get than Kaman but it's possible the Blazers got wind he was going for more than the MLE. Yes, he reportedly made noise about liking Portland but he also wants a large contract. "I'm interested in the Blazers" could have been code-speak for "I've heard enough $5 million offers. If you want to talk to me, you have to bid higher." Maybe the threat of the Blazers getting Hawes for the MLE brought out another suitor. If so, fair enough.
Kaman appears to have two advantages. He's a center and the Blazers can cut him loose after one year. This preserves their flexibility in the summer of 2015. There's no chance Hawes would have agreed to that kind of deal. His salary would have eaten into Portland's space going forward. If that's the priority, again...fair enough.
The interesting part of this equation: the Blazers won't have that much space available in 2014 after cap holds take their toll. The only way to generate enough space to make a difference would be to extend, trade, or renounce players whose contracts come up next summer. Though still possible, extensions don't seem likely. If the Blazers can get LaMarcus Aldridge, Wesley Matthews, and Robin Lopez to take little enough, soon enough while preserving more than exception-level cap room next year, more power to them.
The more plausible explanation of the Kaman signing is that the Blazers want to reserve their right to make serious course changes next year. Saying that signing Kaman telegraphed their intention to do so would be unfair. But that single-year contract and Kaman's relatively dim magnitude among the constellation of potential signings don't exactly pave the road to the future in cement. It falls closer to "wait and see" than "here we go".
Why the team seems cautious about offering a multi-year contract to a bigger talent remains to be seen. Perhaps they're plotting a huge, strategic acquisition next summer. Perhaps they doubt their ability to retain their current core and don't want to store up spare parts if the car won't be in the garage. Or maybe their self-assessment reveals that the team, though promising, needs more to contend than 1-2 MLE signings over the next couple years could provide. Under any of those circumstances $5 million for one year makes more sense than $5 million with raises over the next three.
Chris Kaman is a more humdrum signing than most expected from Portland's big swing of the summer. (And that's being kind.) The whys of the move are far more interesting -- likely telling -- than the move itself. We're not going to know the final outcome of this event for another year. Until then, as we seem to say most every summer with this franchise, we'll have to wait and see.
--Dave (blazersub@gmail.com)Did you watch or read Hunter x Hunter's "Greed Island" story arc and wished you could play the game yourself? It's now become a reality.
Thanks to Premium Bandai, a real life card set based on the fictional "Greed Island" card game is now on the way.
Premium Bandai has just announced a replica "Greed Island" card set. There are 100 Restricted Slot cards and 40 Spell cards all featuring the art of series creator Yoshihiro Togashi. To make this even more impressive, the SS class cards such as series famous Breath of Archangel and Blue Planet will have a holographic foil covering.
The set will come with a poster, binder, and a case matching the series' Joystation which "Greed Island" is played on. For interested fans in importing the set, it runs 8,800 yen (about $78 USD) and Premium Bandai will be taking orders through February with shipment beginning in April.
Hunter x Hunter's "Greed Island" arc follows Gon and Killua as they enter the "Greed Island" game created by Gon's father Ging. Thinking he'll be able to meet his father should he collect all 100 necessary "Greed Island" cards and win, Gon and Killua work together to collect, and eventually fight back against the cruel plans of others.
With a mysterious nen bomber assasinating game players and taking their cards, Gon and Killua need to train in order to survive the game. Running into the pro hunter Biscuit, the two eventually agree to be trained by her to increase their power.
For those unfamiliar with Hunter x Hunter, the series was originally created by Yoshihiro Togashi. The story follows a young boy named Gon Freecss, who discovers that his previously thought to be dead father is in fact alive. Not only is he alive, he is a famous Hunter, a professional traveler who specializes in finding rare treasures, exploring unidentified lands, and hunting down dangerous individuals. Gon then decides that in order to meet his father he has to become a licensed Hunter, but in that journey gets wrapped up in way more strangeness than he ever could have anticipated.
The series first ran in Shuiesha's Weekly Shonen Jump in March 1998. Unforunately, the series has gone on a number of hiatuses ever since 2006 which were most likely incurred by bouts of illness Togashi experienced when publishing his last work, Yu Yu Hakusho. The series has run for 360 chapters, and been collected into 47 volumes as of 2017. It's one of Shueisha's most successful selling series with over 66 million copies sold in Japan.
Hunter x Hunter was then adapted into two different anime series. One series ran from 1999 to 2001 from Nippon Animation and lasted for 62 episodes. The second adaptation, produced by Madhouse, ran from 2011 to 2014. The Hunter x Hunter manga has just announced it was returning from its most recent hiatus in January 2018.
via CrunchyrollJointops420
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Re: I'm talking to Max Keiser..what do you want to ask him today? August 11, 2012, 10:15:25 AM #11 Quote from: Matthew N. Wright on August 11, 2012, 10:00:32 AM Quote from: Jointops420 on August 11, 2012, 09:50:54 AM Quote from: Vladimir It is not our mission to please everyone.
So you are not interested in what potential customers may think of your product. Most successful business's are interested no matter whether its positive or negative feed back. Anyway you lost one potential sub.
So you are not interested in what potential customers may think of your product. Most successful business's are interested no matter whether its positive or negative feed back. Anyway you lost one potential sub.
I think what Vladimir meant to say was, "We work hard to produce the high quality content that we do, and we feel that the covers are neither negative nor excessive, neither does our Editorial Board or any of our thousands of readers. While you personally may have a personal issue with the cover, the best we can do is receive your input for future covers. You know what they say though, you can't judge a niche magazine by it's cover."
And I fully echo these sentiments. That said, see
I think what Vladimir meant to say was, "We work hard to produce the high quality content that we do, and we feel that the covers are neither negative nor excessive, neither does our Editorial Board or any of our thousands of readers. While you personally may have a personal issue with the cover, the best we can do is receive your input for future covers. You know what they say though, you can't judge a niche magazine by it's cover."And I fully echo these sentiments. That said, see this thread please
Thanks for the reply. Thanks for the reply.N.J. Spars Over Free Beach Access Post-Sandy
Enlarge this image toggle caption Doug Mills/AFP/Getty Images Doug Mills/AFP/Getty Images
At an oceanfront park in Long Branch, N.J., Tim Dillingham looks out over the beach in awe of how much the pounding waves and high waters of Hurricane Sandy have changed the Jersey shore.
Dillingham is the executive director of the American Littoral Society, a coastal conservation group. Before the storm, he says, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spent years building up the beaches by pumping sand onto them.
But that shouldn't be a solution to restoring the shore, he says.
"We need to design the beaches to be sustainable, to be open to the public, in a way that everybody can get to them, everywhere, and we need to design them so they're ecologically sensitive and they provide for habitat," Dillingham says.
The huge beach restoration cost will be shouldered by the public: Seventy-five percent of it is likely to come from federal taxpayers, with the state picking up a significant chunk too.
Yet much of the beach restoration work will end up protecting private property. The relatively few beach areas now accessible to the public on the Jersey shore often charge fees of $8, $10 and even $12 a day for access. And some towns are considering hiking those fees to help pay for the renovations.
Jeff Wulkan owns Bikini Barbers, a barbershop just off the beach in Long Branch. He says he's fed up with the fees and won't pay them. "I think that they're ridiculous," he says. "I mean, I think the towns make enough money through taxes and fines and all this other stuff."
One of his employees, Jennifer Leotis, isn't a fan of them either but says she pays up to go to the beach in nearby Manasquan. "It's almost $90 for the year and I think it's kind of a rip-off because it's not that nice at Manasquan," she says.
And both Leotis and Wulkan say the fees shouldn't go up to pay for restoration costs.
"Most of it's probably going to go to protect the homes of the superwealthy people that have these multimillion-dollar mansions on the beach," says Wulkan. "So their houses don't get destroyed, you know."
Wulkan and Leotis are hardly alone. In fact, there are similar sentiments in the N.J. state Senate.
Republican Sen. Michael Doherty says he has long been frustrated that N.J. is one of the few states that allow communities to charge beach fees. "The Jersey shore is the domain of single-family homes and they really are not welcoming to outsiders and day-trippers coming in," Doherty says. "They don't want you in their town. That's why there's no place to park, no place to use the restroom, and they charge you seven, 12 dollars just to get on the beach for the day."
And Doherty says for communities to continue charging beach fees after Sandy is even more outrageous.
"They now have their hand out and they want us to send them hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars to rebuild their beaches, yet when it comes time to enjoying the beaches, we're told we have to pay before we can step on the sand," he says.
In response, Doherty is sponsoring legislation that would make public beach access free in all Jersey shore communities that accept federal and state funding for shoreline restoration.
But some officials in beach towns that collect the fees oppose the measure. Thomas Kelaher, mayor of Toms River, N.J., insists they're necessary. "What we do with that money is that pays for the lifeguards, the beach cleaners, and the crossing guards along the highway leading up to the beach," Kelaher says. "And we just about break even every year with what we collect and what it costs us."
Kelaher says if the state wants to pick up those costs, he'd support getting rid of the fees. But it wouldn't be fair to charge his town's property-tax payers more to cover those expenses when mostly out-of-town visitors benefit, he says.
The bill banning beach fees is expected to come up for a vote in the N.J. Legislature in January.A reader kindly pointed me to FE: IF Dengeki scans from here. I translated the character profiles as the gameplay info is likely similar to the Famitsu ones, which I translated in full here.
I intend to translate the information on the TCG soon.
This was all done on my free time, and so took a little while. It was certainly a lot of work, but I do hope you enjoy! I am unemployed… so please consider donating if you like the work I do. : )
Notes:
-I made Character Page 1 by moving the Protagonist next to Aqua, they were originally on two separate pages.
-I referred to the Protagonist as a “he” but really can be either gender. I just used it as a neutral umbrella term!
-I erased the voice actor information. It made it look cleaner, as they are hard to read and can easily be mistaken.
Advertisements(Grace Carr, Daily Caller News Foundation) The makers of Barbie unveiled their latest business venture with a hijab-wearing Barbie doll to honor the Muslim American woman who competed in the 2016 Olympics wearing a hijab.
Mattel (MAT) announced the news on Monday at Glamour’s Women of the Year summit that the company is adding the veil-clad Barbie to a “Shero” collection as a tribute to the Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, according to CNNMoney.
“I’m proud to know that little girls everywhere can now play with a Barbie who chooses to wear hijab! This is a childhood dream come true,” Muhammad — who became the first American to compete for the United States in the games wearing a hijab in 2016 — tweeted Monday in applause of the company’s new product.
Thank you @Mattel for announcing me as the newest member of the @Barbie #Shero family! I’m proud to know that little girls everywhere can now play with a Barbie who chooses to wear hijab! This is a childhood dream come true.
RELATED: Feminist Moms Promote Muslim Oppression of Women with ‘Hijab Barbies’
“Ibtihaj is an inspiration to countless girls who never saw themselves represented, and by honoring her story, we hope this doll reminds them that they can be and do anything,” Barbie global marketing VP, Sejal Shah Miller, said in a statement CNN reported.
The move comes after Mattel introduced three body types this year for its Ken dolls — slim, broad, or original — and seven skin tones, and nine hairstyles including the man bun in an effort to reach a more diverse audience.
Mattel sales decreased almost 10 percent over the summer even after launching new body positive Barbie dolls last year.
Republished with permission from the Daily Caller News Foundation via iCopyright licenseFor 50 years, Christo and Jeanne-Claude created grand art projects that stretched |
for troops in most scenarios. The idea was first floated by the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission in a report to Congress last year.
Defense Department officials can kick that can down the road for a few years because it's unlikely that anyone will be completing their career and actually retiring under the new system for at least another 10 years.
Some defense officials are quietly hoping that Congress will revisit the new retirement law and eliminate that piece of the benefit package before any troops have an opportunity to exercise it.
"If we can get rid of it at some point it would be ideal," the defense official said.
Troops who opt into the new retirement system will face an array of new variables and decisions. What are the best investment fund options for a TSP account? How will financial markets impact the growth of retirement accounts? How much will the 12-year continuation pay actually be? Is the lump-sum option worth considering?
"It can be very complicated. But it can also come down to some very simple decisions, like contributions," said Beth Asch, a personnel expert with RAND.Surplus electricity from cellphone towers can run fridges to chill vital drugs in parts of the world where the main power supply is unreliable
STAFF at Morganster Hospital, which serves a remote community in Zimbabwe’s Masvingo province, used to sleep fitfully. If the power failed and a back-up generator was offline – common problems in the impoverished nation – they would have to jump out of bed and drive for 26 kilometres to stash their stock of life-saving vaccines in a fridge in the provincial capital.
But those days are over, thanks to a pilot project that is testing a simple idea floated in the pages of New Scientist. In that article, infectious disease specialist Harvey Rubin of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Alice Conant, then a student at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, suggested using surplus power from cellphone towers to run the refrigerators needed to keep perishable vaccines cool (18 September 2010, p 24).
Their idea is now being tried out at 10 church-run hospitals across Zimbabwe, with the backing of Econet Wireless, a cellphone provider based in Johannesburg, South Africa. After Bernard Fernandes, Econet’s chief technology officer, heard Rubin give a presentation in Mombasa, Kenya, in March 2011, he went straight to Econet’s chairman, Strive Masiyiwa, with a proposal. “He said to me: ‘Get on with it’,” Fernandes says.
Cellphones have overtaken landlines in developing countries. To keep their towers working reliably in areas where the power often fails, or the masts are off the grid, cellphone firms have installed generators, and sometimes solar panels. Surplus power can then be used to chill vaccines, maintaining the cold chain, the weakest link in efforts to immunise children against diseases like polio, measles and diphtheria.
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Power from the towers can keep vaccines cold, the weakest link in childhood immunisation schemes
To be sure that power glitches wouldn’t cause problems, Fernandes chose fridges by True Energy of Tywyn, UK, that can keep cool for 10 days without power, even in temperatures above 40 °C. The fridges have sensors to monitor temperature both inside and out, and to detect when the door is opened. This data is relayed back via the cellphone network, allowing Econet and its partners to know immediately if anything goes wrong. The fridges are either housed in a shelter beneath the cellphone tower, or in the hospital if it is nearby.
Several other projects are in the planning stages. In India, Rubin’s non-profit organisation, Energize the Chain, is talking to the Vodafone Foundation and the Karuna Trust, which is known for its work in providing healthcare to the “untouchable” Dalit caste. This initiative would include a controlled experiment to confirm if sites powered by cellphone towers have less vaccine spoilage. This is easy to check because vials of vaccine can be fitted with labels that darken on exposure to heat. Meanwhile in Kenya, Energize the Chain hopes to launch a pilot project involving 10 or more sites, with the backing of both the Kenyan and US governments.
Anthony Battersby, a consultant based near Bath, UK, who conducted a feasibility study for the Kenyan project, worries that high-tech fridges might fail, and so has proposed making ice at the cellphone towers instead, then moving it to coolers in clinics.
Rubin says he doesn’t mind which technology is used, as long as vaccines are kept cool and more children get immunised. “What’s remarkable is the rapidity with which the idea has been picked up,” he says.9:00 a.m., Friday, February 6, 2015
Grits have a long history and in the South they are a breakfast tradition. Some say grits were one of the things Native Americans educated settlers about and now the South is educating the rest of the country. Just a few years ago the Low Country specialty, shrimp and grits, began showing up in restaurants nationwide. We look at the rising popularity of grits, as well as some the grittier details of this staple.
Guests
Adrian Miller – The Soul Food Scholar; Author, Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time; Winner, 2014 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference and Scholarship; Executive Director, Colorado Council of Churches
Terra Ciota- Culinary Instructor, The Art Institute of Charlotte; Chef de Cuisine, The Artisan; CCC, MBA
Kathleen Purvis – Food Editor, The Charlotte Observer
Glenn Roberts – Founder, Anson MillsUpdate – I’ve corrected a mistake that left out the materials and updated my latest UI files. I also added the section about changing button size. My setup is used on a 22 inch Cintiq so if your setup differs, be sure to alter the placement and button size to fit your needs.
Zbrush gets a bad rap for its User Interface and I think that’s due to its overwhelming amount of things you can do and its use of brand spanking new made up terminology. So to a new user it can look a little crazy, but I have something to admit…. I kinda like it. At least I like a specific thing about it, and that’s the customizing. Customizing Zbrush is simple and fast. Open Preferences, click Enable Customize then Hold down Ctrl+Alt and start dragging things around!
I’m not one to normally customize software. I just suck it up and get use to it but with Zbrush it can be a time saver and with how easy it is to change, there’s no excuse not to. There is one bad thing about it all and thats keeping straight all the different files it uses and where they go if you want to save or transport your custom interface. It’d be WAY better if it was just one file, but sadly its several and that is what is confusing. I’m gonna try and set that straight.
Here’s what you need to know:
Zbrush is a large collection of files. Brushes, meshes, materials, hotkeys, tools, everything including interfaces and interface colors. All tucked away in their folders inside the main Zbrush folder.
Then there is the Config file. This file is what stores your configuration of everything inside the app. So what we need to do is load up everything we like and customize the interface how we want, save any necessary files then store our config file so the next time we open Zbrush everything is right where we left it.
Download my Setup
Included Materials by Zbro and Glauco Longhi Shout out to those guys for making some of my favorites! be sure to check them out if you haven’t, they both have some tutorials and videos. Zbro has all kinds of stuff
I’ve placed the files in the same directory structure as they should be in your Zbrush directory.
Once all the files are in place load up Zbrush and load the user interface and the Color file, you can also cycle through these by clicking the buttons in the upper right until they come up (it just cycles through files in that folder) The materials and Hotkeys are already ready to go.
I also reduce the overall button size of my UI to get it even more out of the way and to squash everything in. This is done in the Preferences Menu under Interface. I set mine to 38. The thing to remember about this setting is that it doesn’t take effect until you restart Zbrush so you probably want to make all of the changes you want and then store your config before restarting to take a look at your shiny new setup.
Be sure to save your startup config!
Once you get everything all nice and how you like save the config so Zbrush starts up the way you want. Do that by going Preferences>Store Config or feel like you’re programming the Matrix by pressing Ctrl+Shift+I
That’s it! Let me know how it goes and how you customize your zbrush to work better. I really love how quick and easy it is to rearrange Zbrush and to make hotkeys but it’s a bummer how scattered all the files are and the extra steps you need to take to save it. It’s worth it though because once you understand how to do it, it can make your day to day work more fluid and let you move your setup to another machine.
Happy ZbrushingProject Veritas, a group that tries to investigate and expose corruption, secretly recorded Cornellâ??s Assistant Dean for students, Joseph Scaffido, agreeing to bring ISIS and Hamas to Cornell University.
â??The university is not going to look at different groups and say, â??Youâ??re not allowed to support that group because we donâ??t believe themâ?? or something like that. I think itâ??s just the opposite. I think the university wants the entire community to understand whatâ??s going on in all parts of the world,â?? Scaffido said.
The undercover Project Veritas reporter asked if he can invite â??a freedom fighter to come and do like a training camp for students.â??
Scaffido responds, â??You would be allowed to do something like that. Itâ??s just like bringing in a coach, to do a training, a sports trainer or something,â?? Scaffido said.
Cornell University President David J. Skorton gave a statement regarding the Project Veritas video:
â??As the president of Cornell University, I want to be clear that the notion that Cornell would allow ISIS training sessions on our campus is ludicrous and absolutely offensive.
â??Project Veritas, the organization behind this shoddy piece of â??journalismâ?? has been repeatedly vilified for dishonest, deceitful activity. It is shameful that any individual would pose as a student facing racial discrimination at another university, ask leading questions on hidden camera about Cornellâ??s tolerance for differing viewpoints and backgrounds, and then conveniently splice together the resulting footage to smear our assistant dean and our University. After speaking with Assistant Dean Scaffido, I am convinced that he was not aware of what he was being asked.
â??Let me be clear: Cornell has an unwavering commitment to the free and responsible exchange of ideas. However, we remain vigilant in maintaining an appropriate balance of freedom of expression within accepted boundaries. Of course, incitement to violence is not protected and would never be tolerated on our campus.â??
Watch the video here.Tobin Ortenblad is a Cyclocross Privateer – Garrett Kautz
Tobin Ortenblad is a Cyclocross Privateer
Words by Garrett Kautz and photos by Brett Rothmeyer
Tobin Ortenblad isn’t your typical 22-year-old, nor does he fit the mold of most professional bicycle racers. Sure, he has a coach and a training plan, but that’s where the path begins to blur. Tobin was born and raised in Santa Cruz, California and spent most of his formative years riding BMX bikes, building jumps and eating burritos. Fast forward a decade and he’s fresh off winning the Under 23 Cyclocross National Championship in Asheville. This year, racing in the Elite category, his results have proven that the off-season wasn’t squandered at the beach. He’s finished consistently in the top ten (or top five) at UCI C1 races and a top thirty at both World Cups. Most impressive is that he’s currently doing all this, without a pro contract. We wanted to catch up with the privateer and see what he’s been up to since his big win in January.
Garrett: This season you’re riding a different bike and your kit is looking very tonal, almost monochromatic. What’s changed from last year?
Tobin: Last season was my fourth and final year as a U23 rider. Coming into my first year as an Elite I really wanted to build my own ‘cross program. Initially I wanted to keep my sponsors as local as possible and for the most part that is true for this season. Santa Cruz Bicycles started making the Stigmata again last year and we had briefly talked about a partnership for the 2015/2016 season, but things didn’t come together until this Spring. Everything about the new program has been running perfectly; new bike, new kit, new race category and a whole new level of fitness. The bikes are rad and the kits are subtle and classy. Joe Stanwyck at Santa Cruz designed them for their in-house factory team and we tweaked a thing or two for my setup, but overall are they’re pretty much the same.
Garrett: Did you choose your sponsors for a specific reason or did you take any support you could get?
Tobin: Starting a first-year program can be tricky. Potential sponsors will only know you from your past results. I was fortunate to draw from past relationships and contacts to put together a solid support structure for this year. And I was lucky in that I didn’t have to compromise on any equipment for the season. From the kits to the bikes, everything is completely dialed.
Garrett: Do you have a mechanic at each race? How do you afford traveling and lodging with so many races on the calendar?
Tobin: I’ve been coached by Chris McGovern, for the past five years and we definitely have a closer relationship than your average coach/client. He was a huge driving force in getting my new program going. Chris also happens to be an incredible mechanic, so he travels with me to almost every UCI race. I don’t have the luxury of a huge team budget, so I have to be frugal. Blocking out race trips and staying with host families are helpful way to save money. For example, in September we went from Rochester – Madison – Las Vegas – Iowa City and hit the major races on the schedule. I choose host housing over hotels at all the races. After a few years of doing the domestic circuit I’ve met many host families and try to stay with the same ones every year. I’ve had the pleasure of staying with a lot of great people who really make it possible for programs like mine to succeed. We usually cook and eat together and you’re never stuck in a lonely hotel room in the middle of nowhere.
Garrett: You’ve surprised a lot of folks with your results so far this season. Did you train to peak early at the big domestic races or are you still building for a long season ahead?
Tobin: The past four years in the U23 category were all about experience. It seemed like every race I learned something new, but it wasn’t as often that I felt like I had a stellar result. Starting in early July, I completely changed my training to focus on ‘cross and worked my ass off because I needed my debut season as an Elite to turn heads. I’ve definitely been training hard, but am nowhere near a “peak” at this point. My big goal for the season is a top five at the Elite National Championships in January and a top twenty at the World Championships in Sanem, Luxembourg a few weeks later.
Garrett: Your dad and sister also race with you at many of the local Northern California ‘cross races. In fact, the first time I met your dad was at a race in San Francisco. He was riding a big blue Hunter and he dropped his chain. He was visibly upset (maybe cursing), a few groups passed him, then he got it sorted and finished the race smiling. Was the family aspect of cyclo-cross apparent to you as a kid? Why do you choose to primarily focus on ‘cross instead of road or mountain?
Tobin: Ooh yes, the whole family races. Maddie and I refer to it as, “The Dynasty.” Rick dropping a chain and dropping a bomb or two…yeah, sounds about right. Honestly, I think he might enjoy going to races more than I do, ha. Seeing him at a ‘cross race is rad. I loved the sport from the very beginning and the vibe was immediately more relaxed than the road or mountain races that I went to. Overall, it seemed like everybody took the racing seriously, but had a good time before and after. I think that still remains true, even at the highest level of the sport.
Garrett: I know you enjoy your time at home in Santa Cruz, but what do you do all day? Is it all bikes and training?
Tobin: I swear, sometimes I wish I was from a place that was not as nice as Santa Cruz. At least then, when I’m traveling I wouldn’t miss the place so damn much. During the season it seems like my time at home is never long enough. Running my own ‘cross program this year means that when I’m home between race weekends, I’m training, but also making sure my equipment is dialed and ready to go for the next trip. Chris does most of the work while we’re on the road, but I do everything else when I’m home. Unpacking, cleaning, adjusting bikes, gluing tires, and repacking is pretty standard protocol. I also try and get in some hard motor pacing sessions with my dad driving the scooter up Highway 1. Obviously, my life isn’t all bike related. Corrina, my girlfriend, and I are usually cruising around Bonny Doon, going to the beach, eating tacos, or camping if we have time!
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Thanks to Brett Rothmeyer for the photos! Follow Tobin on Instagram, or his blog and Garrett on Instagram.Baahubali is an epic triumph of director SS Rajamouli’s fierce imagination
In 1948, when an obsessive SS Vasan, owner of Gemini Studios, spent everything he had to make Chandralekha, the costliest film outside Hollywood then, it took the country by storm by its sheer spectacle, scale and creative daredevilry. Indian cinema, still in its early stages with limited budget and equipment, hadn’t seen anything like it before.
Thirty years later, Telugu director B Vittalacharya, another celluloid visionary, drove his audiences crazy with visual illusions in his Jaganmohini. In an era when everything had to be done on film, Vittalacharya dreamed big and broke new ground with his camera tricks, clever lighting and sets to create unprecedented visual effects in India.
With Baahubali, Telugu director SS Rajamouli has reclaimed the legacy of Vasan and Vittalacharya with his audacious vision of the art of entertainment cinema. It’s an astonishing sensual experience, not only because of stunning spectacles and high definition grandeur, but also because of the riveting drama of cinema that only a master can unravel.
The story of Baahubali is no different from the age old mythological rip-offs that we had read and re-read in and Amar Chitra Katha and Chandamama magazine - of kingdoms, valorous men, fratricidal strifes, invasions and wars.
A benevolent royalty, with its exaggerated magisterial aura, and its loyal tribes make the picture complete. Rajamouli takes this thread and goes wild with his imagination. What rolls out in front of us is a 4K Dolby Atmos spectacle that is both stunning and endearing, something that we have never seen in India earlier.
Undoubtedly, at the core of Baahubali is the art of cinema, an Indian story and highly skilled narration. Without them, the movie would have fallen flat like the VFX misadventures such as Ra One and Kochadaiyaan.
Everything that Rajamouli uses in the film - grand production design, luxurious visual effects and foley, elaborate period costume, great music, classic photography and well choreographed fight and war sequences - are in fact only incidental and hence do not stand between him and the viewer-experience. There are situations and sequences that are so dramatic and imaginative that they offer brand new experiences for the same old stories and emotions.
The song sequence, for instance, between the hero (Prabhas) and his female co-star (Tamanna) is a brilliant example of Rajamouli’s unbridled imagination and how he summons up the right resources - charming music, delightful performances, breathtaking locations and poetic visual effects - to make it work. It’s such delectable fantasy. Similarly, every scene played by Ramya Krishnan reeks of regal authority, thanks to the right camera angles and movements, and consistent expressions. Action sequences, particularly the hand-to-hand combats, are crisp and outstanding.
Tamanna, who had had a bad run in Bollywood despite her roaring success in the south, looks very good in those fight scenes in the jungle. Also noteworthy is how good looking human bodies are in this movie - look out for the shots of a lean and well-built Prabhas with a bare torso and the dance sequence featuring three great looking women in a bar.
There is no point in restating the quality and scale of Baahubali’s spectacle that everybody is talking about - the sweeping landscapes, the enormous sets and multiple locations (within in India and in Bulgaria) that dovetail with high quality visual effects, breathtaking fights and convincing war sequences. Yes, it’s really true that every scene is dripping of grandeur and it rarely dips in consistency.
The film is equally engaging in terms of emotions and drama. Specially notable are veteran composer Keeravani’s music, that displays a diverse repertoire, and Senthil Kumar’s camera. Performances of the main cast, drawn from Tamil and Telugu film industries, are measured and not over the top. There are occasional flashes of Telugu kitsch, but they mostly embellish the scenes.
By his own admission, special effects is only a tool that Rajamouli uses to enhance the quality of his narration. In his last movie Eaga (Makhi in Hindi), he used copious amounts of visual effects to tell an emotional tale featuring a cute fly in the lead. The movie was so well-crafted that it worked both as a love story and a revenge-thriller. Prior to Eaga, he had made another epic tale titled Magadheera that too had a lot of special effects. In Baahubali, he seems to have found a better balance between big spectacle and human emotions, while raising the bar of quality manifold.
Ultimately Baahubali is the triumph of Rajamouli’s fearless imagination and command over the medium, and the skills of Indian technicians. Although the visual effects have been put together by graphics specialists in studios across the world, it’s a film designed and realised in India. And in character, it’s Indian to the core.
Updated Date: Jul 13, 2015 13:10:08 ISTDrinking contest
When two or more people want to duke it out with their bodies on their line, but aren't partial to pain, drinking contests are the go-to method.
This is a simple ruleset for a fait drinking contest.
Setup
You need to have at least two participants. The contest is divided into rounds called "Drinking rounds". Each round lasts until both parties finish their drink.
Drinking round
First, the drink is determined.
Assign a category of drink to be drunk during this drinking round.
Then all contestants make 3 CON saving throws against a DC of "Category of drink DC" + "number of rounds" * 5. If they fail all 3, they are out. The number of rounds is considered 0 at the start.
Drink categories
Light
Ale, beer and other low alcoholic beverages DC - 5
Medium
Wine and other medium alcoholic variants DC - 10
Strong
Whiskey, scotch, vodka and other high alcoholic drinks
DC - 15
Liver murder
Spirits, pure alcohol and other pure or near enough drinks DC - 20The Republicans are deficit hawks. This, for example:
A Republican plan to extend tax cuts for the rich would add more than $36 billion to the federal deficit next year -- and transfer the bulk of that cash into the pockets of the nation's millionaires, according to a congressional analysis released Wednesday. New data from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation show that households earning more than $1 million a year would reap nearly $31 billion in tax breaks under the GOP plan in 2011, for an average tax cut per household of about $100,000.
$31 billion out of $36 billion. A bailout for millionaires -- added to the deficit and, subsequently, the national debt. And that's next year alone. $3.5 trillion over the next ten years. Yet making sure teachers, firefighters and police officers get to keep their jobs is somehow a "bailout" (the jobs bill, by the way, reduces the deficit, according to the CBO).
I don't know what's more shocking, the upside-down Republican logic and priorities or the naive idiots who buy it.Subject: [ANN] Rails 0.5.0: The end of vaporware!
From: David Heinemeier Hansson <david@ u h k g o
Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 04:43:00 +0900
I?ve been talking (and hyping) Rails for so long that it?s all wierd to finally have it out in the open. Mind you, we?re still not talking about a 1.0 release, but the package currently on offer is still something I?m very comfortable to share with the world. Undoubtedly, there could be more documentation and more examples, but Real Artists Ship and this piece will grow in public. Enjoy Rails! Documentation, download: http://www.rubyonrails.org What is Rails? ============== Rails is a open source web-application framework for Ruby. It ships with an answer for every letter in MVC: Action Pack for the Controller and View, Active Record for the Model. Everything needed to build real-world applications in less lines of code than other frameworks spend setting up their XML configuraion files. Like Basecamp, which was launched after 4 KLOCs and two months of developement by a single programmer. Being a full-stack framework means that all layers are built to work seemlessly together. That way you Don?t Repeat Yourself (DRY) and you can use a single language from top to bottom. Everything from templates to control flow to business logic is written in Ruby?the language of love for industry heavy-weights In striving for DRY compliance, Rails shuns configuration files and annotations in favor of reflection and run-time extensions. This means the end of XML files telling a story that has already been told in code. It means no compilation phase: Make a change, see it work. Meta-data is an implementation detail left for the framework to handle. What is Active Record? ====================== Active Record connects business objects and database tables to create a persistable domain model where logic and data is presented in one wrapping. It?s an implementation of the object-relational mapping (ORM) pattern by the same name as described by Martin Fowler: An object that wraps a row in a database table or view, encapsulates the database access, and adds domain logic on that data. Active Record?s main contribution to the pattern is to relieve the original of two stunting problems: lack of associations and inheritance. By adding a simple domain language-like set of macros to describe the former and integrating the Single Table Inheritance pattern for the latter, Active Record narrows the gap of functionality between the data-mapper and active record approach. Learn more: http://activerecord.rubyonrails.org What is Action Pack? ==================== Action Pack splits the response to a web request into a controller part (performing the logic) and a view part (rendering a template). This two-step approach is known as an action, which will normally create, read, update, or delete (CRUD for short) some sort of model part (often database) before choosing either to render a template or redirecting to another action. Action Pack implements these actions as public methods on Action Controllers and uses Action Views to implement the template rendering. Action Controllers are then responsible for handling all the actions relating to a certain part of an application. This grouping usually consists of actions for lists and for CRUDs revolving around a single (or a few) model objects. So ContactController would be responsible for listing contacts, creating, deleting, and update contacts. A WeblogController could be responsible for both posts and comments. Action View templates are written using embedded Ruby in tags mingled in with the HTML. To avoid cluttering the templates with code, a bunch of helper classes provide common behavior for forms, dates, and strings. And it?s easy to add specific helpers to keep the separation as the application extends. Learn more: http://actionpack.rubyonrails.org -- David Heinemeier Hansson, http://www.instiki.org/ -- A No-Step-Three Wiki in Ruby http://www.basecamphq.com/ -- Web-based Project Management http://www.loudthinking.com/ -- Broadcasting Brain http://www.nextangle.com/ -- Development & Consulting ServicesESPN legal analyst Roger Cossack discusses the legal impact of the newly released police interview of Joe Mixon, and ESPN Big 12 writer Jake Trotter provides the reaction in Oklahoma as critics are questioning how this has been handled by the Sooners. (4:42)
Oklahoma running back Joe Mixon told police in 2014 that "it felt like a dude hit me" when Amelia Molitor slapped him, and that he punched her as a reaction, according to a video The Oklahoman obtained of his interview with police three days after the incident inside a sandwich shop near campus.
In the video, Mixon told police that he heard a racial slur from Molitor's male friend, but not from Molitor. And Mixon admitted that he responded with an anti-gay slur at the male friend.
"The gay dude... he called me something," Mixon said in the video. "He was like, 'n-----.' So then I was like, 'you got me messed up.' And then I called him a f-g. And after that, the girl, she dropped her purse, that's when she came in my face, pushed me, and then my glasses came off, and then, like, I had, like, jumped at her, like, to watch out. And then she came in my face. I put my head down. And she swung on me.
Editor's Picks We should have been outraged before the Joe Mixon tape On Friday night, when a tape of Joe Mixon punching a woman became public, the outcry was immediate. But the question is: Where was that disgust when the assault first happened?
"And after that, like, I was so shocked, because she hit me so hard. It felt like a dude hit me. And after that, like, my face went boom, my reaction was just right there."
On Friday, Mixon's attorneys released two surveillance videos that showed the punch, which fractured four bones in Molitor's face. Mixon was charged with a misdemeanor at the time of the incident, and the university suspended him for the entire 2014 season.
The City of Norman had shielded the surveillance video from the public since the incident, prompting a lawsuit from the Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters. Earlier this month, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled in favor of the broadcasters and ordered the City of Norman to release the tape under Oklahoma's Open Records Act. The city had until Dec. 26 to either release the video or file an appeal. In a preemptive move, Mixon's attorneys released the tape. According to The Oklahoman, the release came around the time of Molitor's graduation ceremony at Oklahoma.
In a formal apology he issued last month, Mixon suggested racial slurs directed at him initiated the incident.
Joe Mixon told police in 2014 that he punched a woman after being "shocked" at how hard she hit him. "It felt like a dude hit me," Mixon told police, according to The Oklahoman. "And after that, like, my face went boom, my reaction was right there." Sue Ogrocki/AP
In the video obtained by The Oklahoman, Norman police detective David Freudiger told Mixon that Molitor's version of events were that Mixon and some of his teammates begin harassing Molitor and her friend, because the friend is gay, and that they went into the sandwich shop to evade the situation.
Mixon told Freudiger that Molitor intentionally blew cigarette smoke in his face and teammate Mark Andrews' face outside the sandwich shop. Mixon said Molitor and Andrews exchanged words and, "After that, the girl, I guess she got scared or what, she went up inside, and she went to talk to the person that I came there with [teammate David Smith], and I guess she knew him or whatever.
"So when she went inside, she was talking about how we were trying to jump her. So that's when the dude [Molitor's friend] went inside, and I followed the dude. That's when I interrupted her, and I was talking to Sooner Dave [Smith], talking about how nobody was trying to jump her, we had no problem with her, she was just being disrespectful, you know... smoking in my face and acting crazy."
In the surveillance video, Mixon turned away, but he appeared to say something to Molitor's friend. Molitor pushed Mixon. He lunged at her. She slapped him. Then he punched her, which caused her face to slam back into a table.
"I pretty much had a point in the store where we got into it, and I was like, you know, she being disrespectful, I felt like I should have left it alone," Mixon said. "But then once the dude called me the n-----, I mean, it pretty much got my, you know, thoughts off of the whole situation. That's when it just escalated."
According to The Oklahoman, Mixon said the racial slur was not said to him, but about him. A police interviewer called that strange, since Smith -- Mixon's teammate, friend and an African-American -- was sitting at the table.
"I mean, even though she pushed me, I didn't think she was going to hit me," Mixon said. "I was so shocked, because she hit me so hard, it felt like really like a dude hit me. And then, like, my face just started ringing. And after that, like, it was just like a reaction."
Mixon left the sandwich shop immediately after the punch. According to The Oklahoman, several of Mixon's Sooner teammates -- including Michiah Quick, Daniel Brooks and Andrews -- followed.
"I just felt, I was like... what I got myself into?" Mixon said. "And then once I left, I mean, I felt bad. Even though she hit me and it hurt, I mean, it was just like the fact that you know me, you know, being out of character and, you know, putting myself into a certain situation. I just started thinking about the future and everything else."
In 11 games for the Sooners this season, Mixon has rushed for a team-leading 1,183 yards and eight touchdowns. Oklahoma plays Auburn in the Allstate Sugar Bowl on Jan. 2.
Mixon is a third-year sophomore who is eligible for the 2017 NFL draft.
On ability alone, ESPN NFL draft analyst Mel Kiper Jr. on Friday said he'd rank Mixon as his fifth-highest-rated running back, behind Leonard Fournette, Dalvin Cook, D'Onta Foreman and Christian McCaffrey. Mixon, however, did not make Kiper's latest overall rankings at each position.So, I mean, you knew we had to talk about Alex Guerrero. I actually didn’t want to! I wanted to talk about Mike Bolsinger‘s slider. But no one other than Brim and I care about that, and Brooks’ hasn’t updated yet anyway, so let’s do that later and right now instead talk about the guy everyone’s talking about. I can’t even tell you the amount of comments and tweets I’ve heard from fans insisting that Don Mattingly is a fool for not immediately benching Juan Uribe to play Guerrero every day; it’s come with a furor I haven’t heard last summer… when people were insisting that Guerrero was a natural shortstop and should play every day.
And I get that, really. Six extra-base hits in 20 plate appearances is more than a little impressive, it’s spectacular. I want to see more of him too. But you probably already know where this is going. You know that it’s far, far too soon to just toss Uribe overboard, not after the two seasons he’s just had where he was considerably above average on both sides of the ball. You know that we’re talking about 20 plate appearances, and that 20 plate appearances ago, we were wondering if he could even stick on the bench or would have to be offloaded. Remember Hector Olivera? (No, seriously, do you remember Hector Olivera?) When reports came out that he’d agreed with the Dodgers just a month ago, one of the main reactions was “so Guerrero’s gone then, yes?” That was 20 plate appearances ago. 20 admittedly great plate appearances, but let’s try to keep perspective.
Remember, also, that in his limited major league career, he’s never drawn a walk and swings at everything. (I’m not kidding. He swings at 52.6% of pitches outside the zone. For comparison, noted free swinger Pablo Sandoval is only at 45.6% in his career.) That’s not about being a buzzkill. It’s about understanding sustainable hitting approaches. You know that Justin Turner has to get playing time, too. And you know — or you should know — that the four easy balls hit to Guerrero at third hardly dispel any questions about his defense.
Not that I’m trying to talk you out of liking Guerrero or wanting to see him — not at all. That bat! I want to see more of it. I get it. It’s exciting, even if some of the expectations being put upon him by some fans are just ludicrous. It’s just that there are real issues in place of “just start him,” because defense matters, the other players matter, and the fact that pitchers are clearly going to learn |
probably more helpful.”
Other studies also raise questions about the 40 percent claim. An earlier CDC study, reported in JAMA in December 2012, found that the prevalence of obesity among 2-to-4-year olds in low-income families fell to 14.9 percent in 2010 from 15.2 percent in 2003. That represents an improvement of less than 2 percentage points, based on data for 27.5 million children collected at public health clinics.
The CDC researchers had earlier reported that the prevalence of obesity among low-income preschoolers fell from 2008 to 2011 in 19 states. But the largest decrease was from 13.6 percent to 11 percent. In most states, declines were much less pronounced.
SCANT SIGNS OF BEHAVIORAL CHANGE
For obesity rates to drop, researchers reckon, young children have to eat differently and become more active. But research shows little sign of such changes among 2-to-5-year olds, casting more doubt on the 43 percent claim.
Such a decline would require changes in exercise, food consumption and sleep patterns, said Mass General’s Kaplan “There is no evidence of that,” he said.
In 2010 Whaley and her colleagues examined the effectiveness of WIC classes and counseling to encourage healthy eating and activities for women and children in the program.
Their findings were discouraging: Television watching and consumption of sweet or salty snacks actually rose, while fruit and vegetable consumption fell - changes that could lead to weight gain. One positive was a rise in physical activity.
Apart from the WIC program, few anti-obesity efforts target preschoolers, Kaplan pointed out. That makes a precipitous decline in obesity in that group highly unlikely.
“The programs that have been implemented, from changing what’s in vending machines to the Let’s Move program, target school-age children more than preschoolers,” he said, referring to an exercise initiative championed by Michelle Obama.
While experts have raised doubts that obesity among preschoolers has fallen as much as CDC reported, no one can say for certain that the claim is wrong. To resolve the controversy, scientists say they need more data on both preschoolers and older children.
Until then, said Einstein’s Kabat, “there are many reasons to think the 43 percent claim is shaky.”It wasn't pretty in the early goings, but Florida State got its 20th consecutive win Saturday night in Raleigh after being down 24-7 to the N.C. State Wolfpack.
On the second play of the game, N.C. State hit the FSU defense with a big gainer for a 54-yard TD. On the play, Jalen Ramsey blitzed and missed Jacoby Brissett, who gathered and hit a receiver who had reset his route after Tyler Hunter jumped the flat, expecting the ball to come out quickly.
Florida State responded immediately with a seven play, 55-yard drive, with Jameis Winston hitting Bobo Wilson for the TD on 3rd and 20.
But N.C. State answered right back, with a 13-play, 75-yard touchdown drive of its own, converting two third downs in the process. Florida State, without Nile Lawrence-Stample (lost for the year with a torn pec) and Mario Edwards, Jr. (concussion) got run over on the drive.
On the first play of the following drive, right guard Tre' Jackson allowed pressure up the gut, and Jameis Winston was hit as he was about to throw and fumbled, giving N.C. State the ball at the Florida State 21-yard line. N.C. State turned the resulting field position into a field goal.
N.C. State hit a great kickoff following the field goal, high and deep, to pin FSU at its own 19. FSU went three-and-out, including a questionable lack of pass interference call, and Cason Beatty hit a poor punt to give N.C. State great field position.
And N.C. State turned the field position into points almost immediately, hitting a nice throwback play to a tight end, and then Jacoby Brissett evaded two sack attempts and threw a nice ball to the open man in the end zone to go up 24-7. The 24 points allowed by FSU in the first quarter were the most in the program's history.
FSU punches back
N.C. State hit another nice kickoff following the TD attempt, and FSU started on its own 18 again. But FSU responded with a 10-play, 82-yard touchdown drive of its own. Jameis Winston and the passing game worked its way down the field, and Karlos Williams finished it off behind a great block by Josue Matias.
FSU pinned N.C. State deep on the ensuing kickoff at its own 8, playing gaps a bit better and not allowing a huge run on first down for seemingly the first time in the game. FSU forced a three-and-out and Rashad Greene returned the ball to the N.C. State 21.
FSU immediately cashed in with a fantastic throw to Christian Green. The senior scored the first touchdown of his career with some excellent body control on a great ball by Jameis Winston.
Another good kickoff from Roberto Aguayo pinned N.C. State deep at its own 19. State picked up the initial third and 9 with a great throw and catch on a comeback route at the sticks, and hit a RB screen for another first. But FSU got the stop and forced the punt, a good one, to the FSU 8.
FSU moved the ball to the NC State 46, flipping the field, but could go no farther. A solid punt pinned NCSU at the 13.
N.C. State picked up one first down with a great scramble, beating defensive tackle Desmond Hollin in the open field -- a mismatch. Another first down came on a missed tackle on a quick pass to a running back. But FSU got a stop, and the ball back with all three timeouts, although Rashad Greene foolishly caught the ball inside the FSU 10, and then attempted to run after giving a fair catch signal, which is a penalty. FSU would have had to march 96 yards for the score, and after a false start by Nick O'Leary, elected to go conservative.
At the half, FSU trailed 24-21, and had given up 6.8 yards/play, while gaining 7.3.
To open the 2nd half, Winston was intercepted after trying to evade pressure allowed by Cam Erving. On the ensuing drive, Jacoby Brissett made another fantastic play, while being sacked and dragged down on the body of a teammate, Brissett managed to flip the ball to a teammate for a first down.
Brissett made a great scramble getting out of the grasp of Chris Casher on the ensuing play. Brissett followed it up with another great scramble, and was playing out of his mind at that point. FSU had better rush discipline on the ensuing pass plays, but Brissett had time and threw a fine TD pass over the middle for a score to go up 31-21.
FSU again started deep in its own territory after another nice kickoff by the Wolfpack, and picked up first downs to Wilson and Greene, and another to Greene as N.C. State was playing deep and giving the underneath passes. Then FSU turned to the run game, rushing four of the final five plays for 42 yards, including a Dalvin Cook touchdown.
Aguryo boomed a great kickoff and it was covered well, and N.C. State was stopped at its own 12. Freshman Lorenzo Featherston made a first down stop that got the Wolfpack off schedule, and FSU got the stop. But Rashad Greene fumbled the punt and the Wolfpack recovered at the FSU 27, scoring on the sudden change soon thereafter to go up 38-28.
FSU was composed on the ensuing drive, even after an opening false start, going 71 yards in five plays, including a huge gainer of 40 yards by Travis Rudolph on a bubble screen.
On the ensuing drive, the FSU's defense allowed a first down on the ground, then caused its first turnover of the game, as a pair of freshmen (and third stringers), Jacob Pugh and Lorenzo Featherston, closed quickly on QB Jacoby Brissett. Brissett fumbled, and FSU cashed in for its first lead of the game, Winston to Greene, 42-38.
On the ensuing drive, N.C. State worked its way down the field with quick passing, not giving FSU much chance to rush, but FSU got the stop, and took over on its own 12.
No problem for FSU, however, as Freshman Dalvin Cook busted a 38-yard run on first down with a great cutback run. Rashad Greene got open from the slot against N.C. State's third corner or safety time and again, and FSU marched the field 88 yards in 9 plays.
At this point in the game, Florida State was averaging almost 10 yards per minute.
On the ensuing drive, FSU lost new starting nose guard, Derrick Mitchell, (old starter Nile Lawrence-Stample tore his pec and is done for the year) to a leg injury. N.C. State converted a fourth-and-1 play in which it looked like the runner's elbow many have been down a yard short, but it was not reviewed. The Wolfpack drove deep into FSU territory, and sophomore Jalen Ramsey screamed past the blocker for the Wolfpack to strip Jacoby Brissett and FSU recovered.
On the ensuing drive, a ridiculously bad chop block call negated a big run by Karlos Williams and backed FSU up. N.C. State was then hit with an illegal hands to the face. Winston then threw a bad interception, not seeing a linebacker in space.
On a scramble by Jacoby Brissett on the ensuing drive, the QB was injured and the reserve QB couldn't connect with a fade route in the end zone. State kicked a field goal to pull to 49-41.
On the ensuing drive, FSU faced a third and 11, and Jameis Winston picked it up with a great scramble, and Karlos Williams ran for 28 on the next play, to salt the clock and put FSU in scoring territory. Williams punched in a final run to go up 56-41, sealing the deal.In less than a month from today The League turns 1 and I turn 31. As I reflect back on my first year as a single founder (yes, the pun is intended), my biggest regret is that for nearly a year I’ve held my tongue on voicing the mission behind The League, and instead let the press write their own story about a dating app exclusively for good-looking rich kids. I told myself I was just obeying wise adages: ‘ignore the critics’, ‘focus on your users and your product’, and ‘no press is bad press’, but by refusing to respond, I essentially let the media go on to corrupt our concept into one so superficial and optimized for clickbait that it’s nearly unrecognizable to me now.
Why did I hold back? Truthfully, I was worried that if I shared my real vision behind The League I would alienate some of our user base -- particularly the men -- which a dating app clearly needs to survive. This, in turn, could further segment our already-smaller-than-Tinder addressable market, and could hurt our chances at getting traction and raising funding. But ironically, by downplaying my mission, I was actually suffering from the very same type of complex I am determined to eradicate.
And at 31, it’s time for me to stop worrying about what other people think and start worrying about moving the needle.
So if you’ll bear with me while I get on my soapbox for a few minutes, I’d like to finally explain why I started The League.
When I got an academic scholarship to Carnegie Mellon to study computer science, I never thought twice about how education and career would affect my dating life. I worked incredibly hard to graduate early and build my resume, network, and pedigree working in all-male teams at name-brand tech companies. After finishing it all off with an MBA, I started to realize that with every promotion or degree I collected, I embodied more and more the definition of ‘alpha female’. (The fact that women who are able to compete successfully with men in the workplace warrants us a special label is ludicrous to me, but I embraced it because it meant I was succeeding).
After business school, I entered back into the world of singledom after the end of a 5 year relationship. It became clear that I had effectively qualified out a large pool of guys that were simply not interested in dating an alpha female;
I was an over-educated, career-obsessed wanna-be tech executive with little interest in playing the 'traditional' doting girlfriend.
And to be fair, I qualified out guys that didn’t share my same drive to achieve, level of intellect, or desire to be in a relationship where our careers and social lives were of equal importance. It only took me a few dates ‘in the wild’ to realize that the typical online dating sites were a waste of my - and their - time. And when you’re $200,000 in debt after business school, you tend to place a high dollar value on your time.
It became clear to me that as far as women have come in redefining our role in the workplace, there is much work left to do in redefining our role in relationships.
In 2015, there’s many men who will claim they want a ‘smart, ambitious woman’, but I’ve noticed it often doesn’t play out that way in reality, and there are plenty of studies [ In 2015, there’s many men who will claim they want a ‘smart, ambitious woman’, but I’ve noticed it often doesn’t play out that way in reality, and there are plenty of studies [ 1 2 ] to corroborate my anecdotal evidence. It also doesn’t mean men expect their ‘ambitious’ wife to stay that way after marriage. An HBR study finds that 50% of millennial men expect their wife’s career to take a back-seat to theirs (vs. equal priority), and nearly 70% expect the wife to be the primary caretaker of their children (vs. equal responsibility). Even more daunting for some men are ‘progressive relationships’ - where the female may have a busier schedule, a more powerful network, and achieve more career success than her male partner. A University of Chicago study shows a woman and man are much less likely to pair up if her income exceeds his. All of this points to why it’s not uncommon for women to feel the need to
‘tone down [our] intelligence, opinions, and career ambition as to not scare guys off’.
This awful, cringeworthy expression is what drove me to create The League. I wanted to build a community where smart, outspoken, high-achieving women are celebrated and encouraged to progress in their career full-time. I wanted to never EVER hear a woman be worried that her educational achievements or career ambition would be a turn-off. As Sheryl Sandberg wisely advised to us:
‘T he most important career choice you'll make is who you marry. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner.' - Sheryl Sandberg
I wanted to build a community where this type of relationship is the rule, not the exception.
The media has slammed The League for our ‘exclusive’ model and labeled us an elitist app for trust fund kids and ivy league grads.
My inbox flooded with dozens of reality-show production companies pitching us to create the next Millionaire Matchmaker, type-casting me as the millennial's Patti Stranger whose goal is to match up rich men with gorgeous women desiring financial security.
These stereotypes make my blood boil and couldn’t be more wrong.
The women in The League have consciously prioritized their education and career trajectory: 98% have college degrees, 8% are pHDs, 30% have advanced degrees, 14% are director-level or higher, 21% are managers, 13% are CEOs, founders, co-founders or owners, and over 39% are estimated to be making six figure salaries. And this is all with an average (and median) female age of 29. These are high-achieving women that are likely to continue working post marriage and post children (if they choose to have them). The men they (we) want to be matched up with on The League are educated, ambitious, accomplished and confident enough in themselves to desire a female partner that has the drive and intellect to reach high levels of professional success, even if it eclipses his own.
What at first glance is easy to label as elitism is actually efficacy of this broader mission.
The League’s heavily scrutinized admissions-based model is our attempt to create a founding community of high-achieving, diverse, and influential members that will serve as trailblazers to help change the conventional gender views still prevalent in our society. Yes, we are selective - we believe in the The League’s heavily scrutinized admissions-based model is our attempt to create a founding community of high-achieving, diverse, and influential members that will serve as trailblazers to help change the conventional gender views still prevalent in our society. Yes, we are selective - we believe in the research that correlates education and professional achievement with ambition, and weigh these data heavily in our screening algorithms. Though it’s currently a slow and far from a perfect admissions process,
If we open the gates too wide and too fast, we risk becoming like every other dating app out there where the men judge women on their looks and the women struggle to find men who value their intelligence and support their ambition.
And then our mission has failed.
The couples that we create, even if small in absolute numbers right now, ideally will go on to successfully demonstrate that dual-career relationships are not only possible, they are preferable. These power couples will ultimately serve as the role models that our society sorely lacks today.
My hope is that The League promotes higher education, encourages career-ambition, and, most importantly, cultivates the desire for an egalitarian relationship in both sexes.
Our generation has the unique opportunity to weed out the antiquated social norms that stem from decades (if not centuries) ago, yet still manage to profoundly influence how we define a relationship in today's world. If as a founder I can point to even a small increase in the number of equal partnerships that result from the curated community we’re building, then I’m okay being labeled an elitist, or whatever anyone wants to call me. Because if we can help move the needle of society, even a tiny bit, towards equalism, that is much more important to me than my own google search results.
Amanda Bradford, Founder & CEO
theleague.com
#endofsoapbox #micdrop #getmeoffTinder #neversettleAccording to Marissa Mayer, who was Google’s 20th employee and its first female engineer, the key to success at the search giant was hard work. Specifically, the kind of hard work that required strategically planned trips to the john.
Speaking to Bloomberg Businessweek for its 2016 interview issue, the Yahoo CEO shared her thoughts on the “Google story.”
The other piece that gets overlooked in the Google story is the value of hard work. When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if it was inevitable. The actual experience was more like, “Could you work 130 hours in a week?” The answer is yes, if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom. The nap rooms at Google were there because it was safer to stay in the office than walk to your car at 3 a.m. For my first five years, I did at least one all-nighter a week, except when I was on vacation—and the vacations were few and far between.
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Beautifully, interviewer Max Chafkin responded with, “Wow.” Do you think Google employees ended up synching their bathroom breaks with each other, like women and menstrual cycles?
Besides detailing the level of commitment needed to make it work at Google, Mayer also discussed her future at Yahoo (“I plan to stay. I love the company, and I want to see it go into its next chapter”), the challenges of balancing work life with home life (she recently gave birth to twins), and the surprises that emerged after she took over at Yahoo (“I didn’t know how much time I would spend studying things like tax law and forming an opinion on Chinese e-commerce”).
I’m still stuck on the bathroom comment, though. If any Google employees are reading this, please, get in touch. I am very interested to learn more about your strategy.
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[Bloomberg Businessweek]Thursday, June 6th, 2013 (8:12 am) - Score 963
The UK government’s culture secretary, Maria Miller, has called in major mobile operators, broadband ISPs and online content giants (BT, Sky, Facebook, Twitter etc.) to a special summit on 17th June 2013 where she intends to urge stricter censorship of internet websites and services that distribute “harmful material”.
According to the FT (Paywall), the summit will mostly focus on tackling online child abuse and terrorist content that became a greater target following the recent Woolwich attack in London.
Miller also wants to see firms making it harder for related content to be upload and downloaded, although it’s not clear how this would be achieved or in precisely what context she was speaking. One proposal though appears to envisage the option of “new protocols” that would govern how ISPs respond to such content. It’s all very vague.
An Aide to Maria Miller said: “Enough is enough. There isn’t a comprehensive approach to dealing with this issue. We want to get all these people in a room to explain what they are doing. It’s not good enough for them to throw up their hands and say ‘It’s all very difficult’.”
It’s perhaps worth pointing out that all of the big mobile and broadband ISPs are already voluntarily restricting access to child abuse sites through the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). In addition Facebook are also known to be quite strict against pornographic content in general.
But today most of the worst material is spread through underground services, which ISPs have almost zero control over. Similarly ISP blocks can only ever be skin deep and are thus so easy to avoid that even children can do it. Incidentally this isn’t the ISPs fault, it’s just how the internet works and that’s one of the problems that politicians often struggle to comprehend. In this sense Miller would appear to be talking to the wrong people and what’s really needed is international coordination to delete such content at source.
The other issue here is one of mission creep. Few would disagree with the need to stop child abuse content or terrorist sites but as usual this is often just a mask for plans to target a much wider selection of online content and services (porn, copyright infringement etc.) where the definitions can quickly begin to trap legitimate sites. Commercial ISPs and security firms make for very poor judges.
O2’s on-going censorship of websites that dedicated themselves to helping male victims of domestic violence and rape is just one example (here). We’ve also seen mobile providers block major online retail sites because they contained images of underwear (the same images you see in the high street), as well as restricting access to church websites, political sites and various other incidents (another example). As ever, when push comes to shove, ISPs would understandably rather play it safe but this can harm freedoms.
Peter Bradwell, Open Rights Group, said: “It is understandable that the Minister wants to see what can be done to deal with illegal content online. But powers to make decisions about what people are allowed to see and do on the Internet are significant and must be treated with great care. Efforts to ensure a ‘safer’ online environment can inadvertently lead to overreaching or unaccountable powers or practices that block far too much content, for example. There are particularly serious problems when governments ask or expect companies to police content on their platforms, for example through industry practices. We will be writing to the Minister to make sure that Open Rights Group and representatives of civil society are present.”
Nicole Robinson of business ISP Fluidata said: “Regardless of your position on policing the internet, monitoring cyber activity isn’t going to stop. The question becomes not about whether policing the internet is acceptable, but rather how far is too far? When does policing the internet for those abusing it actually become an abuse to the benign users as well?“
Suffice to say that if the government are going to dictate what we can and cannot see then they should at least put in place a process to ensure that such content is being justly blocked and to remove any that are made illegally. It should not be a one way street, there does need to be accountability.
UPDATE 9:01am
Added some comments from the Open Rights Group and Fluidata above.
UPDATE 11:20am
Speaking of web blocking. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) today showed precisely what happens when states try to enforce censorship through skin deep ISP filtering systems. ASIC ended up blocking 250,000 websites because the 1,000 that they wanted to block were on shared web hosting and thus used the same IP address as the other 249,000 legal sites (here). This is one of the many reasons why Ofcom has previously warned against the use of mandatory web blocking.
UPDATE 8th June 2013
Added a comment from the UK Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA).The Pennsylvania Senate failed Wednesday to get 33 votes to move forward a plan to remove Attorney General Kathleen Kane through a process last used in the late 1800s in order to get a public official out of office.
The resolution was debated for nearly 3 hours on the Senate floor about the grounds that Kane's lack of an active law license has made it impossible to do her job.
The resolution failed 29-19, however a vote to have the resolution returned to the Senate Rules Committee was approved.
The resolution mostly failed along party lines, with the exception of two votes. Democratic Sen. Rob Teplitz voted yes, and Republican Sen. Stewart Greenleaf voting no.
Kane's law license is under temporary, indefinite suspension while she fights criminal charges of leaking secret grand jury material and lying about it.
The measure passed out of the Senate Rules Committee on party lines, with 10 Republicans in favor and 6 Democrats opposed. Kane is a Democrat.
Kane called the maneuver unconstitutional.
The means being used by the Senate to try to remove Kane is called Direct Address, and was last used in 1891. The attempt at that time to remove the government official failed.
After the vote, Kane issued a statement referencing the pornographic email scandal which her office continues to investigate.
"Today is a good day for all those who share my desire to restore confidence in our judges and prosecutors and integrity to our system of justice," Kane said in her statement. "Special Prosecutor Gansler will press on, leaving no hate-filled email unread and no ex parte communication uncovered, in our effort to deliver to all Pennsylvanians, the system of justice we deserve rather than the one we now have. I am happy to continue this effort, finish the mission I pledged to carry out and the job for which I was elected to serve."
Also Wednesday, the state House of Representatives is advanced a second process to explore Kane's removal.
The House voted 170-12 to authorize the Judiciary Committee to make a recommendation about whether Kane should be impeached.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Ron Marsico has said committee work on a Kane impeachment process could be finished in May or June.Over the past few years, we have watched Apple climb the music sales chart courtesy of the iTunes. Last month we learned that Apple passed Best Buy to become the number two retailer in the the US in December. Now, Apple has ascended to the top of the charts, surpassing Wal-Mart for the first time ever, according to an NPD MusicWatch Survey for the month January contained in an internal Apple e-mail which was leaked to Ars Technica but has not been officially published.
The news was announced in an e-mail sent this afternoon to some Apple employees, a copy of which was seen by Ars Technica. It includes a screenshot of an Excel file showing the top ten music retailers in the US for January 2008, and Apple is at the top of the list. The iTunes Store leads the pack with 19 percent, Wal-Mart (which includes the brick-and-mortar stores as well as its online properties) is second with 15 percent, and Best Buy is third with 13 percent. Amazon is a distant fourth at 6 percent, trailed by the likes of Borders, Circuit City, and Barnes & Noble. Rhapsody is in the tenth slot with 1 percent.
The fact that a digital-only retailer has ascended to the top of the sales charts is not unexpected, but it does demonstrate just how much the music landscape has changed since the beginning of the decade. The NPD Group has been tracking a "sharp increase" in digital downloads over the past several months as physical sales dry up. According to NPD's research, 48 percent of US teens didn't buy a single CD in 2007, compared to 38 percent in 2006.
Apple sits atop the NPD Group's list. At the request of the NPD we
have removed screenshots of the documents in question
It has been a dizzying climb for Apple, which only managed to pass Amazon to become the number three music retailer in June 2007. The biggest surprise is Amazon's drop to the number four slot, which might be explained by consumers using iTunes, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy gift cards to buy music after the holiday season—and those gift cards certainly helped propel Apple to the number-one position.
For the music industry, there is a dark side to Apple's ascension to the top of the charts. Buying patterns for digital downloads are different, as customers are far more likely to cherry pick a favorite track or two from an album than purchase the whole thing. In contrast, brick-and-mortar sales are predominantly high-margin CDs. For 2007, that translated into a 10 percent decline in overall music spending according to the NPD Group, and it's a trend that's expected to continue for the foreseeable future.
Overall, paid downloads accounted for almost 30 percent of all music sold in January, a number that would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago. With the Big Four labels throwing off the DRM shackles and experimenting with new delivery models like Last.fm's free streaming service, the future looks bright for digital music distribution.
Update: note on "debunking"
We have seen some stories this morning claiming to have debunked this report based on conjecture (no factual detail or analysis). We repeat: the document says what we said it says, and you can see it for yourself. The documents were also distributed to Apple employees, and show Apple as the number-one music retailer during the period in question. That can't be debunked, sorry. (Sure, you can claim that the data is bad, or sampled incorrectly, but there's no proof of that yet.)
Also, I already noted that the results are influenced by gift card usage, and I noted that other retailers on the list have gift cards, too—don't forget that fact. A sale is a sale, as well. We could also argue forever over whether or not gift cards sales matter, but note that no one was bothered by Apple's December results which included a great deal of gift card purchases as well (but didn't inspire any debunking that time around).
This is a monumental event for Apple, because while the company may not be guaranteed the top spot for eternity—or even the following month—it is something many thought would never happen. But in closing, rest assured that this report is accurate.
Update 2: Apple confirms
Press release here.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
May 24, 2017, 5:52 AM GMT / Updated May 24, 2017, 5:06 PM GMT / Source: Reuters
ILIGAN CITY, Philippines — ISIS-linked militants swept through a southern Philippine city, beheading a police chief, burning buildings, seizing a Catholic priest and his worshipers and raising the black flag of the group, authorities said Wednesday. President Rodrigo Duterte, who had declared martial law across the southern third of the nation, warned he may expand it nationwide.
At least 21 people have died in the fighting, officials said.
Military vehicles carrying government troops head to reinforce Marawi City in the southern Philippines on Wednesday. ROMEO RANOCO / Reuters
As details of the attack in Marawi city emerged, fears mounted that the largest Roman Catholic nation in Asia could be falling into a growing list of countries grappling with the spread of influence from ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
The violence erupted Tuesday after the army raided the hideout of Isnilon Hapilon, a commander of the Abu Sayyaf militant group who has pledged allegiance to ISIS. He is on Washington's list of most-wanted terrorists with a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture.
Related: What You Need to Know About the Controversial Philippine President
The militants called for reinforcements and around 100 gunmen entered Marawi, a mostly Muslim city of 200,000 people on the southern island of Mindanao, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said.
"We are in a state of emergency," Duterte said Wednesday after he cut short a trip to Moscow and flew back to Manila. "I have a serious problem in Mindanao and the ISIS footprints are everywhere."
Abu Sayyaf militant Isnilon Hapilon is on the FBI's "most wanted terrorist" list. The State Department has offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest. FBI
He declared martial rule for 60 days in the entire Mindanao region — home to 22 million people — and vowed to be "harsh."
"If I think that you should die, you will die," he said. "If you fight us, you will die. If there is open defiance, you will die. And if it means many people dying, so be it."
But he said he would not allow abuses and that law-abiding citizens had nothing to fear.
Related: Trump Praised Duterte’s Drug Crackdown
Duterte said a local police chief was stopped at a militant checkpoint and beheaded, and added that he may declare martial law nationwide if he believes the group has taken a foothold.
Marawi Bishop Edwin de la Pena said the militants forced their way into the Marawi Cathedral and seized a Catholic priest, 10 worshipers and three church workers.
A map showing the location of Marawi City in the Philippines. Google Maps
The priest, Father Chito, and the others had no role in the conflict, said Archbishop Socrates Villegas, president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines.
"He was not a combatant. He was not bearing arms. He was a threat to none," Villegas said of Chito. "His capture and that of his companions violates every norm of civilized conflict."
Villegas said the gunmen are demanding the government recall its forces.
Military spokesman Col. Edgard Arevalo said 13 militants had been killed, and that five soldiers had died and 31 others were wounded. Other officials said a security guard and two policemen were also killed, including the beheaded police chief.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte Pavel Golovkin / AP
Arevalo said troops had cleared militants from a hospital, the city hall and Mindanao State University. About 120 civilians were rescued from the hospital, the military said.
Thousands of people have fled the city, said Mary Jo Henry, an emergency response official. She quoted another official as saying Marawi was like "a ghost town."
Broadcaster ABS-CBN showed people crammed inside and on top of public vehicles leaving the area, and some walking on foot with their belongings as they passed through a security checkpoint manned by soldiers.
Martial law allows Duterte to use the armed forces to carry out arrests, searches and detentions more rapidly. He has repeatedly threatened to place the south, the scene of decades-long Muslim separatist uprisings, under martial law. But human rights groups have expressed fears that martial law powers could further embolden Duterte, whom they have accused of allowing extrajudicial killings of thousands of people in his crackdown on illegal drugs.The descendant of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Rev. Robert Lee IV, has left the Bethany United Church of Christ after receiving backlash forhis denouncement of white supremacy at the MTV Video Music Awards last week.
On Monday,an open letter by Lee describing the events that unfolded after his speech was published on a website for the Auburn Seminary. In the piece, Lee wrote that some members of the church “were concerned” about his speech and that the attention it brought to the church wasn’t desired.
“My presence at the church as a descendent of Robert E. Lee and an outspoken opponent of white supremacy had already attracted attention, but with my appearance on MTV the media’s focus on my church reached an all time high,” he wrote. “A faction of church members were concerned about my speech and that I lifted up Black Lives Matter movement, the Women’ s March, and Heather Heyer as examples of racial justice work.”
He went on to say that “the church’s reaction was deeply hurtful” to him.
The 24-year-old pastor had served the North Carolina church for just six months and says he doesn’t want “this episode to be a distraction from the sacred work of confronting white supremacy in all its forms.”
Adding: “My calling and my vocation has led me to speak out against violence and oppression in any form, and I want to especially challenge white Christians in America to take seriously the deadly legacy of slavery in our country and commit ourselves to follow Jesus into a time of deep reflection, repentance and reconciliation.”
At the VMA’s, the fourth-great-nephew of Robert E. Lee introduced Susan Bro ― the mother of slain Charlottesville counter protester, Heather Heyer ― and said it was his “duty to speak out against racism, America’s original sin,” and advocated for viewers to “confront racism and white supremacy head on.”
Since Lee cut ties with the church, he’s been vocal on social media, expressing thanks to supporters and sharing his thoughts on speaking out:
If we all used what we had to speak up, no matter how large or small. I think this world would be a better place.https://t.co/ia5Rlz5Oxc — Rev. Rob Lee (@roblee4) September 5, 2017
Lee ended his open letter by saying he is “looking forward with great hope to what God’s unfolding future and what God has in store for me and ask for all of your prayers and blessings for the future of my ministry.”
Following white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Va.,Lee told HuffPostthat he was deeply troubled by the actions taken in his family’s name and that statues honoring his great-great-great-great |
and grows.” CrossFit has done just that, absorbing pieces of fitness from everywhere and repackaging them as its own. This includes weightlifting, kettlebells, self defense, running, and much more. In general, this is a good thing.
The problem lies when CrossFit envelops a sport or movements from a sport steeped in rich history and tradition, with rigid rules and techniques, and then pukes all over them in the name of speed and intensity.
Weightlifting is a good example. In the weightlifting world, pressing out a lift is general cause for red lights (a “no-rep” in CrossFit parlance). People who are loyal to the sport of weightlifting are appalled by CrossFit’s application of the word “snatch” and that we give credit for reps such as those where athletes drop to their knees to save a lift (dumb) or fight a missed lift with the world’s most hideous press-out (also dumb).
Similarly, with kettlebells, there is a history, a method, and what some might describe as a beauty in a properly executed kettlebell swing. So, when CrossFittters go and bastardize those swings, it pisses off the RKC folks, whether the particular swing might be good, bad, ugly, pretty, or injurious. You may as well have painted a kangaroo into the background of da Vinci’s The Last Supper. (Monty Python fans, you’re welcome)
"The problem lies when CrossFit envelops a sport or movements from a sport steeped in rich history and tradition, with rigid rules and techniques, and then pukes all over them in the name of speed and intensity."
On the other side of the argument, many CrossFitters claim ownership of these newly crafted movements without any real regard to their value because, well, CrossFit says so. When you read some of the disputed article and see words like, “uniqueness of line of action,” “irreducibility,” “While admitting a penchant for iconoclasm, we are not contrary solely for the sake of being contrary. Rational foundations for our programming, exercises, and technique are fundamental to CrossFit’s charter,” you can’t help but be impressed. (I had to look up “irreducibility” to at least get myself some context.)
But while “uniqueness of line of action” and “irreducibility” sound impressive, the words mean little to the majority of people. We are simply being dazzled. So instead of doing any real analysis of the value of the overhead swing, we take CrossFit’s word for it. “Hey! It’s irreducible, alright? Get that goddamn thing over your head!”
CrossFit's Reasoning
Let’s look at CrossFit’s reasons for swinging overhead. The first stated reason is:
We don’t do half rep pull-ups, we don’t do half rep squats, and we don’t do half rep push-ups. If there is a natural range of motion to any movement we like to complete it. To do otherwise seems unnatural.
So CrossFit considers a Russian swing a half rep. There’s one of the reasons you have the RKC community ruffled, guys.
Using that logic, CrossFitters would never deadlift. Rather, they should sumo deadlift high pull the bar every time they touch it. Better yet, just execute a narrow grip snatch every time you touch the bar because that’s the way to “lengthen the line of travel of any movement” as the article justifies.
"The goal is not always simply to 'do more work.' And you’ll never convince a powerlifter deadlifting 750lbs that he is only doing a 'half rep.'"
The problem with this argument is that it disregards the purpose for a particular exercise. For example, the reason you practice a deadlift is different than the reason you practice a snatch. You’re not just looking for the longest possible range of motion. Deadlifts can be trained as a piece of the snatch or as their own end-goal. There are multiple variations of a deadlift, all of which serve different and varied purposes. The goal is not always simply to “do more work.” And you’ll never convince a powerlifter deadlifting 750lbs that he is only doing a “half rep.”
But that’s the difference between CrossFit and other sports in a nutshell. Other sports, in general, seek to execute the task specific to their sport. In weightlifting, everything is done in furtherance of the goal of executing a three-white-light snatch at the highest possible level. Snatch pulls, squats, Romanian deadlifts, good mornings, you name it, are all done in support of that single execution of technique.
In CrossFit, the goal is simple: more work. That is the technique. That is the execution of the test. So everything CrossFit does is done in furtherance of that goal - to perform more work. As such, any RKC argument that the “purpose of the kettlebell swing is to develop ballistic hip power” falls on deaf ears. That’s not what CrossFitters are interested in. They are only interested in how to do more work (in less time). They’re not training pieces of movements; they’re working. And they don’t care about your sport’s protocol. They really don’t.
The CrossFit Formula
But CrossFit, as a training methodology as expressed in a mathematical formula fails to take some nebulous variables into account - namely, goals. So when it comes to the American kettlebell swing, we see this formula:
Work (W) = The weight of an object x the height that object is lifted (why CrossFit takes the bell overhead)
W/Time (T) = Power (P) or, more accurate to CrossFit’s application, Intensity (I).
The bottom line is that for this formula (and for CrossFit’s substantiating formula) to be accurate, you simply must start with “W.” This means you need to move the heaviest possible weight the farthest or highest. That is CrossFit’s entire justification for the American swing as outlined in the referenced article, aside from that half-rep nonsense.
The upshot of this is that CrossFit will never not do the American swing, so we can all stop talking about it. It fits their math, so it’s going to be done. You can do more “work” with the American swing, and they have the anecdotal tables of data to prove it.
You Have a Choice
Here’s where I have an issue, though. There must, as some point on the matrix, be a place where W/T=P(I) crosses with Goals (G). That point in the matrix is the point at which the risk of injury becomes unacceptable.
More succinctly, you have to weigh the value of a particular movement against your goals. The value of a particular movement is its ability to provide the desired response, taking risk into consideration. In the case of the American swing, perhaps you can make the argument that more work is being done, the net result of which gets you “intensity.” But can you get the same level of intensity, the same ultimate power output, by doing Russian swings and not put your shoulders at risk?
"[Y]ou have to weigh the value of a particular movement against your goals. The value of a particular movement is its ability to provide the desired response, taking risk into consideration."
Absolutely. Why not make up the alleged “loss of work” somewhere else? If the workout is kettlebells and burpees and you choose to do Russian swings but turn up the heat on the burpees - by resting less, going a little faster, or wearing a vest - can you, in theory, do as much “work” while keeping the swings from causing an uncomfortable shoulder impingement overhead? Yes.
Ultimately, it’s exercise. And you are going to get fit either way. So feel free to advise the coach that you are going to do Russian swings if you so choose, and then crank those burpees.
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Photo 1 by Justin Connaher via Wikimedia Commons.
Photo 2 courtesy of Jorge Huerta Photography.
Photo 3 by Cpl. Skyler Tooker via Wikimedia Commons.Response to kidnapping of three teenagers near Hebron, blamed on Islamist group, follows arrest of 150 Palestinians
Israel is considering expelling Hamas leaders from the West Bank to Gaza as part of its response to the kidnapping of three teenagers, which it has blamed on the Islamist group.
The deliberations come as Israel continued to round up members of Hamas in six West Bank towns for the third night running, including senior Palestinian lawmakers, in one of the biggest waves of arrests in recent years.
Thousands of Israeli troops and police have joined in the hunt for the three seminary students – Gil-ad Sha'er and US-Israeli national Naftali Frankel, both 16, and Eyal Yifrach, 19 – who disappeared while hitchhiking home from a yeshiva, or religious school, on the West Bank.
The kidnapping has gripped Israel, with constant news coverage and prayer vigils since news broke of the youths' disappearance on Thursday.
The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, spoke on the phone with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, on Monday for the first time in almost a year. Netanyahu demanded that Abbas help with the hunt for the missing youths and arrest the kidnappers.
Breaking his silence on the kidnapping and the Israeli clampdown, Abbas issued a statement condemning "the series of events over the last week, beginning with the kidnapping of the three Israeli teens and ending with a series of Israeli violations".
Although Israel has insisted Hamas was responsible, it has yet to provide any hard evidence linking the kidnapping to the group. In ominous remarks, the chief of Israel's armed forces, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, said the military was preparing to expand its operations.
Gantz said: "We have a goal, and that is to find these three boys and bring them home, and to hit Hamas as hard as possible – and that is what we are going to do. We are on our way toward a significant campaign. We will get our plans in order."
An Israeli government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to Reuters, said Israel was looking to capitalise on the search by enforcing a wider clampdown on Hamas in the West Bank.
In an interview, the aunt of Naftali Frankel, Ittael, expressed the family's gratitude for the nationwide support and for the government's efforts to find him. "We are of course very, very worried," she added. "We really, really want to see him home fast."
Israeli forces have arrested more than 150 Palestinians, most of them from Hamas, over the past four days. The detainees included 10 Hamas legislators – one-third of the Hamas representatives from the West Bank in the long-defunct Palestinian parliament.
Among those arrested in Hebron – which has been the focus of the Israeli operation – was the speaker of the Palestinian legislative council and Hamas member Aziz Dweik, who was arrested in the early hours of Monday morning.
"They came for him at 2.30 in the morning," his son, Anas, told the Guardian at the family's home. "He was expecting it, so he had his medicine ready in a bag. I don't think it's fair. My father has not been arrested for anything he did. He has nothing to do with finding these young men. He is a political figure.
"[After the kidnapping] my father said he thought it was not helpful and would have a dramatic and negative influence on the Palestinian unity government [which is backed by Hamas]."
Elsewhere in Hebron, the city's mayor, Daoud Zatari, who on Monday visited the homes of families raided overnight, accused Israel of imposing "collective punishment" on his city of 750,000 in largely sealing it off. He added that Hebron's residents were afraid of further escalation.
The three Jewish students went missing late on Thursday while hitchhiking at a West Bank bus stop near the Palestinian city of Hebron. They were en route home, two to West Bank settlements and the third, an American citizen, to a small community in Israel. Large numbers of Israeli troops have been involved in a massive search since then, going from house to house in some areas.
Abbas's aides have rejected Netanyahu's contention that the Palestinian self-rule government was ultimately responsible, saying that Israel was in overall control of the West Bank.
The alleged kidnapping took place at a road junction that is under direct Israeli control and is commonly used by soldiers and Jewish settlers.Clear Creek sheriff’s deputies on Thursday arrested a rafting guide for swimming to a stranded young rafter who had tumbled from his boat on Clear Creek.
Ryan Daniel Snodgrass, a 28-year-old guide with Arkansas Valley Adventures rafting company, was charged with “obstructing government operations,” said Clear Creek Sheriff Don Krueger.
“He was told not to go in the water, and he jumped in and swam over to the victim and jeopardized the rescue operation,” said Krueger, noting that his office was deciding whether to file similar charges against another guide who was at the scene just downstream of Kermitts Roadhouse on U.S. 6.
Duke Bradford, owner of Arkansas Valley Adventures, said Snodgrass did the right thing by contacting the 13-year-old Texas girl immediately and not waiting for the county’s search and rescue team to assemble ropes, rafts and rescuers.
“When you have someone in sight who has taken a long swim, you need to make contact immediately,” said Bradford, a 15-year rafting guide and ski patroller from Summit County. “This is just silly. Ryan Snodgrass acted entirely appropriately. These guys came to the scene late and there was a rescue in progress. They came in and took over an existing rescue. To leave a patient on the side of a river while you get your gear out of the car and set up a rescue system you read about in a book is simply not good policy.”
Snodgrass’ raft flipped on the runoff-swelled Clear Creek around noon Thursday and the girl swam from the raft. Krueger said the girl was missing for 30 to 45 minutes while Snodgrass searched for her. He said she swam a half mile from the spot where the raft capsized.
Since it had been so long, Krueger said, it was no longer the rafting company’s rescue.
“They should involve themselves up to a point. They lost contact. Whether they want to say they were trying to rescue their customer, when they had lost visual contact and had no idea where their customer has been for 30 to 45 minutes, then it becomes our issue.”
Bradford said he would expect his guides to do the same thing again. His guides are professionals, he said, trained and certified in swiftwater rescue.
“To jump into water and navigate a river in a swiftwater rescue is common. You get into the river and swim. You have to do it,” Branford said. “The fact these guys don’t understand that is disturbing. Making contact immediately with your victim is essential. It’s not about who is in charge. It’s about the safety of a 13-year-old girl. You are going to do everything in your power to insure the safety of your guest, and if that means in Idaho Springs you get arrested, well I guess we’ll just get arrested.”
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com“The Chinese government has credibility to pick on Qualcomm because of investigations into the company in other countries,” said Scott Kennedy, director of the Research Center for Chinese Politics and Business at Indiana University. “But it also definitely fits their industrial policy goals if they can squeeze in lower licensing fees or other technology-sharing arrangements.”
As it takes aim at foreign players, China is striving to develop its chip industry. Over the past 15 years, the government has granted subsidies, funding and even extraordinary rights to promising chip makers.
To attract international talent, the founder of one chip maker, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, added amenities like a bilingual school to entice the highly skilled engineers he needed to put together complex assembly lines. The founder, a Christian, even built a church — of particular appeal to Christian Taiwanese, who are accustomed to companies sponsoring Bible study and similar activities — even though Beijing remains highly suspicious of the spread of Christianity.
Image Vice Premier Ma Kai leads efforts to make China’s chip industry a world leader by 2030. Credit Jason Lee/Reuters
With help from government subsidies, SMIC has become a major chip producer since its founding in 2000, though it still lacks the scale and technology to compete at the level of companies like Intel, Samsung and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation. Other companies founded with government funding in the early 2000s sell chip designs for cheap smartphones but remain small compared with Qualcomm.
The Chinese government has been suspected of being involved in schemes to acquire chip technology with military applications. In 2012, the Federal Bureau of Investigation indicted two Chinese men, charging them with illegally trying to buy reprogrammable chips from an American company, Lattice Semiconductor, that could be used at high temperatures on spacecraft like rockets. The men are presumed to be in China and have not been arrested.
In two separate cases in 2011, Chinese citizens were prosecuted for trying to procure radiation-hardened chips for use in satellites. In one case two defendants pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the Arms Export Control Act and to smuggle goods unlawfully from the United States. In the second case, one defendant pleaded guilty to violating that same act by selling chips to China. Analysts say attempts by Chinese companies to acquire confidential American technology are usually state-directed if not state-led.
Speaking about one of the 2011 cases, Neil H. MacBride, who was United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia at the time, said the conviction served as a deterrent to anyone seeking to procure information for China.(IraqiNews.com) Baghdad – On Friday, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced, that Turkey is aiming to re-establish its Ottoman empire in the region and doubted its intentions to fight ISIS, while called it to withdraw its troops from Iraq.
Abadi said in a statement followed by IraqiNews.com “Turkey is telling us that it is eager to fight ISIS, but I’m telling them frankly, I’m not seeing evidence of that and I hope to see more evidence of their intention to fight ISIS,” adding that, “I think the Turks have to shift their priority from considering the Kurds as their problem, to ISIS as their major problem.”
Abadi continued, “ISIS is responsible for the bombings that targeted some areas in Turkey and it is a warning to Ankara to take the risk of ISIS seriously,” noting that, “Turkey had extended its fight against the PKK into Iraq and hoped to do so into Syria as well.”
Noteworthy, Iraqi prime minister accused Turkey of seeking to re-establish its Ottoman empire in the region, while emphasized that Iraq is keen to maintain good relations with the neighboring Turkey.”
The Prime Minister also considered the spread of Turkish troops inside the Iraqi territory as unacceptable, while called Turkey to withdraw its troops.”Everyone in the World has some sort of struggle, issue or distraction. Not one person is exempt. Even if you're wealthy, young, older, come from one part of the world. It's just the way things in life fall haphazardly together.
We all need something at some TIME.
ADOOGOODA aims to build a platform for like-minded people to be able to meet other GOOD people IRL and transact with people who are honest, trustworthy, vetted and genuinely GOOD.
The entire web based platform is geared towards working in and around your own commUNITY to create a socio-economic ecosystem for GOOD.
Actually doing things for others and yourself to fill those gaps in everyday life, creating a True Purpose for both the GIVER & the TAKER, right down the street and around the corner.
Making it a truly 100% ACTION based platform.
You won't find meaningless buttons shaped like fingers or hearts HERE!
The platform is being developed to make everything happen IRL!! That means no solitary, sedentary, secluded online website and app behaviors.
After 10 years of R&D, hard word, determination and tons of GOOD; what has been created is ADOOGOODA, a platform for SHARING, PURPOSE, INCLUSION, POSITIVITY and GOOD to happen in everyday life, for everyone GOOD.
It's a no non-sense, straight forward, honest, to GOODness brand built for the PEOPLE I know are out there in this crazy WORLD.
YOU want and need a GOOD place to go when YOU need support, a helping hand, knowledge to TAKE from DO-GOODR(S) and ALSO VIS VERSA, when you can GIVE back to the commUNITY, DO GOOD for someone else.
To create GOOD connections with infinite possibilities; filling those everyday life gaps, that we all must push aside because it involves contacting a company with an exorbitant fee, or let it sit on your daunting to-do list that is constantly nagging you from inside your head, as they pile up, creating a cycle of distress and self-deterioration by not being able to keep up.
It's TIME to start relying on one another.
Being able to both GIVE when your resources are in abundance, and on the flip side; a real place to be able to ask for support from trusted contributors of the ADOOGOODA platform and feel like you can TAKE without judgement, pretense, qualifying or opinion.
Welcome ADOOGOODA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The 1st Ever Social GOOD commUNITY application platform to TAKE, GIVE & TRADE with a TRUE Social CommUNITY of DO-GOODR(S)!
ADOOGOODA will post all updates, project changes & important fyi's as they come. We @ ADOOGOODA are honest, GOOD, and truthful at all TIME(S) not just during this campaign. We are DO-GOODR(S) & ANGEL FUNDER(S) by ADOOGOODA for THE GREATER GOOD. GO.DO.GOOD.Electric Safari
Lights, Animals and Holiday Spirit!
Celebrate holiday lights and cheer during Electric Safari with 85 light sculptures on over 50 acres! Warming fires throughout the Zoo offer a reprieve from the chill, as do select indoor animal exhibits that remain open during the event. Top off this astounding display by gazing out at the city’s lights and watch all of Colorado Springs sparkle.
2019 DATES – open 22 nights!
Nightly, December 6-8
Nightly, December 13 – 23
Nightly, December 25 – January 1, 2020
(*Electric Safari is NOT open on Christmas Eve, December 24)
SANTA:
He’s here with Mrs. Claus nightly through December 23 – see Activities below for details.
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Please check back in October 2019 for pricing and tickets! Refund Policy: Online tickets can be refunded or exchanged up to two weeks prior to purchased date. (For example, tickets purchased for use night of Dec. 20, can be refunded through Dec. 5 only.) Military Personnel **The military discount is offered to all active duty, veteran and retired military personnel any day of the year. Bring any of the following to qualify for the discount for you and your dependents living in the same household: A valid military / retired military ID
A copy of your DD214
Your state driver’s license printed with veteran indicator or military identifier
Your ID issued by the VA, VFW or American Legion Group Tickets Group tickets (minimum 15 people per group) are $1 off per person for Electric Safari Zoo-Only or Combo Sky Ride regular-priced tickets.
Discounted group entry is available at the ticket window if the group arrives together and pays in a single transaction.
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Want to know what to expect?
DOWNLOAD a sample of the
Interactive activities and face-to-face experiences with animals in The Loft at Rocky Mountain Wild.
at Rocky Mountain Wild. Santa and Mrs. Claus are visiting in the Safari Lodge nightly starting at 5:30 p.m., through December 23.
Special Animal Encounters and Animal Happenings nightly, see detailed schedule below.
Sky Ride – tickets are available at Admissions. Adult $4, Child $3, 2 and under FREE.
(Be in line by 7:30 p.m., last Sky Ride leaves at 8 p.m. – weather permitting)
(Be in line by 7:30 p.m., last Sky Ride leaves at 8 p.m. – weather permitting) Carousel – $2 per ride (weather permitting)
Enjoy warming fires and hot cocoa stations (available for purchase) throughout the Zoo.
Select animal exhibits are open, including: African Rift Valley Giraffe Building Elephant/rhino barn Rocky Mountain Wild (except grizzlies) Asian Highlands Scutes Family Gallery Australia Walkabout Monkey Pavilion
Restaurants open during Electric Safari: Grizzly Grill Cozy Goat expresso bar Pizza with a View Elson’s Place Rocky Mountain Barbque CO. – open for beverages only Hot chocolate available at the Thundergod Gift Shop and Dip-in-Dots station in Rocky Mountain Wild
DOWNLOAD a sample of the 2018 ELECTRIC SAFARI PROGRAM PDF, (Includes map, animal happenings, Santa, activities and more!) Be a SECRET SANTA to the animals! View the Electric Safari Wish List for a list of items you can bring in for the animals!
Drop-off for wish list items is located at the Zoo’s admission gate. SANTA ZONE: You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I’m telling you why….Santa and Mrs. Claus are coming to town! DATES: Nightly, December 6-8 & 13-23
TIME: 5:30 – 8:30 p.m.
WHERE: Safari Lodge in African Rift Valley WHAT: Ho, ho, ho! Santa and Mrs. Clauis are visting Safari Lodge. Snap a photo with the big man in red while you tell him what’s on your holiday wish list!
ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS: Get hands-on with Zoo animals throughout each evening. – The Loft – (Rocky Mountain Wild)
Experience the excitement of coming face-to-face with some of our smaller animals. Bring your curiosities! – Giraffes – (African Rift Valley)
A guest favorite! Hand-feed our long-necked friends in the Giraffe Barn— $3 per lettuce bundle, or $5 for two. – Budgies – (Australia Walkabout)
Hold a specially-crafted seed stick for our colorful budgies to enjoy in the Budgie Building— $1 each. Please check back here in November 2019 for the Animal Happenings schedule.
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Parking is FREE for Electric Safari, but on-site parking is limited and is not guaranteed. Due to the popularity of Electric Safari, off-site parking and a FREE shuttle will be available once the Zoo lot is full on busy nights.
Watch for signs as you drive up the mountain that will direct you to our FREE off-site parking shuttle – if the Zoo lot is full.
Shuttles will only run if necessary, and the off-site location is subject to change.
Watch for the signs which will have the most up-to-the-minute information.
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Our members receive FREE, unlimited visits to Electric Safari!* – Reserve your FREE member tickets to Electric Safari now, online in advance.
– Member tickets will be available at the gate.
– *Sorry, the Sky Ride Day Pass is not applicable to this event. Please check back in October 2019 for pricing and tickets!
Please note: – You will not be able to purchase or renew a membership at Electric Safari – please join or renew online before you attend the event, and bring a printed copy of your order receipt to check in as a current member. *Who can attend Electric Safari for free? Anyone who is listed on a current membership can attend Electric Safari. For an Individual Plus membership, the primary card holder and his/her guest is included; for a Family or Grandparent membership, the one or two primary adults and any children listed on the card are included; for Family Plus and higher, any “Plus” people are included (x1 for Family Plus, and x2 for Conservator and higher). Third Adults can also attend if they are listed on the membership. Guest passes are accepted but they must be presented at the front gate for admission. If you have questions, you may call 719-424-7830 or email [email protected].
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Party with over a million lights Looking for a unique venue for your company’s holiday party this season? The Lodge at Moose Lake is available for private rental during Electric Safari! For details, please contact April Nance with Taste, Cheyenne Mountain Zoo’s exclusive caterer, at 719-314-0970 or [email protected].
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Volunteers Needed! Looking to volunteer this holiday season? Well look no further! Cheyenne Mountain Zoo needs volunteering hearts for Electric Safari! The time commitment is from 5:00 pm -8:30 pm with check-in at 4:45 pm. All those under 18 will need an adult who is volunteering with them. Interested in volunteering? Please contact Kelsey at [email protected] or 719-424-7840.
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If you would like to be a sponsor of Electric Safari, please call Jenny Koch 719-424-7814, or e-mail [email protected].You can be sure that some activities, done regularly, will make you feel happy.
#1 Be grateful – The powerful antidote to negativity about bad life experiences is an “attitude of gratitude” about good experiences. Research indicates that people who appreciate things feel a strong sense of satisfaction, and are more optimistic. As such, they are much happier.
TO DO – Power up your sense of gratitude, start a weekly “gratitude journal” in which you write about things that make you feel grateful.
#2 Stay optimistic – If you are pessimistic, feeling happy is almost impossible. Everything gets filtered through a dark, negative attitude, and is colored accordingly. Instead, be optimistic about life. Work to enhance your coping skills, so you feel energized and more goal-oriented.
TO DO – Be more optimistic, write down how you see your life going if things go right. This visualization exercise will help activate your “optimistic muscles.”
#3 Don’t overthink – When you worry constantly about problems (“self-focused rumination”), like a dog gnawing at a bone, you will naturally feel bad, sad and depressed. This rut is remarkably self-defeating. So is routinely comparing yourself negatively to others.
TO DO – Break this harmful bad habit, don’t indulge in it. Switch your focus to something enjoyable instead, like exercise or a movie.
#4 Be kind – The ultimate happiness secret is being kind. When you go out of your way to be kind, you will feel good about yourself and eliminate negative feelings including guilt and emotional distress. When you are kind, you immediately turbo charge a positive attitude.
TO DO – Exercise kindness by engaging in volunteer activities – you couldn’t possibly spend your time in a more rewarding way.
#5 Become social – The overarching message of Barbra Streisand’s song, “People Who Need People,” is that such people “are the luckiest people in the world.” Psychologists agree that the need for social inclusion is one of every humans’ strongest motivational forces.
TO DO – Be social to be happy, so make time for others.
#6 Learn to cope – Stress is universal and may be brought on by a wide variety of problems. You can’t become happy if you don’t know how to cope with stress. Address your problems by focusing on finding solutions. Take things step by step.
TO DO – Develop a strategy and an action plan. Seek advice. If the stress is emotional, not situational, do something that makes you feel good. Go on a hike. Listen to soothing music. Visit a friend. Writing about stress can help alleviate it.
#7 Forgive others – Often, old bromides contain the most truth and, thereby, remain timely. “Forgive and forget” is one such maxim. Psychologists confirm that people who hold on to anger, resentment and hostility hurt themselves both emotionally and physically. Of course, forgiving someone who has done you wrong is not easy.
TO DO – One way to try is to write a forgiveness letter to that individual. Include details about how the person wronged you. Then forgive him or her in writing. You don’t have to send the letter. Getting the hurtful emotions out is what counts. When you do that, you free yourself of them.
#8 Seize the moment – Do you live in the future, planning how wonderful things will be when you become rich, lose weight, marry your true love or get a better job? Or do you live in the past, regretting actions that you took or didn’t take. Why not live in the all-important present? Think about it: The present really is all you have.
TO DO – Be in the present is to focus on your current activities. As psychologist William James wrote, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” Pay attention to your life. Make each moment in your life meaningful. Don’t waste a minute.
#9 Be joyful – Do you savor your life and enjoy each minute? If not, why not? With the right attitude, even the mundane can be exquisite. Eating breakfast can be a blissful experience if you make it so. So can getting into bed and falling asleep.
TO DO – Use your imagination to enrich your life. Recall wonderful experiences from the past. Make them real again in your mind. Research indicates that nearly one in three individuals gains valuable perspective on current challenges after engaging in “positive reminiscence.”
#10 Become goal-oriented – People who strongly commit to goals commit to life. Of course, their goals need to be sensible, achievable and truly fulfilling. Are yours? Many people set the goal of becoming rich or improving their physical appearance. But research indicates that being wealthy or beautiful does not guarantee happiness. Indeed, such “extrinsic goals” can get in the way of the more important “intrinsic goals” that can truly make you happy. These differ from individual to individual. For one person, it is learning to cook. For another, it is swimming every morning before breakfast.
TO DO – Life without goals is empty. Commit wholeheartedly to yours.
#11 Become spiritual – Research indicates that religious people are much happier than nonreligious people. They are also in better health, cope more effectively with disease and deal better with trauma than people who are not religious.
TO DO – Being spiritual – the “search for the sacred” – helps people achieve inner serenity and peace. Religion and spirituality can give meaning to your life.
#12 Stay physically and mentally fit – If you don’t meditate, you should. Meditation represents the “cultivation of attention.” A period of meditation is a patient, nonstriving time when you let things go, detach from standard thinking and stop making your customary judgments about everything.
TO DO – Do you exercise? Exercise is one of the best ways to immediately feel good about yourself. Do you act like a happy person? Believe it or not, you can fool yourself into feeling happy when you smile and laugh. It’s hard to be sad when you’re smiling.
Source(s)React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. This guide targets React v15 to v16.
Components
Components
import React from'react' import ReactDOM from'react-dom'
class Hello extends React.Component { render () { return <div className='message-box'> Hello {this.props.name} </div> } }
const el = document.body ReactDOM.render(<Hello name='John' />, el)
Use the React.js jsfiddle to start hacking. (or the unofficial jsbin)
Import multiple exports
import React, {Component} from'react' import ReactDOM from'react-dom'
class Hello extends Component {... }
Properties
<Video fullscreen={true} autoplay={false} />
render () { this.props.fullscreen const { fullscreen, autoplay } = this.props ··· }
Use this.props to access properties passed to the component.
See: Properties
States
constructor(props) { super(props) this.state = { username: undefined } }
this.setState({ username: 'rstacruz' })
render () { this.state.username const { username } = this.state ··· }
Use states ( this.state ) to manage dynamic data.
With Babel you can use proposal-class-fields and get rid of constructor
class Hello extends Component { state = { username: undefined };... }
See: States
Nesting
class Info extends Component { render () { const { avatar, username } = this.props return <div> <UserAvatar src={avatar} /> <UserProfile username={username} /> </div> } }
As of React v16.2.0, fragments can be used to return multiple children without adding extra wrapping nodes to the DOM.
import React, { Component, Fragment } from'react' class Info extends Component { render () { const { avatar, username } = this.props return ( <Fragment> <UserAvatar src={avatar} /> <UserProfile username={username} /> </Fragment> ) } }
Nest components to separate concerns.
See: Composing Components
Children
<AlertBox> <h1>You have pending notifications</h1> </AlertBox>
class AlertBox extends Component { render () { return <div className='alert-box'> {this.props.children} </div> } }
Children are passed as the children property.
Defaults
Setting default props
Hello.defaultProps = { color: 'blue' }
See: defaultProps
Setting default state
class Hello extends Component { constructor (props) { super(props) this.state = { visible: true } } }
Set the default state in the constructor().
And without constructor using Babel with proposal-class-fields.
class Hello extends Component { state = { visible: true } } }
See: Setting the default state
Other components
Functional components
function MyComponent ({ name }) { return <div className='message-box'> Hello {name} </div> }
Functional components have no state. Also, their props are passed as the first parameter to a function.
See: Function and Class Components
Pure components
import React, {PureComponent} from'react' class MessageBox extends PureComponent { ··· }
Performance-optimized version of React.Component. Doesn’t rerender if props/state hasn’t changed.
See: Pure components
Component API
this.forceUpdate()
this.setState({... }) this.setState(state => {... })
this.state this.props
These methods and properties are available for Component instances.
See: Component API
Lifecycle
Mounting
Method Description constructor (props) Before rendering # componentWillMount() Don’t use this # render() Render # componentDidMount() After rendering (DOM available) # componentWillUnmount() Before DOM removal # componentDidCatch() Catch errors (16+) #
Set initial the state on constructor(). Add DOM event handlers, timers (etc) on componentDidMount(), then remove them on componentWillUnmount().
Updating
Method Description componentDidUpdate (prevProps, prevState, snapshot) Use setState() here, but remember to compare props shouldComponentUpdate (newProps, newState) Skips render() if returns false render() Render componentDidUpdate (prev |
agreements to implement such a system.
5.Be ready to consider accommodation or other requests from employees who may raise issues based on disability, religious beliefs, or other areas protected by law.
With new and creative technology increasingly available every day, it is safe to assume that biometric systems in the workplace will become more and more popular. But as with any new technology it will bring new challenges and new opportunities – so as the Boy Scouts say: Be Prepared!Kazakhstan is working with Deloitte, the Blockchain company Waves and others to examine how the technology can operate in government.
A press release issued today claims the country wishes to become the “second after Japan” to “recognize the need for the development of the cryptocurrency market system at the governmental level.”
“The signing of the memorandum with our partners on the development of the digital currency market on the basis of the The International Financial Center Astana is the first step towards a creation of a full-fledged ecosystem of the digital economy in Kazakhstan,” Kesarev Consulting partner Natalia Sheiko continues.
Kesarev and Waves join Deloitte CIS in signing a memorandum with Kazakh authorities to set the research in motion, having already established a dedicated working group.
With the project’s base in Astana utilizing the British legal system and an innovation sandbox, the potential for Kazakhstan to sidestep neighboring states in the Blockchain race is clear.
“We are glad that the authorities of Kazakhstan are trying to create the most favorable conditions for the development of Blockchain technologies,” Waves founder and CEO Sasha Ivanov commented.
“We are sure that the outcomes of this [working] group [...] will attract new investors to Kazakhstan and will help the country to become known as the ‘new Singapore’ in the field of Blockchain.”
Last month, the country’s central bank announced it would begin selling Blockchain-based bonds to investors via a mobile app. The plan is due to become a reality in the second half of this year.Traditional payments giant First Data sent a ripple through the bitcoin community last month when the company announced it had acquired mobile gift card provider and long-time bitcoin industry advocate Gyft as part of a deal with undisclosed terms.
Following the announcement, bitcoin’s vibrant Reddit community was quick to speculate what the news could mean for Gyft’s long-popular service and what, if anything, the acquisition inferred about First Data’s interest in the bitcoin space.
In a new interview with CoinDesk, senior vice president of First Data Prepaid Solutions Mark Putman has addressed these concerns, confirming that, though the focus of the acquisition was Gyft’s mobile gift card platform, the company intends to take advantage of Gyft’s position in the bitcoin space to further its knowledge of emerging payment methods.
Putman told CoinDesk:
“We’re going to be watching extremely closely. […] Getting the company comfortable with bitcoin would be the approach we’re taking right now.”
Despite fears expressed by some Gyft users, Putman said that First Data has no plans to alter Gyft’s existing service, adding: “We’re focused on making sure that [service] continues to work like it has in the past for Gyft.”
Notably, First Data earns more than $10bn in annual revenue through processing fees, selling and leasing point-of-sale (POS) devices and debit network fees, among other revenue streams.
Observing the industry
Putman went on to suggest that First Data has been watching developments in the bitcoin space, but that this interest doesn’t currently extend beyond its broader desire to maintain an understanding of new payment methods.
Still, Putman indicated that the company’s interest in Gyft has lead to more internal research on bitcoin, stating:
“I would definitely say [our bitcoin research] accelerated as a result of the acquisition.”
For now, Putman says, First Data will continue to work with fellow Atlanta-based bitcoin merchant processing provider BitPay to convert bitcoins it receives to US dollars.
Notably, Putman declined to comment on BitPay’s business model and what assessment, if any, the company has made about its potential to offer a similar service to the bitcoin space. First Data offers a number of processing services to its clients, with an emphasis on POS devices.
Putman also suggested his company may have some reservations about bitcoin as an emerging payment method, mentioning fraud and regulation as issues that are important to any business decision First Data makes.
Hands-off approach
Vinny Lingham, co-founder and CEO of Gyft, told CoinDesk that his San Francisco-based company was attracted to the deal because of the synergy he felt between First Data and Gyft’s corporate cultures.
Lingham told CoinDesk:
“It’s a great bunch of guys, and we like working with them, and that’s what you look for in your partners.”
Putman suggested that First Data, in turn, aims to allow Gyft to continue to build its budding platform, and that its aim is to not interrupt what it already feels is an emerging company in its own right.
Lingham went on to note First Data’s successful acquisition of the Andreessen Horowitz-backed POS startup Clover as another influence on the deal.
Expanding its reach
Overall, Lingham voiced optimism that the acquisition will empower Gyft to enroll new merchants, thus continuing to enhance the quality of its mobile gift card offering for general consumers and bitcoin customers.
For example, Lingham said that this validation would help encourage more small businesses and major retailers to join the platform, though he foresees that issues will still arise on an individual basis owing to the nature of his company’s core offering.
Lingham concluded:
“Having a company like First Data behind us saying that this is the future, and pushing us as the de-facto wallet standard for gift card delivery was a big part of why we wanted to get their stamp of approval. It just made a lot of sense.”
Image via First Data‘The Refusal Of Work’
by Rebecca Anderson 137
“THE REFUSAL OF WORK: THE THEORY & PRACTICE OF RESISTANCE TO WORK” by David Frayne, 270 pages, Zed Books (2015)
Is work a joy or something we, like Dolly Parton in her hit single, must do each day from 9 to 5 to make a living? Is work even meant to be a joy? Could we find a way for work to be both? When was the last time you questioned your relationship with work or work’s place in our society? Its status is not only normalised, but championed.
If we do critique work we usually find that the onus is placed on us to find the appropriate work-life balance. We must change in order to meet the needs of the economy rather than the other way round. Perhaps this is a slightly cynical view but it still remains that despite technological advances, the working week is continuing to grow.
Those who do not work, no matter the reason, are routinely looked down upon despite the increasing pressures and shrinking resources available to non-workers due to the current climate of austerity. The British Conservative party now frames itself as the party for workers but what about those who don’t work?
David Frayne uses his most recent book, “The Refusal of Work,” to challenge the status of work in our society and explore the lives of people looking for alternatives – whether these are giving up work altogether, switching to part-time work or going freelance. Frayne encourages the reader to begin to think critically about work, explore its alternatives and get involved in the growing debate around how jobs should be structured and distributed in our society.
The book leads the reader to question if the growing disillusionment with work could blossom into a political alternative and create change on a societal level. In identifying a maldistribution of meaningful employment as the central problem with work today in the United Kingdom, Frayne radically calls for a re-distribution of the work we already have rather than creating new industries.
Related article: “A PROFILE OF A BURNOUT PHYSICIAN”
Intriguingly, the book is divided into two parts; the first is a theoretical exploration of the concept of work in the United Kingdom and the second tells the story of Frayne’s five year long research project into what pushes people to go against the grain and give up work in some way.
In the first section of the book, Frayne mixes contemporary theorists such as Carl Cederstrom, Peter Fleming, Arlie Hochschild and Andre Gorz with classical theorists such as Hannah Arendt and Karl Marx. The theory is situated in cultural references, including “The Lego Movie,” Charlie Chaplin, and zero-hour contracts, which, not only makes it accessible but also allows Frayne to apply classical concepts such as Marx’s alienation to our current situation. In mixing contemporary and classical theorists, Frayne alludes to the different ways in which capitalism and labor have evolved over time.
Frayne weaves together the two sections of the books by relating the theoretical concepts explored in the first half to the real life experiences of the people he encounters in the second half. This is a nice touch which ensures the book stays grounded in real life experiences.
In the photo: Suiting up for work Photo Credit: Public Domain Pictures/ Pixabay
“The Refusal of Work” focuses on the many ways jobs today exert more of an emotional toll from workers than ever before by exploring jobs in the service industry, jobs in call centers and the modern trend of attempting to make the office ‘fun’.
The author underlines how more and more companies in different sectors may allow workers to dress how they want, decorate their workstations to suit their tastes and call their workforce a ‘family’ that the freedom to be oneself is only allowed as long as the worker is prepared to stay within the limits. There is increasing pressures on workers to be upbeat, bubbly and fun and not a lot of room for the worker to express feelings of tiredness, stress or frustration. This can lead to emotional exhaustion and feeling burnt out.
When discussing the research participants who had cut down on paid labor or given it up altogether, Frayne stresses that these people did so not in order to do less but to make time to do more. Work had become so draining that these people found they had no time to pursue their passions and interests, something that is bound to ring a chord with many readers.
This brings up the question as to why has it become normal for our paid labor to be the most important thing in our lives? Why does economic activity outweigh all others?
For a full mindmap containing additional related articles and photos, visit #therefusalofwork
It is the case for most of us that we require our jobs in order to survive financially and thankfully, the book gives this due consideration by stressing the importance for most people to have an income and a discussion of the concept of Basic Income.
Basic Income is a popular theory amongst activists and academics in Europe and Northern America which suggests that each person should have the right to enough money to survive on, regardless if they work or not, and then this can be topped up by earning additional money through jobs if the individual wants to.
However, it is not made clear how governments could afford this. Frayne wants to know why societal structures place work on such a podium, rather than why we as individuals feel the need to go to work everyday. As part of this discussion, we see the author explore stereotypes that exist within British society such as the idea that unemployed people are lazy or have an easy life living off of benefits. Instead, Frayne shows that searching for a job weighs heavily on one’s mental health. Furthermore, he explores how the current climate of austerity is leading society to question groups who were traditionally exempt from working, such as single parents and those who are disabled or sick.
In The Photo: Old Sign saying You’re Hired You’re Fired Photo Credit: Gerd Altman/ Pixabay
Emotional health and self-care are a theme that runs throughout the book with Frayne showing the many ways we can be affected by both working and societal attitudes to not-working.
Additionally, throughout the book Frayne makes great efforts to be intersectional and in particular shows great sensitivity to the intersections of feminism, women’s rights and the topic of work. He explores feminism’s fight for women’s right to work and the double-shift of paid work and housework that is a reality for many women. In the second part of the book, Frayne continues situating his research participants within intersectional webs, by mentioning, where relevant, their gender or health.
Yet this could have been taken further as sexuality and race could be taken into consideration more in the second half of the book. That being said, Frayne maintains his focus on wellness and stresses how one of the hardest things about cutting down on work is coping with the reactions of others to this choice and exploring the coping strategies of his research participants.
All in all, Frayne offers a book which gives the reader a huge amount of food for thought. Throughout, Frayne offers a balanced argument, grounded in both theory and real-life experience which forces the reader to start to engage with both the critical debate around work and the neoliberal society structures. Despite containing many theoretical references, this is a book easy to read and understand; furthermore, despite the cynical twist on its topic matter, Frayne has written a book that is filled with optimism.
Whether you agree with Frayne or not; this book is sure to provoke a response. As summer draws to a close, this could be the perfect book for those returning to their jobs after summer vacation with heavy hearts.
Recommended reading: “AUTOMATION WILL MARK THE END OF OUR WORK-OBSESSED SOCIETY“
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EDITOR’S NOTE: THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED HERE BY IMPAKTER.COM COLUMNISTS ARE THEIR OWN, NOT THOSE OF IMPAKTER.COM.
Featured Image Credit: Cardiff UniversityKids can’t do chores that get dirt under their fingernails? In England, the refrain goes, “It’s Health and Safety, mate, isn’t it? (Or as your typical Londoner might say it: ‘Elf ‘n’ Safety, mate, innit?”). The HSE (Health and Safety Executive) is the justification for every nanny-state, micro-managed intrusion into the lives of the queen’s subjects. What we’d consider harmless child’s play is often banned. This problem naturally evolves from acceptance of the premise that it is the government’s job to keep us safe. Once government anoints a new bureaucracy to enforce that premise, the bureaucracy must create new regulations to justify its existence. Common-sense goes out the window.
Here in the United States, the Department of Labor just took another step in that direction. Weighing in on kids working the family farm, new regulations don’t reach the absurdity level you’ll find across the Atlantic, but they continue on that path by accepting the same premise: that a legitimate function of government is to protect us from ourselves.
Here are the reasons they are wrong:
1. Effectiveness:
The new regulations, first proposed August 31 by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, would also revoke the government’s approval of safety training and certification taught by independent groups like 4-H and FFA, replacing them instead with a 90-hour federal government training course.
I could learn a lot from a 90 hour government course on farming. You know who wouldn’t? Kids who already live on a farm. Furthermore, the Department of Labor is a coercive and distant federal institution, and by that fact alone will be less effective in training kids how to farm than local and voluntary groups such as 4-H and FFA. Alexander de Tocqueville recognized these types of civil institutions as the lifeblood of America, epitomizing our can-do spirit. As shown by the Obama administration’s recent run-in with the Catholic Church, liberals purposefully try to weaken non-government institutions until big government is the only game left in town.
2. Incentives:
Children employed in agriculture are some of the most vulnerable workers in America,” said Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis. “Ensuring their welfare is a priority of the department, and this proposal is another element of our comprehensive approach.
Who do you think is more motivated to keep kids on his farm safe? Hilda Solis, some government bureaucrat, or the owner of that farm? The farm’s owner probably has his own kids working there, and knows the parents of the others he employs. From a financial aspect alone it’d be suicide to gain a reputation for lax safety standards.
3. Increased government spending:
Boswell told TheDC that the new farming regulations could be finalized as early as August. She claimed farmers could soon find The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division inspectors on their land, citing them for violations. “In the last three years that division has grown 30 to 40 percent,” Boswell said.
The US government is currently taking on about $1.5 trillion in debt per year. Enlarging the bureaucracy to deal with this non-issue would be grossly irresponsible. Especially since “According to a United States Department of Agriculture study, farm accidents among youth fell nearly 40 percent between 2001 and 2009, to 7.2 injuries per 1,000 farms.” When you’re broke, providing “solutions” to improving situations might be the first place you want to cut back.
4. Diminished work ethic:
“I started working on my grandparent’s and uncle’s farms for a couple of weeks in the summer when I was 12,” Weber told TheDC. “I started spending full summers there when I was 13. The work ethic is a huge part of it. It gave me a lot of direction and opportunity in my life. If they do this it will prevent a lot of interest in agriculture. It’s harder to get a 16 year-old interested in farming than a 12 year old.
As Charles Murray recently detailed, industriousness is on decline in America. These regulations take another whack at it.
5. Another attack on the family:
“It’s so far-reaching,” he exclaimed, “kids would be prohibited from working on anything ‘power take-off’ driven, and anything with a work-height over six feet — which would include the tractor I’m on now.” The way the regulations are currently written, he added, would prohibit children under 16 from using battery powered screwdrivers, since their motors, like those of a tractor, are defined as “power take-off driven.”
America… where the federal government doesn’t care if a 14-year-old gets an abortion without her parents knowing, but won’t let her ride a tractor with her parents watching.A months-long construction project to replace water mains underneath Irving Park Road has snarled traffic and made it impossible to park near Portage Grounds in Portage Park View Full Caption DNAinfo/Heather Cherone
PORTAGE PARK — A months-long construction project to replace water mains underneath Irving Park Road has snarled traffic and made it impossible to park near Portage Grounds in Portage Park — grinding the cafe's profits to dust, its owner said.
"We're just fed up," said Robert Quezada, who opened the independent coffee shop in 2013 with his girlfriend after becoming frustrated with the lack of places to grab a java jolt in Portage Park. "We're going to try everything we can to survive this."
The project — one of the largest in Chicago this summer, a city spokesman said — that began June 19 is designed to replace more than 5,200 feet of 100-year-old six-inch water mains with 12-inch water mains underneath Irving Park Road between Central and Cicero avenues.
"We do realize that construction is dirty, noisy and very inconvenient for businesses and residents," said Gary Litherland, a spokesman for the city's Department of Water Management.
"This would also be the same situation if that 100-year-old six-inch water main broke, and everyone lost water without warning."
Quezada said he's worried as the end of summer gets closer.
"We count on August to be able to save money to make up for the slow winter months when no one wants to leave the house because it is so cold," Quezada said. "I don't think we will be able to do that this year."
Bob Denneen, a spokesman for Ald. Nicholas Sposato (38th), said his office had also gotten complaints from auto dealers on that stretch of Irving Park Road who were unable to get deliveries of cars.
"It has been, and is going to continue to be, a hassle for everyone," Denneen said. "But it has to get done."
The biggest hassle for Portage Grounds customers has been the lack of parking near the cafe, 5501 W. Irving Park Road, Quezada said.
"Sometimes, the closest spot is blocks away," Quezada said. "I see people circling and circling, and then give up."
Because the volume of traffic is so high on Irving Park Road, crews had no choice but to ban parking along the street's south side, said Litherland.
The work has also made sitting outside the cafe less than pleasant, Quezada said.
"It is dusty and loud," Quezada said. "No one wants to be there."
Crews have finished the work between Central and Long avenues, and are scheduled to finish the section between Long and Laramie avenues in two weeks, Litherland said.
"We are working as quickly as we can to provide the best water service possible," Litherland said. "It is also our fervent wish that we do not need to revisit this section of water main for another 100 years."
The final section from Laramie to Cicero through the Six Corners Shopping District will be completed by mid to late September, Litherland said. The three crews usually work in one location for a day or two, and then move on to the next two-block section of street, Litherland said.
Irving Park Road will be repaved once the work is complete, Litherland said.
"We are asking for just a little more patience," Litherland said. "We will be done soon, and the water service along this section of Irving Park Road will be better than ever."
Quezada said he wasn't considering closing the cafe any time soon, but it wouldn't be able to keep its doors open if he and his partner weren't working day jobs to subsidize Portage Grounds.
"I feel a real responsibility to our employees and the neighborhood," Quezada said. "We're hoping things will get better in the fall. That's the best weather for coffee."
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:Notorious hacker George “geohot” Hotz created some buzz after his self-driving car/machine learning startup ‘comma.ai’ came out of stealth mode last year. Hotz released an email conversation he had with Tesla CEO Elon Musk in which he was offered a contract with a “multimillion-dollar bonus” for him to build a new Autopilot system for Tesla.
Hotz refused the offer and said that he could build a self-driving car system himself. He then reportedly made a bet with Musk that his system, which he installed in an Acura, will beat a Tesla Model S with Autopilot on Interstate 405 in Los Angeles. At the time (Dec 2015), the hacker said that he would release a video of the challenge “in a few months”.
We have yet to see that video, but now it looks like the rules of the challenge have changed.
comma.ai is not just Hotz working alone in his garage anymore. It was revealed last month that the startup secured funding from high-profile VC firm Andreessen Horowitz — potentially bringing the startup’s valuation to $20 million.
The news was confirmed this week when the fund reported leading a $3.1 million investment in the company.
Now comma.ai and Hotz has taken to Twitter to challenge Musk and Tesla again:
https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/717766827950997506
The new challenge is to build the first vehicle that can autonomously navigate San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge without human intervention. According to the Guardian, Musk hasn’t responded.
While still talking about Musk and Tesla, Hotz followed up:
“I think we can maybe build better self-driving cars. He can build a better rocket.” It’s not clear why Hotz keep making it an “us versus them” thing with Tesla, but it could have something to do with the fallout he had with Musk over the offer to work at Tesla (Hotz claims that Musk changed the terms of the agreement throughout the process). Hotz’s license plate on comma.ai’s test car: Either way, Tesla doesn’t agree. When Hotz first made his statement about “crushing” Tesla’s and its partner Mobileye’s Autopilot system, Tesla responded with a statement: “We think it is extremely unlikely that a single person or even a small company that lacks extensive engineering validation capability will be able to produce an autonomous driving system that can be deployed to production vehicles. It may work as a limited demo on a known stretch of road — Tesla had such a system two years ago — but then requires enormous resources to debug over millions of miles of widely differing roads.” Hotz said that he doesn’t expect Tesla to acknowledge his Golden Gate Bridge challenge. We will have to wait and see, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Tesla’s Autopilot has already been able to easily handle the Golden Gate Bridge – any Model S owner in the SF willing to try and report back?
Featured image: Bloomberg by Peter Bohler
If you want more Tesla Motors and electric vehicle news, make sure to follow us onTwitter, Facebook or Google+ to get our latest articles.Sports injuries have sidelined many athletes for games, seasons, and worse, careers.
Injuries are common while participating in organized sports, competitions, training exercises, or fitness activities.
Poor training methods, inadequate warm-up, and lack of conditioning are a few of the causes of sports injuries.
“Injuries can be caused by a combination of those things without necessarily being the only reasons,” says Apostolos Theophilou, DPT, clinical coordinator of the Physical Therapist Assisting program at South University. “Fatigue and overuse are also significant contributors to an injury, and not excluding also the psychosocial aspects and dehydration that cause athletes to be prone to injuries.”
Coping with sports injuries often requires physical rehabilitation. Physical therapy helps people rebuild strength and movement in parts of their body after an injury. Therapy can also help someone manage pain and prevent permanent damage and recurring problems.
Each sport carries its own risk of injury for the athlete.
Physical therapists are trained to help patients recover following an injury. As part of physical therapy, they can teach exercises, stretches, and techniques using specialized equipment to address problems.
“Physical therapists will examine a patient to determine if there are weak or inflexible muscles in the body that could make you more prone to an injury,” says physical therapist and athletic trainer Dr. Trent D. Stone, who is the director of rehabilitation at Effingham Spine & Sport in Rincon, Georgia.
Common Sports Injuries
According to the National Institutes of Health, the most common sports injuries include sprains, strains, knee injuries, swollen muscles, shin splints, fractures, and dislocations.
“Athletes participate in a wide spectrum of sports,” Theophilou says. “Each sport carries its own risk of injury for the athlete.”
These injuries should be appropriately addressed in order to keep the athlete safe. It is useful to examine the biomechanics of an athlete participating in a particular sport, therapists say.
“This is actually very useful for repetitive-motion athletes like golfers, baseball’s pitchers, and tennis players,” Theophilou says. “These are different sports, although they share similar biomechanical concepts. During their games, these athletes have to constantly go through the same motion, putting the same body structures through the same stress.
“This motion often involves some sort of a loading or pre-swing phase, some sort of swing phase or throwing phase, and finally the ‘follow-through’ phase.”
It is common for these athletes to develop similar injuries such as lateral epicondylitis (tennis elbow), inflammation or pain on the outside of the upper arm near the elbow; medial epicondylitis (golfer’s elbow), inflammation or pain on the inner side of the upper arm near the elbow; or “Tommy John” injury for pitchers, which is an injury to the ulnar collateral ligament of the elbow.
The biomechanics of these players need to be very precise during the game to avoid an excessive load of forces distributed to the wrong or same anatomical structure, Theophilou says. For example, pitchers will focus too much on a particular anatomical part, such as the elbow, and neglect to appropriately use their legs. Thus the elbow now has to deal with over-excessive forces. In addition, athletes may neglect or struggle with a particular phase of their motion and expose a specific anatomic structure more.
Sports Injuries and Treatment
Physical therapists need to understand the involved and injured structure and the extent of the injury before treating it.
Rehabilitation of an injured athlete should carefully be evaluated on a daily basis. Injuries are time dependent, which means that the normal healing process follows a pattern of acute phase, subacute phase, and chronic phase.
“Each phase dictates a different treatment approach and it is the physical therapist’s responsibility to accurately diagnose which phase and what treatment the patient should receive,” Theophilou says.
The acute phase involves the R.I.C.E. (Rest-Ice-Compression-Elevation) principle, which allows for healing to take place and controls inflammation.
“Recently, the letter ‘P’ was added to this acronym, ‘PRICE,’” Dr. Stone says. “The ‘P’ stands for protection and the ‘RICE’ principle has been around for quite some time now, but major advancements have been made recently in the area of prevention.”
The subacute phase also is a control motion phase, however the athlete may carefully perform active-assisted range of motion exercises and strengthening exercises. And the chronic phase is a return to function phase in which the athlete progressively returns to pre-injury workout routines.
“Through the years, therapists have been successfully able to log the ‘steps’ for each phase, thus now we have collective treatment protocols that have a complete analysis of what activities and treatments the athlete should be receiving based on his current phase,” Theophilou says.
In addition to injuries to muscles, joints, and bones, concussions are a hot topic in sports today. A concussion is a traumatic brain injury that may result in bad headaches, an altered level of alertness, or unconsciousness. It may result when the head hits an object or a moving object strikes the head. Athletes in all sports are at risk of a sports-related concussion, but the most at risk are athletes who participate in football, boxing, hockey, rugby, and snow skiing.
Concussions are one of the most difficult-to-manage injuries in sports today. Dr. Stone says physical therapists are an integral part in the multidisciplinary approach to the identification and treatment of these injuries.
“Being able to understand the signs and symptoms of a concussion, as well as a multitude of other diagnoses, can be vital to a physical therapist as a patient is able to access our services without requiring a referral from a physician,” he says. “This is called Direct Access. The physical therapy in this case would be the first line of defense for the patient and can provide the patient with a home exercise program to perform, as well as instruct the patient on things to avoid such as removal from play/activity, decreased workload, limited reading, decreased video game playing, and decreased outside activities that would increase stimulation to the brain.”
Prevention of Sports Injuries
Dr. Stone says athletes can prevent some sports injuries with proper warm-up and stretching.
“Seeing a physical therapist prior to an injury becoming very severe can be beneficial as we can examine the patient and find areas that would need to be addressed,” he adds.
Physicians, athletic trainers, and physical therapists continue to gain more knowledge in preventing and diagnosing sports injuries. Although some procedures would remain the standards of care, the means to address the injuries could change.
Author: Darice Britt15 Oct 2010 by maki
Since I was diagnosed with pre-diabetes back in July when I was hospitalized with a zombie bite, I’ve been fairly diligent in sticking to a low-carb diet. My blood sugar levels have dropped to nearly normal levels in the last couple of weeks - this is probably due as much to the fact that my body is no longer having to fight infection, as much as the low-carb eating and medication I’m taking. Still, I think that sticking to the low-carb is helping.
I have loosened up a bit on the carbs - I’ve added back some rice, whole wheat pasta and so on, and the blood sugar is holding steady. Still, I am staying away from bread as much as possible, since for some reason bread makes me blood sugar spike more than rice. I don’t miss it as much as I thought I would, but I do get a yearning for a simple sandwich now and then.
I saw this method for making sandwich ‘bread’ in a Japanese low-carb cookbook for diabetics. It’s basically to use deep fried kouya or koya tofu (dofu), or freeze dried tofu, as the ‘bread’. I’ve tried this out a couple of times, modifying the original recipe - I shallow fry it rather than deep frying it for example, and use regular vegetable stock rather than dashi. Note that the method is similar to the fried frozen tofu nuggets.
Recipe: Koya tofu (or kouya dofu) - freeze dried tofu sandwich ‘bread’
Freeze dried tofu squares
Vegetable stock or dashi stock
Oil or butter
I’ve already written in much detail about koya tofu or kouya dofu a while ago on Just Hungry. It’s freeze dried tofu. If you can get a hold of it, it’s a really handy thing to have in your pantry. Look for kouya dofu at Japanese grocery stores - general Asian or Chinese stores and Korean grocery stores may not have it (though Korean stores are worth a try). Here’s a package that I bought from Japan Centre by mailorder. These are about 3 inches (8cm) square when dried. If you can only find small ‘soup’ sized kouya dofu, you can turn them into mini-sandwiches, but do try to find the bigger squares, which will end up really looking like sandwiches.
Soak the dried kouya dofu in plenty of cold water. They will turn soft in 5-10 minutes, depending on the brand. If you squeeze the middle and no longer feel any hard core, they are ready.
Here are a couple that have been soaked and squeezed out.
Bring up a pot of vegetable soup stock or dashi stock to a boil. It’s fine to use soup stock cubes or granules for this, though homemad stock would be better. I usually just use a stock cube. Drop the kouya dofu in, and simmer them for a few minutes. Drain well and press lightly to get rid of excess moisture. (Sorry, I for got to take a photo of this step…)
Heat up a frying pan with olive oil or butter. Fry the kouya dofu on both sides until golden brown and crispy. (The original recipe called for deep frying, but I’ve just shallow fried them to cut down a bit on the fat.)
Drain the fried kouya dofu, and pat the surface with kitchen paper towels to get rid of excess surface oil. Cut the tofu in half horizontally, to end up with two ‘slices. Here you see one tofu that’s been cut in half, and another that’s still whole.
And here’s a simple cucumber and ham sandwich made with the halved ‘bread’. I put a little mayonnaise on the inside too. It tastes surprisingly good - not really like bread, but you get the feel of a sandwich. And it’s about as low-carb as you can get, as long as you watch what you put inside!
Calorie-wise, the ‘bread’ for one sandwich is around 160 calories, depending on how much oil or butter you use. Butter tastes better than oil…but oil is healthier of course. (Note, I did try toasting them in a toaster oven, and they didn’t get as nicely golden brown on the outside. I might try spreading them lightly with butter and toasting them though.)
I did try making the ‘bread’ without simmering the kouya dofu in stock - frying the soaked and pressed out tofu directly. That works, though the ‘bread’ is very bland. It also tastes a lot more greasy than the simmered version for some reason. If you want to fill it with a sweet filling (good for gluten-free people, a no-no for low-carbers) like peanut butter and jelly, you might try the non-simmered version, and blot off the surface oil as much as possible.
It just occured to me that kouya dofu might form an interesting base for low-carb french toast! I’ll try that sometime and report back.
Make ahead?
You can make these the night before and cut them in half, ready to be formed into sandwiches. They do get soft after a while though.
Can this be made with regular tofu that’s been frozen?
The texture of regular, frozen tofu as I explained how to make here is a lot moister than freeze-dried tofu, and so not as bread-like. You can give it a try if you like of course, but I prefer to just make those cutlets or fried nuggets from frozen regular tofu.Surviving members claim GoldieBlox advert isn't fair use
The Beastie Boys have issued complaints against toy company GoldieBlox, alleging that their parody of 'Girls' infringes the band's copyright.
The advert in question is a viral campaign from the toy company that pastiches the famous track, reversing the misogynistic lyrics of the original in order to empower women. So far the video has amassed over 7 million views since it was posted on November 17.
Watch the GoldieBlox commercial below
The surviving members of the iconic rap group have since threatened to issue a lawsuit against the company, who themselves have issued a statement.
"GoldieBlox created its parody video with specific goals to make fun of the Beastie Boys song, and to further the company's goal to break down gender stereotypes and to encourage young girls to engage in activities that challenge their intellect, particularly in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. The GoldieBlox 'Girls' Parody Video has gone viral on the Internet, and has been recognized by the press and the public as a parody and criticism of the original song."
The Hollywood Reporter has compared the lyrics of the two versions, with the original reading: "Girls - to do the dishes/Girls - to clean up my room/Girls - to do the laundry/Girls - and in the bathroom/Girls, that's all I really want is girls". The GoldieBlox version reads "Girls to build the spaceship/Girls to code the new app/Girls to grow up knowing/That they can engineer that/Girls/That's all we really need is Girls."
Below, remembering the Beastie Boys in commemoration of Adam YauchThe federal government insists that Canada can expand fossil fuel production and build new pipelines while still achieving its commitment to climate action. But how can we know for sure? And what's the likelihood of such fossil fuel projects becoming stranded assets in a low-carbon future?
wolv via Getty |
the Syracuse Police Department.
Stefanie Heath, Cuse Pit Crew President, said, "Animal abuse continues to be a problem here in Central NY. When Cuse Pit Crew hears about a violent crime committed against a dog, we feel discouraged knowing that the current system does not protect them from being isolated indefinitely in a shelter during court proceedings. We have witnessed first-hand the emotional and physical struggles that abused dogs endure while languishing in the shelter during the often drawn out legal process. Mr. Katko's HEART Act will ensure that these dogs are not re-victimized by the current system. We support the HEART Act and know that it can benefit countless abused dogs not only in Central NY, but throughout the country."
"The ASPCA is grateful to Congressman Katko for his leadership on the HEART Act, which will remove the cumbersome red tape of the legal system that hinders the recovery process for victims of animal fighting," said Richard Patch, vice president of federal affairs for the ASPCA. "We thank Congressman Katko for his work to expedite the disposition of animals held in federal court cases, and we urge Congress to swiftly pass this legislation to help speed up the rehabilitation and re-homing of these animals."
Specifically, the HEART Act:
Accelerates the disposition process by reducing from 60 to 30 days the amount of time the government has to notify interested parties following the seizure of animals under the federal animal fighting or gambling statutes
by reducing from 60 to 30 days the amount of time the government has to notify interested parties following the seizure of animals under the federal animal fighting or gambling statutes Requires the court to consider the animals’ welfare as well as the cost to the government when seeking to extend the notice period
as well as the cost to the government when seeking to extend the notice period Requires claimants to reimburse the costs of caring for animals seized in federal animal fighting cases when the government prevails in civil forfeiture proceedings
seized in federal animal fighting cases when the government prevails in civil forfeiture proceedings Gives judges the discretion to allow the consideration of the claimant’s culpability, financial condition, and other factors when requiring and determining reimbursement
Congressman John Katko represents the 24th Congressional District, which includes all of Onondaga, Cayuga, and Wayne Counties and a portion of Oswego County. For more information, please visit https://katko.house.gov or www.facebook.com/RepJohnKatko.
###The factory in Swindon UK has released a 15 min footage of robots working on the production of the new 2017 Honda Civic X Hatchback which started much sooner than we really expected.
Honda is giving its best, and it seems that they have kicked the production of 2017 Civic X Hatchback into the high gear well before its debut on the Paris Motor Show. The footage of the assembly shows that the robots in the plant are working from the ground up welding the pieces of the chassis, painting, and some small parts assembly, to ensure the optimum time of production and less man made mistakes. The extended footage of the work inside the plant reveals a few details that you usually miss in this kind of videos. It shows how the chassis is assembled and from what pieces, what materials are in use and how they look and feel before the car is complete. Furthermore, we can a slightly more detailed assembly by human hands of the front and rear suspension, which is rarely shown. With this, you can see that the Honda means business and that they are confident in what they make.
As you may or may not know, the Honda didn’t have much success with the hatchback in EU. Now they are trying to change that by using the same platform from the US market with the same engine as well – the 1.5-liter turbo four pot. Even the transmission choices are the same – 6-speed manual is standard, and the CVT comes as an option. This Civic X Hatchback is much bigger, though, and thanks to an increase in size it almost has Octavia’s 478 L trunk capacity and a far more legroom for passengers.
Honda will try to draw some of the competitions clientele by adding more stuff to this model. Japanese car maker will most likely offer 1.0 L turbocharged engine that is supposed to make a lot of problems to Ford and its model Focus. There is a revised 1.6 L diesel engine in the preparations as well to b e dropped in this vehicle. When we take a look at its specs and the fact that most cars in Europe are diesel-powered it might make a lot of commotion. But what you probably want to hear even more is that the Hatchback will make its way back to the US next year in the form of Type R that is supposed to give other hot hatch manufacturers a lot of headaches.PARIS  Bubbles don’t just disappear when they pop but deflate in a rapid cascade of ever-smaller “daughter” bubbles, scientists reported on Wednesday.
The physics behind this bursting effect seems to hold true whether the liquid is as thin as water or as thick as heavy oil, suggesting that the researchers have found a universal theory of how bubbles behave when they break.
A host of practical applications could follow in areas ranging from health care to climate to glass manufacturing, according to the study published in the British journal Nature.
It may also prove valuable for controlling industrial processes in which bubble formation can be detrimental.
There was an element of serendipity in the discovery, according to lead researcher James Bird, a graduate student at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Bird and one of the study’s co-authors were working late one night investigating ways to spread bubbles on different surfaces when they noticed the rings that form when one bursts.
“After that, any time I was just walking around during a rainy day I’d look at the bubbles popping on puddles,” Bird said.
“When I went swimming in the ocean I’d watch the bubbles on the surface… And I soon realised that it was everywhere.”
In order to minimise surface area, he explained, a bubble forms an almost perfect hemisphere when it is in contact with a solid or liquid surface. When it pops, a two step process unfolds, creating a ring of smaller bubbles.
Until now, the exactly how that happened was not understood.
In the first step, the forces acting on the bubble cause the film to fold in on itself as it retracts, trapping a pocket of air in the shape of a donut.
In the second step, surface tension breaks this donut — called a torus — of air into a ring of smaller bubbles in the same way that surface tension transforms a thin stream of water flowing from a faucet into individual droplets, he explained.
The cascade effect is very short-lived — too short to be seen with the naked eye.
The researchers filmed the collapse with high-speed cameras, and then used the video to construct a mathematical model to test and replicate their experimental hypothesis.
Bird said in a statement that he was anxious to study similar popping effects in more exotic materials such as molten glass, lava and mud.
“What I love about this study is that the overall effect can be seen by anyone in their kitchen,” he said.The unwinding of Dodd-Frank. The firing up of shuttered coal plants. The rollback of rules that increase overtime pay for low-wage workers.
Hours after Donald J. Trump won the race for the White House, scores of regulations that have reshaped corporate America in the last eight years suddenly seemed vulnerable.
While many questions remain about how Mr. Trump will govern, a consensus emerged Wednesday in many circles in Washington and on Wall Street about at least one aspect of his impending presidency: Mr. Trump is likely to seek vast cuts in regulations across the banking, health care and energy industries.
“This is going to be a president who will be the biggest regulatory reformer since Ronald Reagan,” Stephen Moore, one of Mr. Trump’s economic advisers said in an interview on Wednesday. “There are just so many regulations that could be eased.”The Chicago Fire found out Tuesday that starting midfielder Logan Pause suffered two broken ribs and pneumothorax as a result of a collision with former teammate Bakary Soumare in the 25 th minute of Sunday’s 3-1 victory at Philadelphia. The injury is expected to keep the Fire captain out approximately four-to-six weeks.
The injury kept the Fire captain down on the PPL Park turf for multiple minutes during Sunday’s game though he did return to action before making way for Patrick Nyarko in the 44th minute.
With the injury, Pause was medically unable to fly. Almost immediately following the match he rode back in a rental van that featured Head Athletic Trainer Bo Leonard, Head Coach Frank Klopas, Assistant Mike Matkovich and the scorer of two goals on the night, Chris Rolfe for the 11-hour drive back to Chicago.
“We’re going to miss Logan on the field,” said Klopas following training Tuesday. “The leadership and positive influence he brings to the team, his work rate on the field. He represents this club well everyday and we hope he recovers well.”
A relatively healthy player throughout his 10-year Fire career, Pause has appeared In a minimum of 21 matches every season since his rookie year of 2003. Sunday’s game was ironically his 250th regular season match for the club and the injury could put in doubt his ability to hit 300 competitive appearances by the end of the season (he currently sits at 294).
Pause’s absence also brings into question who will partner with Pavel Pardo at the heart of the Fire midfield.
Sunday may have been a small glimpse into Klopas’ short term plans as recent acquisition Alvaro Fernandez moved inside following Pause’s substitution while central midfielder Michael Videira saw his first minutes of 2012 as a second half substitute.
Daniel Paladini has previously played in the role, while 2010 first round SuperDraft pick Corben Bone and Homegrown midfielder Victor Pineda provide the manager with more options.
“Throughout the season you go through situations like this. We’ve always talked about relying on the team so others will need to step up and contribute and I’m sure the guys will be ready to do so.”Negative potatoes, sometimes called antipotatoes, are an edible cousin, and the exact opposite, of the widely known potato. A member of the negative tuber family, their existence is centered around the belief that while it is possible to possess no potatoes simply by having zero potatoes, it is also possible to have fewer than no potatoes with even one negative potato. Their paradoxical existence has granted negative potatoes special properties, for which applications have been developed and commonly used in various settings, from culinary to economic, from military to industrial. Once overshadowed by "regular" potatoes in the public eye, negative potatoes gained notoriety in 1956 when they were adopted as the national food of Darfur.
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Characteristics
In the case of nearly all manner in the universe, the exact opposite of an object is the lack of existence of that object; for example, if a chair exists, then somewhere a chair does not exist. This preserves the balance of nature across the universe. Potatoes, however, are different in that God did not originally intend to create a food as useful, delicious and customizable as the modest potato. Nonetheless, due to a rounding error by the Department of Agriculture in Heaven, potatoes were created and gifted to the people of Earth. Thinking quickly, God decided that in this instance the opposite of an object would have to be a physical manifestation of fewer than none of that object. The negative potato was devised as a way of keeping the universe balanced, and it is said that for every potato farmed in Idaho by a wealthy American industralist, on the other side of the world there is a negative potato farmed by a dirt-poor Chinese man.
The appearance of a negative potato is dependent on the individual perceiving it: whatever would represent the exact opposite of a potato is the form that a negative potato takes to them. Most people perceive negative potatoes as slightly radioactive, potato-shaped holes in space, and believe that all black holes (such as those in outer space, or the area between the ears of most politicians) are merely large piles of negative potatoes. If true, this theory would explain how there can be one negative potato for each regular potato and yet they can still be rare; indeed, most people have never heard of negative potatoes. Some literal-minded individuals incorrectly assume that a lack of potatoes equals the presence of negative potatoes, concluding that negative potatoes are everywhere, though these people are generally called crazy and ignored.
Mathematics of negative potatoes
Negative potatoes are heavily intertwined with mathematics to justify their existence. Many people have gone their entire lives without learning about negative potatoes, and it is sometimes difficult for them to comprehend the idea of less than no potatoes. Fortunately, mathematicians over the years have made it easy to explain the concept of a negative potato through use of simple equations and mathematical facts.
Creating a negative potato
There exist a number of methods for mere mortals to create negative potatoes. A few of these are listed below.
Take two casseroles, one with two potatoes and one with no potatoes. Remove three potatoes from the first casserole and add them to the second. Since the number of potatoes must be the exact same throughout the process, a negative potato is created to maintain balance
Plant a negative potato seed in negative soil, give it plenty of negative water, make sure it gets negative sunlight and doesn't get eaten by any negative insects (but avoid the use of negative pesticides), and wait a few negative weeks. For obvious reasons this is not recommended for pessimists.
Ask Sarah Palin to fetch the ten potatoes from her closet. (Why she keeps them there is beyond the scope of this article.) She will predictably miscount and withdraw eleven potatoes, creating a negative potato.
Potato equalization
As is standard for an object and its complete opposite- of which potatoes and negative potatoes are the only known examples- the combination of a potato with a negative potato will cause the two to cancel each other out and effectively disappear, an event known as potato equalization. Unregulated, rampant potato equalization was cited as the cause of the Great Famine of Ireland in 1845, an event which ravaged the country until the Irish government caught up in 1852 and established regulations governing the use of negative potatoes. Potato equalization is sometimes used in food fights, since potatoes are large and powerful ammunition for an elementary schooler to hurl at a classmate. Countering with a negative potato allows said classmate to avoid the attack.
Uses
Because of potato equalization, negative potatoes have found popularity with people working in certain industries. In 1965, massive overproduction of potato salad in communist Russia threatened the nation's economy until the extra potato salad was combined with negative potatoes, resulting in regular salad. Unbeknownst to most Americans but knownst to us, the upper levels of the United States government are putting into motion a plan to cut down on the population of lazy people by giving all so-called 'couch potatoes' a negative potato, turning them into couches and reducing the strain on the nation's health care and economy. Sexually curious pre-teens will sometimes sneak a negative potato from the grocer and use it with their Mr. Potato Head toy, giving them a Mr. Head. Giggity.
Producing regular potatoes and the square potato theorem
Those who find themselves without any need for the uses described above can simply use negative potatoes, in sufficient quantity, to produce regular potatoes. The traditional method is to bake two potato casseroles, each of which is made with three negative potatoes, and then multiply them together:
$ -3 * -3 = 9 $
This process is extremely efficient, as it can produce more potatoes than the number of negative potatoes required. However, a casserole dish is consumed in the process. Prospective potato-producers should take caution to not overuse the process and drive casserole dishes into extinction.
Around the beginning of the 20th century, mathematicians devised a method of turning negative potatoes into potatoes without using up casserole dishes, called the square potato theorem. The basic idea is to square a negative potato; that is, multiply it by itself:
$ -1^2 = -1 * -1 = 1 $
This seems much more efficient as it can produce potatoes without wasting casserole dishes, but this technique is difficult to perfect. Newbie mathematicians often make the mistake of calculating the square root of a negative potato instead of the square. This is problematic, not only because the square root of a negative potato is an imaginary potato (which is, of course, a completely fictional and absurd idea), but because most modern calculators will return an error if "square root of nine negative potatoes" is entered into them.
It wasn't long before the fast food industry picked up on this mathematical tool of wizardry and found other uses for it. For example, it is possible to extract the roots of nine potatoes by calculating their square roots, although this is considered wasteful as the roots are not very tasty. A more popular method is to calculate the square root of an imperfect square number of potatoes:
$ \sqrt{8} = ~2.8 $
Rather than useless potato roots, this equation gives two whole potatoes, some french fries (the physical manifestation of a fraction of a potato), and a little ketchup, as illustrated on the right. Fast food chains have used the square potato theorem to quickly produce french fries in bulk.
Nutritional value
Because of their contrary nature to regular potatoes, eating a negative potato is equivalent to throwing up a regular potato, without the messy inconvenience. Thusly, high school girls often adhere to a diet of negative potatoes in order to lose weight.
See alsoWith the Baltimore Orioles getting two walk-off wins against the New York Yankees over the weekend, it brings to mind the number of occasions that this has happened in 2014. The actual number is 10 times, whereas they have been the victim of a walk-off loss on seven occasions.
Looking back over the past five seasons, here are the numbers of walk-off wins and walk-off losses…
2014 – 10-7
2013 – 7-12
2012 – 7-0
2011 – 9-7
2010 – 12-9
After writing most of this article today, I saw where Roch Kubatko had already this afternoon written on the same theme. He points out in his piece that there are three teams with 11 walk-offs, and those teams are not exactly champions right now: San Diego, Miami, and Cleveland.
So what does it say about a team that wins with walk-offs? In Roch’s article, Showalter said, “I wish I was that smart to say this is exactly it in black and white and let’s try to duplicate that and let’s teach that through the system.”
Without doubt there is an intangible element of players who believe they can do this and who together accomplish the “verb of the year” for the Orioles – they “grind” it out.
Giving it some thought today, it would seem to me that there are two other more tangible reasons why teams would have a high number of these experiences: one very positive reason and one that is not as fully complimentary.
First, it requires some decent relief pitching to be in positive positions to hold down an opponent until the offence can get the game-winning run across the plate. Clearly, the Orioles have an outstanding bullpen. Even though the pen over the weekend twice gave up a run in the top of the inning wherein the O’s would walk-off in the bottom, over and over the Orioles, in these games and others, kept the team in the game to get to the critical moment.
Consider the previous two years for the Orioles. The 7-12 numbers of 2013 are attributable largely to the troubled bullpen featuring Jim Johnson, including three consecutive walk-off losses in Arizona – the backbreaker games of the season.
In 2012, with the O’s 7-0 in these situations, it was the Jim Johnson-led stellar bullpen that held the team in game after game for the extra-inning and one-run wins that uniquely characterized that season.
The other major contributing factor would be an offense that is highly capable of putting up a lot of runs in a short time, but that is often also held down by good pitching. I think that characterizes the Orioles. When a team fails to score early and often and put games away with tack-on runs, there are going to be a higher number of situations where close games exist at the very end.
Here is a quick review of the 10 walk-off wins of 2014, with #10 being Sunday’s clutch hit by Kelly Johnson, and #9 occurring on Friday afternoon with Jimmy Paredes driving in two runs with two outs in the bottom of the 11th inning.
#8 – July 29 by 7-6 over the Angels in 12 innings – Manny Machado hit a walk-off solo home run against Cory Rasmus. So it was 45 days between walk-off O’s wins.
#7 – July 11 by 3-2 over the Yankees in 10 innings – Batting ninth in the batting order, Nick Hundley singled home the winning run. Showalter said that evening, “If we were that good, we’d do it before extra innings.” Haha… good stuff!
#6 – June 25 by 5-4 over the White Sox in 12 innings – Nelson Cruz hit a game-tying grand slam in the bottom of the eighth inning, and then scored the winning run on a wild pitch in the 12th.
#5 – June 23 by 6-4 over the White Sox in 9 innings – Trailing 4-3 going into the bottom of the ninth inning, struggling Chris Davis was sent in to pinch hit and he drove a three-run homer for the winner off Ronald Belisario.
#4 – May 10 by 5-4 over the Astros in 10 innings – In a crazy back-and-forth game in the ninth inning – where the Astros took a lead with two runs, there was a rain delay, and the Orioles tied it in the bottom – Steve Clevenger’s double in the bottom of the 10th was a game-winner.
#3 – May 1 by 6-5 over the Pirates in 10 innings – This was the second game of a doubleheader with rain delays, etc. that lasted a total of nine hours between the two games. Matt Wieters hit a walk-off home run about 1:00 in the morning to put an end to a long day.
#2 – April 26 by 3-2 over the Royals in 10 innings – Nick Markakis had the RBI single with the bases loaded by pitcher Danny Duffy, who hit a batter and made two fielding errors to put the three O’s on base.
#1 – April 12 by 2-1 over the Blue Jays in 12 innings – After Colby Rasmus – that Toronto pest – sent the game into extras with a ninth-inning homer, David Lough delivered the walk-off single in the 12th inning.
In the 10 walk-off wins, 10 different Orioles were the heroes. And the list is interesting. It contains the three Orioles who are now out for the season. And it includes some players who are very much role players – like Lough, Clevenger, and Hundley. And of course, the late additions of Paredes and Johnson have paid off as well. It is a picture of a well-balanced team.Sublimation is a psychological process in which socially unacceptable impulses are transformed into something less destructive, explains Weaam El-Masry, a fiery Egyptian artist, as she unloads a truckload of her watercolor nudes for sale in a central Cairo art gallery.
“Maybe you have something you want to say—maybe it’s sexual—but society suppresses it,” she says. “When it comes out in your art, that’s sublimation.”
Since the Arab Spring broke out in Egypt a year ago, the country’s art world has started to shake off decades of repression. Sexuality is more out in the open, as are deep-seated social problems such as poverty and corruption—subjects long off limits under former president Hosni Mubarak. Many artists, it seems, no longer feel obligated to cloak their politics in thick layers of allegory.
At Townhouse, a funky art gallery nestled in the heart of central Cairo, iconoclasm is now the rule rather than the exception. In December, the gallery opened D1sc0nN3ct, a dizzying collection of digital-media pieces by a handful of Egyptian artists. Featuring videogames that can’t be won and Web pages with faulty encryptions, the exhibition presents corruption—a debilitating ulcer in a society where you can’t get a driver’s license without paying a bribe—in a daringly critical light.
On the same night but in an adjacent space, the gallery headlined another bold exhibition titled The Politics of Representation. Composed entirely of campaign paraphernalia from the country’s ongoing parliamentary contest—the first since Mubarak’s ouster a year ago—the exhibit takes on the explosion of political activity that has rocked Egypt in recent months and reduces it to a maze of symbols, slogans, and glossy poster stock. According to William Wells, who founded Townhouse in 1998, the exhibition was conceived as an “interactive, real-time visual representation of the electoral process.”
Still, for all the freedom of recent months, El-Masry was reluctant to advertise the most shocking of her 11 nudes that she recently exhibited at Cairo’s El Gezira Art Center. The piece, a 120-by-80-centimeter canvas in pen and dark red watercolor, depicts two naked women superimposed on one another in a distinctly sexual embrace. “I didn’t show that one on the event poster,” she says with a laugh. “I didn’t want the Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] to come and break everything.”
One year on, Egypt’s revolution has opened up space for more criticism of the cultural status quo, but it has also opened the door to other, deeply conservative forces that see much of the recent art as an affront to religion. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis, whose ultraconservative brand of Islam was imported from the Persian Gulf, have emerged as major power brokers in postrevolutionary Egypt. Elections for the lower house of Parliament, staggered over the last few months, saw the Brotherhood and the Salafis together win more than 70 percent of the vote.
For artists operating at the margins of social acceptability, the surging popularity of Islamists signals troubling times ahead. El-Masry, whose nudes are risqué by almost any standards, says she is worried about the prospect of an Islamist-dominated government. “They don’t think. They don’t use logic,” she says. “They think art is forbidden.”
The Salafis have done little to dispel this perception. Their leader, Sheik Abdel Moneim el-Shahat (who lost his individual bid for Parliament), recently accused the late Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, of “inciting promiscuity, prostitution, and atheism” in his works. Shortly thereafter The New York Times quoted him as saying that citizenship, freedom, and equality should all be “restricted by Islamic Sharia.”
The Muslim Brotherhood has been more tactful, demurring when it comes to how its vaguely stated policy platform would play out in practice. But if its record in Parliament is any indication, the Brotherhood will be no friend of the Egyptian avant-garde.
From 2000 to 2005, the Brotherhood’s 17 members of Parliament, all of whom ran as “independents” because of a Mubarak-era ban on religion in politics, successfully lobbied to ban three books for “explicitly indecent material amounting to pornography.” Meanwhile, Brotherhood parliamentarians devoted 80 percent of their questions to cultural or media issues.
This emphasis on censorship carried over into the 2005–10 parliamentary session, when Brotherhood members introduced legislation to ban art with obvious sexual references as well as concerts that feature female singers.
How far an Islamist bloc in Parliament will be able to push its socially conservative agenda this time around, most experts agree, depends on one huge wild card: the military, which seized control after Mubarak’s departure last February and which has traditionally been a force for secularism. According to Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, who has written two books on Islam and democracy, Islamists and the military have been “locked in a very complicated, subtle, arms-length negotiation dance” since the fall of Mubarak.
For now, it looks as if the military is the leading partner in that dance. The generals, led by Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, have made it clear that the newly elected Parliament will remain subordinate to the military-appointed cabinet until a new constitution is drafted and a president is elected. And even after Egypt’s military leaders concede some of the day-to-day responsibilities of governance to the Parliament—assuming they do—the Army is likely to wield significant power from behind the scenes. Still, as Feldman cautions, “Islamists are going to have some degree of social-conservatism-style veto. I think that’s almost inevitable.”On 9 November for the 78th time we commemorate the Kristallnacht and German politicians, together with Jewish officials, repeat slogans like “Never again”... “The Holocaust is unique”... and “Against Oblivion”, then this remembrance is meaningless because for the Palestinian people in occupied Jerusalem it is “Kristallnacht” almost every night!
Image by Carlos Latuff
There is Nothing to Celebrate
By Evelyn Hecht-Galinski, English translation by Milena Rampoldi
How can we celebrate this remembrance day without thinking about the actual illegal situation in Palestine? How is it possible that in German education we correctly talk about the Holocaust as one of the greatest crimes of humanity and then completely ignore the crimes committed in Palestine? Nothing is further from my intentions than the relativisation of Nazi crimes, but it takes the breath out of me, when I see how the descendants of the victims of this Shoah crime justify today’s injustice with the injustice of that time. Injustice can never be justified, and there is no excuse for this behaviour.
I can only repeat myself and say that I cannot keep silent in the face of this injustice, and this is what I learnt from my father who is an Auschwitz survivor. When he decided to come back to Berlin to re-build Jewish life in Germany, he was opposed to Israel. And his life’s motto also became the motivating force of my actions: “I have not survived Auschwitz to keep silent about new injustice.” I do not keep silent about the crimes committed today by a “Jewish State” that justifies them with the Holocaust.
And what is even worse: Germany is driven by a misunderstood feelings of guilt and solidarises with these crimes. And this way the old guilt just becomes a new guilt they will never be able to make amends for.
The old German Republic of Adenauer, Oberländer, and Globke, the “commentator” of the race and aryanization laws, and the epoch of the “nice, brown” FDP Meinde were interfused by old Nazis, who were appointed as officials because they were needed, and then influenced the country until the 1970s. They had taken back their official positions thanks to an “anti-nazifization certificate” issued by the Allies. I remember my father struggling for his recognition as persecuted person first and then as Jewish official to be heard by German politicians and media.
It was also at that time that the USA was involved in the War in Korea and the Germans were used as a constant bulwark during the Cold War, a situation that has remained unchanged to today.
I still remember very well how in 1947 my father helped to accommodate former KZ prisoners and Jewish repatriates in empty houses. This very day, this motivated the “steel helmet Jew,” the former Bundeswehr Professor Michael Wolffsohn to persecute Heinz Galinski by his “romanticised” grandfather and home owners in various books with “hate over generations.” Wolffsohn tried anything to discredit my father, but fortunately he did not succeed.
I also felt attracted by the so called 68s, and turned away from the mendacity of certain politicians and parties. For me, the ‘German Autumn’ was the dawning of a new age. In particular in Berlin this sentiment was a glimmer of hope in times of “Springer’s incitement press.” Rudi Dutschke was a stroke of luck for us even if he had no idea against this system. And I was also attracted by young engaged people interested in Palestine turning away from the guilt-ridden solidarity with Israel. Yes, we rose up and did not want to be involved in the Nazi-guilt anymore while old Nazis were still present at universities and in ministries.
In fact, Yassir Arafat was a hero for me and is a hero up to now, as opposed to his actual successors like President Abbas.
On 2 November, when the British Prime Minister May and her colleague Netanyahu celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration during a festive dinner, you could only feel disgusted by these celebrations. The leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn did the only right thing and refused to participate by declining the invitation. It is a sad fact that in Great Britain and in the “Jewish State” the foundation of a national home for the Jewish people was celebrated, while the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland and the actual misery of millions of Palestinians were simply ignored. And this event was the foundation of the myth of the “Jewish people” by declaring that the religious Jewish community is a Jewish “people” to legitimise the “national Jewish home.” This way also the horrifying dream of the Jewish State of Theodor Herzl and the “modern” solution of the Jewish question were realised.
Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, the Zionist poster child of Great Britain, praised the agreement as the “greatest event” in the Jewish history of the last 1800 years. Did Rothschild buy his political future thanks to the support by Balfour and was the declaration the reward?
While the Arabs trusted in the British promise of 1915 as bulwark against the Ottoman Empire, and hoped to be awarded with a national Arab state, the Balfour Declaration gave Palestine to Zionism as a national home for the Jews. Today we have the same phenomenon: the “Jewish State” is the bulwark of the West in the Middle East which should defend the “Jewish-Christian values” against Islam.
The Balfour Declaration consisted of only 67 words, and their woolly formulation left room for Zionist interpretations resulting in the actual illegal occupation, ethnical cleansing, and the “modern final solution” of the Palestine question. From the beginning, the rights of the “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” were violated. In the end, the British colonialists had exactly the same ideas like the Jewish colonialists. These Zionists should get the chance to “civilise” the Arab population. I experienced this attitude myself during my visits in Israel, when Jewish guides or friends spoke disparagingly of the “dirty Arabs.” It was that Jewish disrespect towards the Palestinians I started to hate at that time.
Great Britain should apologise for this disaster, instead of celebrating it. In fact, the Balfour Declaration became the foundation of the ethnic cleansing and illegal occupation of Palestine. Lord Balfour, the former British Foreign Minister, is present everywhere in the “Jewish State.” Almost all former Palestinian villages, located in the illegally occupied Palestine, have their Balfour Square or Street, while the original Arabic names were effaced by the Zionists. So there was not just a physical, but also a cultural and ethnic cleansing, increasing up to now. In fact, the Netanyahu regime also tries to upstage the Arabic language.
The false promises contrived in the secret Sykes Picot Agreement by the British and French were reinforced in the Balfour Declaration. However, today the decisive sentence is simply ignored: “It being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.“
All events after the Holocaust are inseparably linked to the foundation of the “Jewish State” in 1948. The Balfour Declaration was the beginning of the Nakba, the catastrophe for the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people have never been compensated up to now for the crimes of the displacement and confiscation of their property and lands. The “Jewish State” has proven to be totally incapable of living in peace, supported by the hypocritical community of states. An apology for the injustice would be a small, first step on the path to the recognition of Palestine within 1967-borders. However, these steps seem to be as far away as peace. So what remains is only the hope for a future justice in a common state of Palestine for all its inhabitants, ethnic and religious groups.
This should not be forgotten during the celebration of the 78th anniversary of the Kristallnacht and the Balfour Declaration of 100 years ago. A memory without these thoughts would be an empty ritual which is not in keeping with the times!
Until then there will be nothing to CELEBRATE!
Originally posted AT- When facing the uncertainty of a hurricane, people will understandably worry about several factors, including work. As we wait to see how Hurricane Irma will impact Florida, what happens if your employer requires you to work?
Marc Edelman, an attorney with Morgan & Morgan, joined Good Day’s Ask-A-Lawyer segment on Wednesday to discuss employment rights.
In Florida, there is no specific law that dictates how employers and employees should handle the possibility of Category 5 hurricane, according to Edelman.
"Oddly enough, in a case like this, we won’t really know until it happens,” he said.
It would most likely be “unlawful” to require employees to either travel and/or work in a dangerous situation, which would include facing a hurricane with life-threatening winds and rain, Edelman said.
“Let’s say somebody is working outside, you can’t expect a landscaping crew to work during a hurricane and that would implicate OSHA which is the federal law governing workplace safety,” he said. “Every case is going to be fact specific. We’re not going to know until we endure the situation to know who is right and who is wrong in a situation like this.”
If you can prove you have a medical condition that would render you disabled or unable to head to work due to the hurricane circumstances, then you can argue you have protection under the Americans with Disability Act, or under the Family Medical Leave Act if you are a caretaker for someone who requires medical care.
If you don’t go to work, and the hurricane doesn’t make a massive impact to the area, then, as Edelman said, “you’re doing it at your own risk.”
Erik DeL'Etoile with the DeL'Etoile Law Firm, explained that Florida is a right to work state.
"Unless you have a contract that states otherwise, an employer can reprimand you for failing to appear for a scheduled day of work," he warned.
However, he pointed out that when it comes to storms, you should |
million in bombs to the United Arab Emirates for the US-led campaign against ISIS militants in Syria and Iraq, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.
A statement said the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which facilitates foreign arms sales, told lawmakers on Tuesday that the sales had been approved. Lawmakers have 30 days to block the sale, although such action is rare since deals are carefully vetted before any formal notification.
Washington views the UAE as an important ally in the fight against ISIS and has supporters and sympathizers around the world who have carried out bombings and shootings of civilians.
The UAE has taken part in air strikes against Islamic State in Syria.
Separately, the US State Department also approved the sale of 246 missiles and other equipment to Japan for $821 million, to be used for defense at sea over East Asian and Western Pacific airspace, the Pentagon said. The missiles would be used on two new destroyers being built by Japan.
Last Update: Wednesday, 20 July 2016 KSA 08:51 - GMT 05:51News from Kibaale Index of older news
June 2018 Bram Moolenaar, treasurer of ICCF Holland, visited the Kibaale Children's Centre in June 2018. This is his report. You can find more pictures on Google Photos.
A short video of the kitchen can be found on Youtube
Boys Become Men This happens every year: After writing exams in our secondary school in Kibaale the students eagerly await the results. The big question is: Can they go for A-levels? If they can, it is the biggest step in the life of a teenager in Kibaale. Not only because it determines what profession they can learn for, it also means they will leave their home town and live in a boarding school, far away from their familiar surroundings. For our girls we have Timothy center in Masaka, which is still growing. Many of our boys go to St. Mark's college in Namagoma. This is a bit far away, it is close to Kampala. The reason we select this school is that our boys do very well here. This happens every year: After writing exams in our secondary school in Kibaale the students eagerly await the results. The big question is: Can they go for A-levels? If they can, it is the biggest step in the life of a teenager in Kibaale. Not only because it determines what profession they can learn for, it also means they will leave their home town and live in a boarding school, far away from their familiar surroundings. For our girls we have Timothy center in Masaka, which is still growing. Many of our boys go to St. Mark's college in Namagoma. This is a bit far away, it is close to Kampala. The reason we select this school is that our boys do very well here. Since I heard so many stories I decided to visit St. Mark's on my way back to the airport. I must say I'm impressed. This school teaches 2000 children in all secondary levels. It is a big compound with large classrooms, library, sports facilities and dorms. I met the head teacher, who took the time to explain the way the school works and show me around. I also briefly met the director, who turns out to be very enthusiastic and friendly. He himself struggled in his young life to get a proper education, he can relate very well to the difficult life of the boys from Kibaale. They gathered all the Kibaale students in a classroom, so I could greet them and talk with them. They all were very happy. They tell me it is hard to study at St Mark's, there is an awful lot to learn in the two years of A-levels. But they encourage and help each other, and know that there will be a big reward at the end: a chance to join a university. We know this works, our students are often among the best of their class. And that is in a school that is in the top ten of best secondary schools in Uganda. I am very glad we have sponsors that make it possible for these boys to study at St. Mark's!
The classroom block at St. Mark's
The Kibaale boys currently studying at St. Mark's
The bridge between the project and Kibaale town, with the pump house on the left Changes Rakai district has been split in two parts last year. The north, with Kalisiso and Kyotera is now called Kyotera district. The result is that Kibaale is the largest town in Rakai district! The administrative center, Rakai town, is a lot smaller. It appears the split has had no influence on everyday life, and we still talk to the same government administrators. Rakai district has been split in two parts last year. The north, with Kalisiso and Kyotera is now called Kyotera district. The result is that Kibaale is the largest town in Rakai district! The administrative center, Rakai town, is a lot smaller. It appears the split has had no influence on everyday life, and we still talk to the same government administrators. Water supply in Kibaale has always been quite bad. There is a well with a pump at the roundabout, but it has broken down and I don't see anybody fixing it. Most people get their water from the river, which provides enough for everybody, but it is unsafe. It should be boiled, but not everybody can afford that. A small white building popped up near the bridge, with a high fence around it. I have been told it is to house a pump that is going to bring water to a filtering site. We will have to see how that will develop. If it works, it would be the greatest step forward since being connected to the electricity net. And a huge improvement in public health. Electricity When I visited last time in 2016 Kibaale town had electricity, but the project didn't. The clinic is now connected, it's at the end of a long 230 Volt line. That helps being able to treat patients and have the laboratory do tests all the time (except during power failures, of course). This line is too weak to connect the whole project to. When I visited last time in 2016 Kibaale town had electricity, but the project didn't. The clinic is now connected, it's at the end of a long 230 Volt line. That helps being able to treat patients and have the laboratory do tests all the time (except during power failures, of course). This line is too weak to connect the whole project to. Fortunately, a transformer has been installed and it is connected to the high voltage line. The only missing piece is the connection to the generator shed. I have been told this only depends on a formality, the electric installation needs to be approved. We hope this will happen in a few weeks. Once connected it will greatly reduce the electricity costs: Running a generator is expensive. And it will make electricity available around the clock. The generator was only on during working hours and a couple of hours when it is dark. The solar system had broken down a year ago and is too expensive to fix. The next time I visit the sausages in the fridge won't defrost on Sunday, like they did now.
The transformer is connected to the net
The core of the project: children in school Continuous growth When the driver that picked me up from the airport drove towards Kampala, he accidentally entered the new toll road. It's not officially open yet, thus we had to turn back. But it is mostly done and forms a fast connection between Entebbe and Kampala, connecting to the ring road. Having a four lane highway with toll booths indicates how the economy of Uganda has grown. This time we had to take the slow road and "enjoy" the busy traffic. At my next visit I hope to enjoy the new highway, it is expected to open in November. When the driver that picked me up from the airport drove towards Kampala, he accidentally entered the new toll road. It's not officially open yet, thus we had to turn back. But it is mostly done and forms a fast connection between Entebbe and Kampala, connecting to the ring road. Having a four lane highway with toll booths indicates how the economy of Uganda has grown. This time we had to take the slow road and "enjoy" the busy traffic. At my next visit I hope to enjoy the new highway, it is expected to open in November. The project in Kibaale now has almost a thousand students. It is incredible how the steady growth over the years has resulted in giving so many children a bright future! Bram Moolenaar You can find more pictures on
A short video of the kitchen can be found on Bram MoolenaarYou can find more pictures on Google Photos A short video of the kitchen can be found on Youtube
topIn this past Sunday's episode of True Blood, Martonia (Fiona Shaw) clearly had the upper-hand on the vampires as she staged a very public attack in front of audiences and the media that actually outdid Russell Edgington. Yet, things look like they’re going to change.
PHOTOS: True Blood's Dark, Sexy New Style
HBO released the episode descriptions for the final two episodes of Season 4 and clearly Sookie (Anna Paquin) takes a lead on the war between the witches and vampires to protect the ones she loves.
A few other things that caught our eye: Andy (Chris Bauer) gets some romancing, Jesus (Kevin Alejandro) begins to whip up some powerful brujo brew of his own, and somebody returns in the finale – could it be Russell (Denis O’Hare)?
STORY: 'True Blood' Season 4 Spoilers: Episodes 7-10 Revealed
Here are the official descriptions for the final two episodes airing in September:
Episode #47 (S4, Ep. 11): “Soul of Fire”
Debut: SUNDAY, SEPT. 4 (9:00-10:00 p.m. ET/PT)
As the Wiccan-vampire standoff reaches a critical juncture, Sookie (Anna Paquin) summons her faerie powers to prevent Marnie (Fiona Shaw) from bewitching Bill (Stephen Moyer), Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) and Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten) into a suicide march, while Jesus (Kevin Alejandro) casts a secret spell designed to un-bind Marnie/Antonia and break the witch’s deadly defenses. Sam (Sam Trammell) settles a score with Marcus (Dan Buran); Alcide (Joe Manganiello) confronts Debbie (Brit Morgan) about her allegiances; Andy (Chris Bauer) finds unexpected passion in the forest; Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis) is consumed by the past.
Written by Mark Hudis; directed by Michael Lehmann.
Episode #48 (S4, E12): “And When I Die” (season finale)
Debut: SUNDAY, SEPT. 11 (9:00-10:00 p.m.)
It’s Samhain, Wicca’s greatest holy day, and spirits of the dead surface in Bon Temps, giving Sookie valuable allies to combat Marnie’s newest incarnation. Lafayette’s latest medium encounter imperils his relationship with Jesus; Jason (Ryan Kwanten) finds confession good for the soul, but not the body; Alcide makes a heartfelt appeal to the woman he loves; Terry (Todd Lowe) receives an unexpected visitor at Merlotte’s; Sam and Luna (Janina Gavankar) envision a storybook ending, for once; Nan (Jessica Tuck) wears out her welcome with Bill and Eric. Debbie confronts Sookie and Tara (Rutina Wesley) with deadly consequences, and the denizens of Bon Temps brace for a new crisis with a familiar face.
Written by Raelle Tucker; directed by Scott Winant.
Email: Jethro.Nededog@thr.com; Twitter: @TheRealJethro
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More 'True Blood' Coverage on THRSpeaker of the House John Boehner (R), R-Ohio, speaks during the House Republican Leadership press conference at the House Republican Issues Conference in Cambridge, Maryland, January 30, 2014, with Majority Leader US Congressman Eric Cantor (C), R-Virginia, and Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Washington. AFP PHOTO / Jim WATSON (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)
CAMBRIDGE, Md. -- House Republican leaders seized on the divide between President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats over trade on Thursday, one day after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) rejected Obama's plea to Congress for fast-track authority on trade deals.
Speaking to reporters at the annual House GOP retreat in Maryland, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) pointed out it was Obama who used his State of the Union address Tuesday to reaffirm his commitment to legislation known as Trade Promotion Authority. Boehner said he has made clear for months that Republicans support the TPA, which would essentially allow the administration to negotiate international trade agreements that would then be subject to a simple up-or-down vote in Congress with no chance for amendments.
"Expanded trade means more opportunities for Americans and more exports. So the question is: Is the president going to stand up and lead on this issue?" Boehner said.
"We cannot pass this bill without his help," he added. "If this is one of his own priorities, you would think that he would have the Senate Majority Leader working with him to pass Trade Promotion Authority in order to expand opportunities for our fellow citizens."
House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) took a dig at Obama's so-called "pen and phone" strategy, by which the president would sign executive orders absent cooperation from Congress.
"The president at the State of the Union said he had a phone and a pen. I think the first phone call actually has to be to Harry Reid to talk about trade," McCarthy said. "He might want to -- have to get his own party in line."
Obama underscored the importance of the trade legislation in his speech Tuesday, arguing that it would represent a bipartisan effort to boost the economy.
"When 88 percent of our exporters are small businesses, new trade partnerships with Europe and the Asia-Pacific will help them create more jobs," Obama said. "We need to work together on tools like bipartisan Trade Promotion Authority to protect our workers, protect our environment, and open new markets to new goods stamped 'Made in the USA.' China and Europe aren’t standing on the sidelines. Neither should we."
But the president's pitch fell short for Reid and several Democrats who have been blasting TPA as a vehicle to pass "NAFTA-style trade deals." NAFTA, a landmark 1993 free trade deal, eliminated many tariffs -- but critics have cited the agreement for degrading labor and environmental standards. Progressives have been particularly adamant that the unfinished Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact Obama is seeking also has the potential to undercut labor, environmental and public health standards, in addition to shipping U.S. jobs overseas.
On Wednesday, Reid made his opposition to the fast-track clear, effectively killing its chances of getting a vote in the Senate any time soon.
"I'm against fast track … Everyone knows how I feel about this," Reid said. "I think everyone would be well advised just to not push this right now."
If Republicans turn the matter into a political attack, some liberals fear vulnerable House Democrats may crack and prompt further pressure on the Senate to act.
Neil Sroka, communications director for Democracy for America, told The Huffington Post his group has been urging Democrats in the House to resist the pressure and not join the TPA bill.
"What we're telling Democrats is don't do this to yourselves, don't throw yourself into a buzz saw of public anger," Sroka said. He added that progressives are "focused on making sure that Democrats in the House and Senate understand how destructive this is for America, and how their voters would react."
The White House, for its part, has signaled that Obama might be willing to wait until next year.
"It's a priority of the president’s," White House press secretary Jay Carney said last week. "I'm not going to put a timeframe on it, but it’s a priority and we're working towards its passage."Last week began with Donald Trump sniffling and raging at Hillary Clinton during their first presidential debate. It ended with the shocking revelation that Trump lost nearly one billion dollars in the mid 1990s and may have used his massive business failure to avoid paying federal income taxes for 18 years. In between were bizarre 3 a.m. tweets about sex tapes, revelations that he had made a fully-clothed cameo in a soft-core adult movie, and a report that he may have illegally violated the Cuba embargo. Now, after what was perhaps the worst week in presidential politics in modern history, the Trump campaign is feeling the effect.
A wave of new polls Monday show Clinton taking a decisive lead nationally, arresting a slow, post-convention slide in the weeks leading up to the first debate. Prior to Trump’s debate stage debacle (and his subsequent week-long meltdown), Clinton allies were fretting that her pneumonia scare, a spate of negative headlines, and Trump’s relative discipline could permanently change the momentum of the race. But never underestimate Donald Trump’s ability to ruin a good thing.
The latest CNN/ORC gives Clinton leading Trump 47-42 in a four-way race—a huge turnaround from September, when CNN found Trump leading 45-43. The network’s pollsters attribute the change to an “enthusiasm shift” in the electorate, with 50 percent of likely voters excited to vote for Clinton (compared to 46 percent previously), while the same enthusiasm for Trump slipped from 58 to 56 percent. Respondents in the latest poll also said Clinton won the first presidential debate by a 2-to-1 margin.
Morning Consult similarly gives Clinton a 6-point lead in a four-way race, 42-36—a three point improvement for the Democratic nominee over the last Morning Consult poll, taken immediately after the debate. CBS News, meanwhile, places Clinton 4 points ahead of Trump, 45-41 in a four-way race, whereas the last CBS survey in early September found them tied, 42 to 42.
And that’s just nationwide: The latest polls show Clinton improving in key battleground states, too. A Quinnipiac poll released Monday shows Clinton taking a 5-point lead over Trump in Florida, a 3-point lead in North Carolina, and a 4-point lead in Pennsylvania. Another poll in North Carolina shows her eking out a lead in the Tarheel State, where Trump previously had been polling ahead prior to the debate. In Florida, which is a must-win state for Trump (FiveThirtyEight gives the Republican only a 5 percent chance of winning the election if he loses there), Clinton is now ahead by 46-41 according to Quinnipiac.
Colorado, which was once considered a swing state, is now looking like solid Clinton territory, too. The former secretary of state saw a whopping 11 point bounce in Colorado after the debate, bringing her lead over Trump to 49-38 in a four-way race. “Some polls had suggested that Colorado was becoming more competitive. That may have been true last month, but it does not appear to be the case now,” said Monmouth University, which conducted the poll, in a statement.
The best news for Clinton, however, is that she stands to gain more millennial and independent voters as Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, who currently has a hold on roughly a third of the youth vote, loses support. Amid weeks of befuddled interviews (“What is Aleppo?” Johnson asked during one), including one in which he couldn’t remember the names of any world leaders, voters appear to be abandoning the former New Mexico governor. Four-way polls show Johnson dropping from the high single digits to the low single digits, but the damage is more drastic in battleground states:
Even, Libertarian elder statesman Rep. Ron Paul said that he was “disappointed” in Johnson, hinting that he was going to vote for Jill Stein instead. The likelihood that fleeing Johnson supporters will go Green, however, seems low.
Hillary Clinton FOLLOW Donald Trump FOLLOW Follow to get the latest news and analysis about the players in your inbox. See All PlayersStory highlights Ophadell Williams, 41, is guilty of aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle
He was acquitted of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide
The March 2011 crash killed 15 passengers and injured 18 others
The bus driver charged in a March 2011 crash that killed 15 passengers and injured 18 others in New York was acquitted of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide charges Friday.
Ophadell Williams, 41, was found guilty of aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle in the third degree. He has served more than 15 months in prison and was sentenced to an additional 30 days. He will also pay a $500 fine.
A jury in the Bronx reached the verdict Thursday afternoon, but the judge delayed the reading to Friday morning because a juror had to leave for a medical appointment.
The crash occurred just before 5:40 a.m. on Interstate 95 near the Bronx-Westchester County line. The bus was carrying 32 passengers from Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, Connecticut, and was headed for Chinatown in Manhattan. Investigators determined that after crossing a 10-foot shoulder, the bus struck a guardrail, skidded 500 feet and slammed into two signposts that tore off nearly the entire roof of the bus.
An investigation ordered by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo found that Williams was able to obtain a commercial bus license by allegedly using false information.
Williams had claimed that a tractor-trailer clipped the bus, causing the accident, but a March 2011 National Transportation Safety Board investigation found no evidence supporting the claim.
Investigators also determined that Williams was driving 78 mph in a 50-mph zone at the time of the accident.
In June 2012, NTSB investigators concluded that Williams was sleep-deprived while driving and that the combination of fatigue, poor sleep quality, excessive speed and poor oversight resulted in the fatal collision.
World Wide Travel, the bus company, was shut down after the accident. The NTSB subsequently launched a broad investigation into the country's tour bus industry and its safety regulations.Looking for news you can trust?
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Three hundred and sixty-four days after the explosion that caused the largest oil spill in US history, BP is back in action in electoral politics. The Hill reports that the company has made generous contributions to a number of House lawmakers and congressional campaign committees, with all but one of those donations going to Republicans:
BP Corp. North America gave $5,000 contributions to [House Speaker John] Boehner (R-Ohio) and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) through its political action committee, according to a campaign finance report filed with the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday.
BP’s PAC also gave $5,000 to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Only one Democrat—Rep. Pete Visclosky of Indiana—received a donation ($3,000).
In the wake of the spill, BP’s federal contributions basically stopped; the one check the company did cut to a House member was refused. BP did, however, make some contributions to state-level candidates. Buta year after the spill, it’s apparently acceptable to take BP’s campaign cash once again.
UPDATE: Upton tells The Hill that he plans to return the BP money.Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope, the virtual reality spin-off to Croteam's gloriously over-the-top Serious Sam series, has just received an updated Steam Early Access build that adds a couple of surprising new features. "For the first time in series history," the update notes explain, "Sam is not limited by his weapon handling skills and is able to annihilate even bigger alien armies thanks to the all new Skills and Power-Ups update."
That's right, you can now enhance Sam's skills with the new skill tree, which allows you to unlock powerful abilities and weapons including holographic decoys, swarms of flying quadcopters, and "an army of spiders." I'll not be picking that one, ta very much.
"With this update general Stone gains access to a skill tree that allows him to unlock passive and active abilities which players can buy alongside weapons and ammo in the shop," the Steam post elaborates. "Skill points are unlocked by completing planets. Higher difficulty levels bring even more points that players can use to set up their skill inventory to better match their play style."
If that's not enough Sam for you, the top-down Serious Sam's Bogus Detour released last month.The Detroit Tigers announced Saturday that they have hired former utility man Don Kelly as a pro scout/assistant to player development.
It appears he's already getting started on his new gig, donning a windbreaker with the Tigers' old English D at spring training in Lakeland, Florida.
Kelly, 37, hit.234/.297/.340 with 23 home runs and 95 RBIs in 545 games with the Tigers from 2009 to 2014. He played every position except shortstop -- yes, that includes pitcher -- during his six years with Detroit, and he was a favorite of former manager Jim Leyland.
After the 2014 season, Kelly became a free agent and signed a minor league deal with the Miami Marlins. In 2015 and '16, he played a combined 15 major league games for the Marlins.
Kelly was designated for assignment in July 2016 after second baseman Dee Gordon's return from an 80-day suspension for violating MLB's performance-enhancing drug policy.
--Alex TekipIf you’ve discovered Scrivener, like many writers have, you have probably come to love the flexibility and organization it affords your creativity. I’m new to the software, but I really like what I see so far. From everything I’ve read, so does just about everyone else. Understand that Scrivener is not a standard word processor, nor does it intend to be. Think of it as a creative suite. It even makes publishing ebooks quite easy. Once you’ve got the basics down, you’ll probably start looking for some templates to kickstart your writing process. Well, look no further. Below you will find a series of templates that can be found on the web from other authors who share the same passion you have (are gaining) for Scrivener.
Scrivener Fiction TemplatesDave Hancock resigned as the MLA for Edmonton-Whitemud during his last news conference as Alberta premier this morning.
Hancock was emotional as he spoke at Government House in Edmonton.
With his wife Janet at his side, Hancock choked back tears as he spoke about how families are affected by life in the public eye.
"Very few people understand the toll that politics takes on families," he said as his wife placed her hand on his shoulder. "It's a consuming job, and finding that balance between family and province is probably the most challenging task."
The Progressive Conservative caucus named Hancock interim premier and party leader after Alison Redford resigned in March.
Hancock's time in the province’s top political job will end when new PC leader Jim Prentice is sworn-in on Monday.
He told reporters that he hasn't yet submitted his resignation letter but expects the seat will be vacated in time for the byelections expected to take place this fall.
"On behalf of Progressive Conservatives and all Albertans, I would like to thank Premier Hancock and his wife Janet for their enormous contributions to our province throughout their time in public life," said premier-designate Jim Prentice in a statement.
"I have always admired the premier’s extensive understanding of public policy, and his passion for issues like education and children’s literacy which have bettered our province."
According to Derek Fildebrandt with Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Hancock will get a $714,000 transition allowance. He says that number is based on Hancock's salary and years of service.
Longtime politician
A lawyer and longtime PC party member, Hancock was first elected in 1997. He served in cabinet in eight different portfolios under premiers Ralph Klein, Ed Stelmach and Alison Redford.
One of those roles included education minister. The Alberta Teachers' Association said in a statement that Hancock had a continuing interest and commitment to public education at all levels.
“Whenever I met Dave, he was wearing on his lapel a 'Children First' pin," said ATA president Mark Ramsankar in the release. “For him this was more than a slogan, but a life commitment. On behalf of Alberta’s 36,000 teachers, I want to extend to the Honourable Dave Hancock our thanks for his service and our best wishes as he moves on to new challenges.”
Dave Hancock's resignation from Edmonton-Whitemud leaves a seat open for former Edmonton mayor Stephen Mandel. There is much speculation that Mandel, a member of Jim Prentice's transition team, will be one of the people named to cabinet on Monday. (CBC)
Hancock also served as House Leader during most of his time in the legislature. He paid tribute to PC caucus members as well as MLAs from opposition parties.
"I've worked with some really great people from all parties and from all caucuses who want to do the best thing for Alberta," he said. "And I would hope that as we go forward we can continue to honour and respect service and the people who provide service because it's not an easy job."
In a statement, Opposition Wildrose leader Danielle Smith wished Hancock and his family well.
“While we have shared no shortage of disagreements in our day-to-day battles in the legislature, there is no question that Premier Hancock has shown a strong dedication to our province with his passion towards public service," she said.
"Mr. Hancock leaves office with a well-deserved reputation as a top-notch parliamentarian, hard-working local representative, and dedicated family man."
Hancock's resignation from Edmonton-Whitemud leaves a seat open for former Edmonton mayor Stephen Mandel.
There is much speculation that Mandel, a member of Jim Prentice's transition team, will be one of the people named to cabinet on Monday.Moving through the stygian night, he followed the lanky form of Rick-the-dick. They were passing through the slums of southern New Cluster, which were some of the worse parts of the city and of course where they all lived
Streetlights, that hadn’t worked for a decade, stabbed the earth like black daggers. Overhead, the smog obfuscated any hint of the stars he knew lurked above. Leaving the major streets, Rick weaved through the alleys. These grimy streets had gone from being thoroughfares to hard-bitten squats for all manner of dregs.
Normally, Talon would be put off entering these suspect areas, but the tall imposing figure of Rick-the-dick kept the others at bay. Gazing left and right, he saw gangs of dregs. Many eyed them as potential prey, but they had chosen to keep their distance so far.
“These places are too crowded,” Rick hissed back at him. Talon also thought that these folk probably did something with their dead, other than let PRs drag them away, but he kept his opinions to himself.
The pair moved away from the throbbing seas of dregs and headed for the canals. These canals were dryer than a bucket of sand left in the desert and were now just crumbling monuments to a time when rivers still moved across this part of the city, unless you counted the garbage-choked flashfloods that ripped through New Custer in the spring. These were long gone now, and the canal loomed before them like a dark scar cut into the Earth.
People still malingered here and there, for it was rare to find any sort of isolation within the city limits. They moved closer to the canal. A walkway ran along it, which had once been part of a recreation program, but due to the smog, long gone were the days when one could exercise outside. Such things now belonged only to those rich enough to afford the indoor gyms, or people like him that worked off any nutrition he received through drudgery.
A bridge formed a black arch, which blocked half of the northern city’s lights and created a wide shadow across the trail. Rick headed for it. Talon hesitated at the lip of darkness. “Come on you wuss,” Rick ordered. Normally Talon wouldn’t have gone anywhere near places like this, but supposed that they were the predators now.
To his right, only a thin railing kept path traffic from tumbling into the canal bed far below. To his left, the darkness thickened where the bridge continued into a narrow space between the road and the dirt below. Rick had some sort of light and was shining it into these recesses. Talon hurried closer to the light. Looking back at him, the grim form of Rick nodded, the light reflecting off his archaic glasses. He motioned with his head and Talon saw a tangled sleeping form. The man was so filthy, he nearly camouflaged himself into the dirt below.
“Is he dead?” Talon whispered.
Rick’s response was to kick the man in the shin while he removed a pair of nun-chucks. The man groaned, but made no move to retaliate or even awaken.
“He’s still alive, Rick.”
“That’s a situation which can be easily rectified.” Then with a snarl, Rick tore the old man from his bedding and violently dragged him to the edge of the dirt.
Screaming began and ended quickly, when Rick laid the nun-chucks into the old dreg. Talon couldn’t move as the sick crunches filled the air. Rick beat on him again and again, until there was no doubt that the old man was dead. Then crouching over his victim, Rick began to search the man in the faint hope that he might possess something valuable.
They were right next to the rail that separated them from the long drop into the rocky canal. Without really planning to, Talon rushed forward and gave Rick-the-dick a mighty shove. Rick’s eyes grew wide, more with anger than fear, and he clutched at Talon as his body balanced precariously on the railing. Fingers tore strips of hair from Talon’s mohawk, but with a grunt, Talon grabbed the base of Rick’s boots and upended him backwards over the railing. Rick didn’t even bother to scream when his body plummeted into the debris-choked canal.
Another person might have just fled back to is home and hoped for the best, but Talon knew what sort of end that choice would led him to eventually. He had different ideas.
Learn more about New Cluster and its Heroes here!!!
AdvertisementsLondon-based Clearmatics, which uses a distributed ledger system inspired by Ethereum, is focused on bringing efficiency and transparency to over-the-counter (OTC) securities markets.
Ethereum allows a large network of machines to share a decentralised ledger which contains not only data but, in essence, runs computer programmes as well. You can think of it as a "consensus computer". OTC markets involve securities trading which is not done on formal exchanges, but rather carried out by broker-dealer networks in the form of bilateral contracts negotiated using computers or by phone. OTC markets, while already partially decentralised, are known for being mostly opaque and market participants face an advancing tide of regulation calling for increased transparency.
The use of closed consensus blockchain systems to update the mechanics of financial trading has become one of the busiest spaces in fintech. Some players have aligned themselves with existing intermediaries and seem to be looking at a distributed ledger at the bottom of the stack that gets rid of reconciliation and enables some real time settlement.
The Clearmatics vision for OTC markets is different. CEO Robert Sams told IBTimes: "The vision that we are working on is to turn the post-trade life cycle into a bunch of different member-run utilities. So instead of having post-trade intermediation, you have got a membership-run network that automates the post-trade lifecycle without third-party intermediation."
Regulations and transparency
Trade capture platform (TCP) intermediation is on the cards by virtue of a plethora of rules including Dodds Frank and the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), not to mention plus MiFID II, with trade and transaction reporting. Within the next few years market participants will not be able to do a trade without having to report it.
Sams said: "The opacity of the OTC market is something that is going to have to go away. The regulators are going to push in that direction anyway. What I say to all the people in the OTC landscape, if we don't go down a model like this and make the OTC market more transparent, you are going to lose the whole bilateral nature of OTC and everything is going to be intermediated; the pre-trade is going to go from dealer model to central limit order books; there will be vertical integration between central counterparty clearing houses (CCPs) and exchanges and then your market will disappear.
"So people might say – 'oh I like the fact that I can do a trade and nobody has to know about it except my counterpart', but the handwriting is on the wall; The opacity aspect is disappearing anyway."
Netting and blockchains
How the netting of securities settlements will integrate with a distributed ledger model is an interesting problem which can elicit a variety of responses, depending on who you ask. Some people think blockchains will remove the need for netting entirely and do everything on a gross basis. Strictly speaking, within the OTC derivatives space it's not really netting; it's called "trade compression". This effectively does the same thing, only it happens at a different stage because derivatives span the life of a contract, unlike a spot trade where once it's settled, it's settled and finished.
"I think the netting topic is really interesting one that the technology offers elegant solutions for," said Sams. "With a derivatives contract you've got margining that happens over the life of it. The trade compression is something that happens in the middle of that life cycle. For instance, one party goes into the trade with Goldman Sachs; he goes out of the trade with JP Morgan; he needs to use novation to compress those trades to get them off his balance sheet. So the process is different but economic function of it is the same."
To anyone who thinks blockchains will do away with netting in favour of a gross settlement system that's constantly updated and transparent, Sams suggested the following example: "Say you are a fund manager and you have got 40% of your assets in bonds, 50% of your assets in stocks, and 10% of your assets in cash. Let's say that you want to do a re-allocation of like 20% of your portfolio. So on this gross-settled model you are going to have to sell at least 10% of |
Sun. The spacecraft is called Gaia. Its mission, funded by the European Space Agency and involving scientists from across Europe, is to make the largest, most precise, three-dimensional map of the Milky Way ever attempted.
It will be a census of a billion stars spread across our galaxy. The results, says Professor Gerry Gilmore from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy (IoA) and the Principal Investigator for UK involvement in the mission, “will revolutionise our understanding of the cosmos as never before.”
“Our understanding of what’s out there has been driven by looking at what we can see. We’ve never had a genuine opportunity to look at everything, to know what’s there, and to know where they are in relation to each other. We don’t even know how much we don’t know – there are sure to be objects out there that don’t even have names yet, since we don’t yet realise how strange they are.”
During its five-year mission, Gaia’s billion-pixel camera will detect and very accurately measure the motion of stars in their orbit around the centre of the galaxy. It will observe each of the billion stars about a hundred times, helping us to understand the origin and evolution of the Milky Way.
Every celestial object preserves something of the era during which it was born. So, as well as mapping the sky as we see it today, the Gaia mission will allow us to look back billions of years into the past – making possible what some have called a ‘time-lapse video’ of the birth and life of our galaxy.
Scientists involved in the project also hope that Gaia will be able to detect 10,000–50,000 planets beyond our own solar system, as well as some 10,000 exploding stars, or supernovas, many before they reach their maximum brightness, providing an early warning for scientists back on Earth who wish to study them.
But it’s not just those stars ablaze with nuclear fusion at their burning heart that the scientists are interested in; Gaia is also looking for brown dwarves – failed stars that never truly ignited and are left to drift across space as interstellar itinerants. And, looking closer to home, the spacecraft will provide an inventory of our Solar System’s asteroids and comets, from the Near Earth Objects, to those located in the frozen furthest reaches of the Outer Solar System, the Kuiper Belt.
The sensors on board the spacecraft will be able to detect objects so faint the human eye would have to be nearly 4,000 times more powerful to see them. “This accuracy is equivalent to measuring a shirt button on the moon as seen from the Earth,” said IoA scientist Dr Floor van Leeuwen, manager of the Gaia data processing in the UK. “It means we have to have the highest-capability computers to analyse the data.”
Test data will soon start streaming back to a specially built computer at the IoA and powerful clusters at four other computing centres in Europe. Within a few months, the satellite will be fully operational. Over its entire lifetime, Gaia will download around 100 TeraBytes of data, equivalent to 32,000 hours’ worth of DVD movies.
Gilmore estimates that the first 3D maps will be ready in two years: “3D mapping involves combining complicated algorithms: we are moving, the star is moving and the stars will also be wobbling if it has planets around them. You have to process these three motions. But for the same reason, we’ll be able to discover tens of thousands of planets around stars just by examining the wobble.”
Perhaps as exciting as the other projected discoveries is the ability of Gaia’s scientific harvest to be used to test some of the fundamental premises of astronomy. “With Gaia, we can ‘calibrate the calibrators’ on which our cosmic knowledge is built,” explained van Leeuwen. “If you provide a major improvement in the accuracy of the foundations in astronomy, this works its way all the way through the field for decades to come.”
For example, Gaia will provide the most precise test to date of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. Because Gaia can measure positions so accurately, it will be able to spot tiny systematic deviations in the positions of stars caused by the bending of light caused by massive objects, such as our own Sun and Jupiter.
Gaia may also be able to help in the future hunt for Einstein’s prediction of ‘ripples’ in the space-time continuum. So far undiscovered, Einstein thought gravitational waves might be able to alter the apparent positions of a group of stars, by stretching space-time. The spacecraft will help astronomer’s theorise on the possible strength of such ripples, which might have been created during the Big Bang itself.
“There are literally hundreds of questions like this – why is the universe the way it is? Where did the Milky Way come from? What’s it really made of? Exactly how much does it weigh? How did it get to be like it is?” added Gilmore. “We will go beyond what we can see to understand reality. We are going to discover completely new things, things we would think are impossible.”
http://www.gaia.ac.uk/
http://sci.esa.int/gaia/
Latest images from the Gaia project
Disguised in a crowded field of stars, the tiny white dot highlighted in this image is none other than ESA’s Gaia satellite as seen with the Very Large Telescope Survey Telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile on 23 January.
To measure Gaia’s position in the sky, a network of small and medium telescopes are monitoring the spacecraft on a daily basis. This information is being fed into the orbit reconstruction being performed at ESA’s Space Operations Centre, yielding an accuracy of 150 m on Gaia’s position and of 2.5 mm/s on its motion. This image is the result of a close collaboration between ESA and the European Southern Observatory to observe Gaia.Want to read lines into your camera while maintaining eye-contact with your lens? The Parrot is a new teleprompter system that can help you do just that. It attaches to the front of your DSLR or mirrorless camera, and is uses your smartphone for the text it reflects toward you.
If you have ever tried to memorize lines for a video, then you know how challenging it can be. Teleprompters display a script in front of the camera so the actor can read their lines and maintain eye contact allowing them to connect with their audience.
The Parrot measures in at 4x4x3-inches, and weighs only about half a pound when combined with most smartphones. Its components are made out of injection molded ABS (there are some steel components in the mounting hardware). It’s small enough that you can throw it into your camera bag when it’s not in use.
On the front side is an acrylic beam splitting mirror that has 70% light transmission. It’s coated with scratch resistant particles, and allows your camera to see through it with “excellent optical quality.”
The Parrot package will come with the teleprompter assembly, a hood cover, the mount cover, a lens adapter, and instructions for use. It will retail for $150 when it hits store shelves in mid-to-late 2015, but the makers are currently taking preorders through Kickstarter, where early adopters can snag a unit for a lower price.Wary Of Syria's War, Israel Plans A Fence In The Golan Heights
Enlarge this image toggle caption Ariel Schalit/AP Ariel Schalit/AP
Concerned about spillover from Syria's civil war, Israel says it will build a fence in the Golan Heights along the line that has effectively served as the border since wars between them in the 1960s and 1970s.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who recently made the announcement, says he's concerned about Syrian rebel groups that have succeeded in capturing areas close to the frontier. He says that building the fence, which would extend for more than 40 miles, is a precaution.
Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war, and subsequently annexed the territory, a move that no other nation has recognized. Syria has demanded that Israel return the territory, but at present it is home to about 20,000 Israelis.
One of them, Yael Saperia, was sitting at a cafe just a few miles from the boundary with Syria. A few months ago, an errant shell fired by a Syrian tank landed in her neighbor's backyard. The village, Alonei Habashan, is one of the closest to the Syrian frontier. But she says that the nearby violence is hardly felt in Israel.
"We are getting information through the army to go on with our regular lives," she says. "We go to work, your kids go to school. I mean, we haven't changed anything."
Netanyahu Points To Instability In Syria
Despite the relative quiet, Netanyahu says Israel should build the fence.
In a transcript released after last Sunday's Cabinet meeting, Netanyahu was quoted as saying that the Syrian army has moved away from the area while jihadist forces have moved in. Netanyahu added that the Syrian regime is very unstable, and that the fence will protect Israel from both infiltration and terrorism.
In a recent tour of the Golan Heights, scattered gunfire and explosions could be heard coming from inside Syria.
Amos Harel, defense correspondent for Israel's Haaretz newspaper, says that the Israeli defense establishment sees little chance that the Syrian army would launch an attack on Israel at this stage.
But, standing on the ruins of a bunker used by Israeli soldiers in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, he said a conventional attack is not the only concern.
"There is the problem of al-Qaida, chemical weapons, whatever you'd like. But not the conventional warfare of divisions," he says.
Harel says Israel is concerned about the increasing strength of various rebel groups along the frontier. He says the rebels have used the area to play cat-and-mouse games with the Syrian army.
"The presence of the Israeli forces close by is a sort of a shield... against Assad loyalists' military activity. This is not something Israel is happy about, but it's quite logical for rebels to use this method," he says.
Israeli Concern About Syrian Rebel Groups
In a background briefing given to NPR, an Israeli intelligence officer said Israel has increased efforts to gather information about the Syrian rebel groups, especially those with links to hard-line Islamist movements.
The officer said that in the past few months, rebels have managed to take control of large swaths of territory, including areas close to the Israeli border.
Many groups seem focused solely on overthrowing President Bashar Assad, though Israel is worried about a handful that have already promised to turn their attention to Israel if Assad is ousted.
Moshe Maoz, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, says the Israeli leader is rushing to build a fence.
Netanyahu "wants to do it because he's afraid that if a radical Islam organization takes over, Israel will be in danger," Maoz says. "But my analysis is the possibility of them taking over is slim."
Maoz says Netanyahu's announcement of the border fence was well-timed, with parliamentary elections now less than two weeks away.
"Thinking about the forthcoming elections, Netanyahu does everything possible to induce the public to vote for him," Maoz adds.
Maoz says that with the campaign in full swing, Netanyahu wants to reassure the country that he's strong on security issues.04 February 2015
In support of the Administration’s effort to double renewable energy generation for a second time by 2020, the Energy Department announced more than $59 million in funding to support solar energy innovation.
Specifically, the Department of Energy is making $45 million in funding available to quickly move innovative solar manufacturing technologies to market, and is also awarding more than $14 million for 15 new projects to help communities develop multi-year solar deployment plans to install solar electricity in homes, businesses, and communities.
As more communities look to solar energy as a source of clean, renewable electricity, the funding announced today will help lower the cost of going solar and enable businesses to develop solutions for overcoming technical, regulatory and financial challenges, further unleashing cost-competitive solar energy.
1 said
“As President Obama noted in his State of the Union address, the US brings as much solar power online every three weeks as we did in all of 2008,”said Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. “As the price of solar continues to drop, the Energy Department is committed to supporting a robust domestic solar manufacturing sector that will help American business meet growing demand and help American families and businesses save money by making solar a cheaper and more accessible source of clean electricity.”
The $45 million Technology to Market funding opportunity is part of the Department’s Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative, aimed at boosting American competitiveness and supporting a strong domestic, clean energy manufacturing sector. This funding opportunity combines three historically separate SunShot Initiative funding programs— Incubator Solar Manufacturing Technology, and Scaling Up Nascent PV at Home — into one that will support projects with the potential to significantly reduce the costs for solar energy systems across a variety of technology areas. These tools, technologies and services could reduce the costs of technologies including photovoltaics and power electronics, and could also contribute to cutting balance of system and non-hardware costs through customer acquisition, permitting, financing, interconnection and inspection.
Aimed at cutting the non-hardware “soft costs” of solar – such as permitting, financing, and connecting to the electric grid – the case studies and lessons learned from these projects will ultimately provide similar jurisdictions with examples that can be replicated — an important step towards making solar deployment faster, easier, and cheaper across the country. The awardees include not-for-profits, utilities, industry associations, universities, and state and local jurisdictions in California, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Utah, Virginia, Vermont, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C.
In 2012, the Department of Energy announced more than
REFERENCES
The 15 Solar Market Pathways projects announced by the White House earlier today pursue various approaches to developing actionable solar deployment plans and strategies to promote deployment at residential, community, and commercial scales — from expanding shared or community solar programs and local financing mechanisms to integrating solar energy generation into communities’ emergency response plans.Aimed at cutting the non-hardware “soft costs” of solar – such as permitting, financing, and connecting to the electric grid – the case studies and lessons learned from these projects will ultimately provide similar jurisdictions with examples that can be replicated — an important step towards making solar deployment faster, easier, and cheaper across the country. The awardees include not-for-profits, utilities, industry associations, universities, and state and local jurisdictions in California, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Utah, Virginia, Vermont, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C.In 2012, the Department of Energy announced more than $12 million to spur solar innovation in the US.A McDonald’s employee in North Carolina has been fired after a woman found a swastika etched in butter on her chicken sandwich.
Charleigh Matice said she ordered the sandwich at the McDonald’s drive-thru in Morehead City. She was shocked when she went to put mayonnaise on the bun and found the Nazi symbol.
“Is this a joke? Does somebody really think they’re funny?” Ms. Matice, whose grandfather fought in World War II, told a local ABC affiliate.
“Many people died because of that symbol and it’s not something that should be taken lightly. It’s not something that should be thrown around,” she added.
Ms. Matice said the restaurant’s employees offered to replace the sandwich, but ultimately ended up giving her a refund.
“I really didn’t have an appetite at that point so I said I rather have my money back,” she said, adding that employees should be trained so “people know that this is not OK.”
Restaurant owner Dulcy Purcell issued a statement apologizing for the incident, the station reported.
“We are very sorry for the service that our customers received, and to be clear we have terminated the employee who was involved,” the statement said. “We do not tolerate that kind of behavior at McDonald’s, and it’s not what we stand for personally as owners. It is about providing the best level of service and care to our customers, and anything less than that is unacceptable to us.”
Ms. Matice said she will forgive the incident and continue eating at that location.
“I’m a loyal customer and that’s why I don’t want people like that representing them,” she told the station.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.After difficult lessons, Oakland Zoo a leader in elephant welfare
Treats are ready to feed to the African elephants at the Oakland Zoo in Oakland, Calif. on Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2014. The zoo has long opposed the use of bullhooks to manage its elephants in favor of a protected contact, large barricade system as well as using positive reinforcement. less Treats are ready to feed to the African elephants at the Oakland Zoo in Oakland, Calif. on Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2014. The zoo has long opposed the use of bullhooks to manage its elephants in favor of a protected... more Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 12 Caption Close After difficult lessons, Oakland Zoo a leader in elephant welfare 1 / 12 Back to Gallery
It all started on a rainy morning in January 1991 in a barn in the Oakland hills, when Smoky, an African elephant, stomped to death a veteran keeper at the Oakland Zoo during a routine enclosure cleaning.
“It was no accident,” Dr. Joel Parrott, the zoo’s longtime director, said recently. “The elephant did that intentionally, and it wasn’t his fault. For us, that was an awakening. I think until that point we were all in denial.”
Like zoos everywhere, the Oakland Zoo’s elephants lived under harsh conditions that included chains, electrical shocks and sharp pokers called bullhooks intended to control Earth’s largest land animal. Across the country, several keepers a year died or suffered severe injuries as elephants occasionally fought back.
But when it happened in Oakland, Parrott realized something was very, very wrong with the way zoos were treating elephants.
“We wanted to make sure no one gets killed again,” he said. “And that led us to change everything about the way we treat elephants.”
Since then, the Oakland Zoo has become a national pioneer in elephant welfare. Not only did the zoo help revolutionize the way elephants in captivity are cared for, but it has funded antipoaching programs in Africa, fought for legislation to ban ivory sales and, most recently, helped Oakland become one of the only cities in the U.S. to ban the bullhooks still used by circuses.
Expanding enclosure
Last year, the zoo helped purchase a 5,000-acre ranch in rural Tehama County — one of the few places with terrain and climate like elephants’ natural habitat in Africa — to be a reserve and study area for about 50 elephants from North American zoos. Over the years, the zoo has also reconfigured its own elephant enclosure, expanding it to more than 6 acres, one of the largest in the country.
These efforts earned the zoo a prominent place in the 2013 HBO documentary “Apology to Elephants.”
“The Oakland Zoo speaks up for elephants at every turn. And most of their investment has nothing to do with the display of elephants — it’s for the species as a whole,” said Deniz Bolbol of Humanity Through Education, a Redwood City group that advocates for the welfare of circus animals. “The Oakland Zoo has really become one of the most progressive zoos in the country.”
For the Oakland Zoo, it started with examining the day-to-day interactions between elephants and their keepers. Elephants can be dominant and aggressive, and most zoos found that the best way to control pachyderms was through bullhooks and beatings so humans could establish dominance.
Parrott visited zoos around the country looking for alternatives and decided that, for starters, zookeepers would no longer have direct physical contact with elephants. Keepers would stay behind steel bars or at least 40 feet away. That protects the keepers but also allows the elephants some autonomy, “allows them to be elephants,” Parrott said.
Because elephants are as smart as dolphins and whales, Parrott looked at how marine mammals are treated in captivity — entirely with positive reinforcement. So the zoo replaced chains and bullhooks with bananas and other treats. To encourage certain movements necessary for veterinary care — such as allowing a vet to examine ears or trunks — zookeepers tap the elephants gently with a padded stick and reward them with whistles and treats.
Optional procedures
Everything is voluntary for the zoo’s four elephants. If they don’t feel like an ear exam, they can opt out.
One task they never opt out of is their daily pedicures. One a recent chilly morning, the elephants lined up to have their feet bathed in warm water, the rocks removed from their foot pads and a massage with special oil. Donna, 35 years old and weighing 5 tons, stepped into a roomy steel chute, delicately placed her foot through the slats into the hands of zookeeper Jeff Kinzley, and began emitting a low, rumbling purrlike sound.
“If Donna didn’t want her pedicure, she could just walk away,” Kinzley said as his wife, keeper Gina Kinzley, placed banana slices in Donna’s trunk. “Our elephants don’t work for free.”
Keepers spend much of their day hiding food around the enclosure for the elephants to forage and creating new challenges, like puzzle feeders and scented toys, to keep the elephants from getting bored. Last week, the enclosure was scattered with discarded Christmas trees for the elephants to investigate.
Elephants in the wild walk up to 30 miles a day, bathe in rivers, roll in mud and live in herds with their families. Some animal welfare groups believe elephants should not be in captivity at all, no matter how well they’re cared for, because of their size, intelligence and complex social needs.
In fact, every other zoo in Northern California except Oakland has closed its elephant exhibit. Parrott said the Oakland Zoo decided to keep its elephants because the zoo has always had pachyderms, the zoo has the space and climate to offer an ideal setting for them, and educating the public about the graceful beasts might be the best hope for saving them.
“We wanted to improve our elephant program, not end it,” he said, noting that African elephants in the wild face extreme threats from poaching and habitat loss. “And we all have an enormous love of elephants. They’re magnificent animals.”
Raising awareness, funds
Ed Stewart, head of the Performing Animal Welfare Society, an elephant sanctuary in Calaveras County, called the Oakland Zoo one of only two zoos in the nation to take a strong stand on behalf of circus elephants. The other is Detroit.
“The Oakland Zoo has stood up, and it hasn’t always been comfortable for them,” he said. “They’ve helped raise awareness of poaching. They’ve helped animal welfare groups like ours. They’ve raised money for people in the bush, so they won’t have to poach. … If every zoo did like Oakland, there wouldn’t be elephant problems.”
For Donna, it all comes down to the bananas and time with her cohorts, Lisa, Osh and M’Dunda. When she glimpsed Lisa after her pedicure, she trotted over and nuzzled Lisa’s hide. Lisa rumbled in response. Even M’Dunda, who was among the most skittish of the zoo’s elephants, is happy these days.
“She used to take swings at people with her trunk,” Parrott said. “Now she’s our sweetest elephant. It took a while, but now she gets it: Calm down, darlin’, no one’s going to hurt you.”
Carolyn Jones is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: carolynjones@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carolynajonesNick Cannon says that he will no longer be a host of America’s Got Talent. In an emotional post to his Facebook page, he says that jokes involving the “n-word” on his Netflix special were the impetus for a parting of the ways with NBC.
From The Hollywood Reporter:
In a lengthy message posted Monday on his Facebook account, the comedian says he will not be returning to the NBC reality competition for season 12 after executives at the network threatened to fire him over a racial joke he made in a recent Showtime stand-up special.
“I was to be punished for a joke. This has weighed heavy on my spirit. It was brought to my attention by my ‘team’ that NBC believed that I was in breach of contract because I had disparaged their brand,” wrote Cannon. “I find myself in a dark place having to make a decision that I wish I didn’t have to, but as a man, an artist, and a voice for my community I will not be silenced, controlled or treated like a piece of property. There is no amount of money worth my dignity or my integrity.”
The joke in question aired as part of Cannon’s Showtime special, Stand Up, Don’t Shoot, which premiered Friday on the pay cabler. “I honestly believe, once I started doing America’s Got Talent, they took my real n—r card. They did! Because then like these type of people started showing up to my shows,” Cannon said in the special as he jokingly pointed to three older white audience members in the front row. “I can’t do the real n—r stuff no more, because then they’ll put me on TMZ.”
Earlier in his Showtime special, his third on the pay cabler, Cannon made several jokes about NBC and the difference in language he used in the special compared to the more family-friendly reality competition.
“That’s what NBC is gonna stand for tonight: ‘N—rs better come on, cuz n—rs be cussin’, so n—rs be careful,” said Cannon. “‘Cuz y’all see me on the show. I mean sometimes I wish I could say the stuff that I want to say. … But I can’t say that. I can’t talk like that ‘cuz that would mess up the white money. It will.”
In an interview with Howard Stern on Friday morning, Cannon said he wasn’t worried about reaction to his Showtime special. “If they fire me from AGT for the things I’ve said, I can sue them and create a whole new controversy — ‘NBC hates black people!'” he said with a laugh when asked if he was afraid the “AGT white money would dry up.”
Cannon went on to praise the show and NBC, noting that “it’s the best job that I have … hopefully I can do it forever,” he said, noting that he was unsure how many more years he had left on his contract with NBC’s summer hit.
However, as of Monday, Cannon had changed his tune.
“My soul won’t allow me to be in business with corporations that attempt to frown on freedom of speech, censor artists, and question cultural choices. Not to get too detailed but this isn’t the first time executives have attempted to ‘put me in my place’ for so-called unruly actions,” he wrote in his post. “I will not stand for it. My moral principles will easily walk away from the millions of dollars they hang over my head.
“It’s never been about the money for me, what is difficult to walk away from is the fans, the people who love me on the show. This hurts tremendously,” he continued. “I felt like I was a part of the fabric of our great nation every summer, representing every culture, age, gender, and demographic. Now for the rug to be pulled from underneath me and to be publicly reprimanded and ridiculed over a joke about my own race is completely wrong and I have to do something about it.”
Production on season 12 of America’s Got Talent, which would have marked Cannon’s eighth as host, is set to begin next month. The rest of the on-air team — judges Simon Cowell, Heidi Klum, Mel B and Howie Mandel — are set to return for the new season, which is expected to premiere sometime this summer.
Read Cannon’s entire post HERE.
PHOTO: NBC
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Also On Black America Web:First Look: Heroes Assembled Again in 'The Avengers: Age of Ultron'
Hot on the heels of this mornings reveal of Ultron on the new cover for EW, the first real photos from The Avengers: Age of Ultron have popped up. While they don't show more of the title villain, Captain America (Chris Evans) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) look out of place in a normal house, Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) are doing science, Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) see some action in the woods and new heroes Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) are in some kind of trouble. Even Don Cheadle pops up to hang out! We can't wait to see the first footage of the film at Comic-Con! Look below!
Here's the new photos from Joss Whedon's The Avengers: Age of Ultron (via EW):
The Avengers: Age of Ultron is written & directed by Joss Whedon (The Avengers, Serenity). Earth's mightiest heroes must once again assemble when a super intelligent robot created by Tony Stark created to help fight any threats that might harm the world actually turns against him and the human race. Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner and Samuel L. Jackson all return in the sequel to Marvel's The Avengers with new names like Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen joining the team. Disney & Marvel release the film on May 1st, 2015. Looking good?
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Sorry, no commenting is allowed at this time.Greg Ball Asks Twitter and Facebook Friends How to Vote on Gay Marriage Bill
New York is expected to become the sixth state to pass the gay marriage bill. In accordance with this, one of its state senators seems to seek help from his Facebook friends and Twitter followers.
Last weekend, New York Republican state senator – Greg Ball – asks his 2,500+ Twitter followers and 3,400 Facebook friends the question: “Opening up the discussion! So, if you were me, how would you vote on gay marriage? Yes or no?”
This controversial post perhaps made the state senate petrified. The said bill, legalizing same sex marriage, has been passed recently with a 80-63 vote. The bill was supported by almost 29 Democrats and two Republicans in the 62-member Senate. However, Politico pointed out that, “it is seen as not likely that Republican leadership will allow the chamber to vote on the bill if only one more Republican votes yes.” Thus, a scramble is on to secure at least two more GOP votes for the bill. The session is scheduled to take its end before midnight comes, although New York Governor – Andrew Cuomo – is capable to extend it.
Some reports say that Greg Ball’s Twitter followers are in favor of the gay marriage bill. But for his Facebook friends, it seems like a 50-50.
GalleryIt still has to get by David Stern, but apparently the deal has been struck.
Clippers, Celtics are agreeing upon a 2015 unprotected first-round pick, league source tells Y! Rivers, Clippers still finalizing contract. — Adrian Wojnarowski (@WojYahooNBA) June 23, 2013
Los Angeles Clippers agree in principle to Doc Rivers deal -- sources - ESPN Boston
Contrary to previous reports, according to league and team sources, the Celtics have been complicit all along in assisting Rivers make the switch from Boston to Los Angeles. Although Danny Ainge, the Celtics' director of basketball operations, was initially irked that Rivers was lukewarm about returning to Boston, where a rebuilding process will soon be underway, team sources said he recognized the best way to accumulate first-round draft picks, which he covets, would be to relinquish his two most valued assets -- Rivers and Kevin Garnett. Since then, he and Rivers have been working side by side to secure a deal that is best for both parties, sources said.
So what's next? Well, Kevin Garnett (if they can convince the league that any deals with the Clippers are not tied to this Doc Rivers deal) and Paul Pierce (MacMullan indicates that they are looking for a 1st rounder for him and are prepared to keep him if they don't get it). The Celtics will also have to pick a new coach and do the draft on Thursday. Should be an interesting week or so.Summertime, and the living is easy — or it will be whenever the long line of traffic starts moving again.
Keep your temper, and pass your time by deciphering the Colorado license plates of the cars stopped around yours. What do those letters on the left side of some license plates signify?
Colorado’s motor vehicles divisions offer more than 100 variants of designated license plates, from vanity plates to PRM. (No, that doesn’t mean “Prom,” it indicates a vehicle used for interstate commerce.) And hundreds of proposed personalized plates don’t make it past the censors, e.g. “STDMFN” and “PINCHE.”
There are alumni plates, military plates, legislation-approved special interest plates like “Respect Life” (recognizing the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School) or “Share the road” (with bicycles).
Others are more cryptic. MMS? INT? Horseless carriage?
Here’s a cheat sheet decoding some of those designations:
CCL: Commercial call letter, meaning the owner possesses a standard radio, FM or television FCC license
DMO: Dealer demo. Vehicle dealer plates
DPT: Depot. Vehicles being road-tested or moved for repair and refurbishing
FLT: Commercial fleet. Issued to the owner of 10 or more vehicles — a company car fleet, or trailers, truck tractors and SMM equipment
FTR and FTK: Farm tractor or Farm truck. Vehicles transporting raw agricultural products or livestock
GVT: Government. State-owned or -leased vehicle
GVW: Any truck weighing at least 16,001 pounds
INT: Dealer in transit or Dealer full use. Vehicles being transported to sell, auction or store
Honorary Consul: Vehicles owned by official representatives or official consuls of a foreign government
Horseless Carriage: Vehicles limited to driving to or from assemblies, parades and conventions
MFG: Manufacturer. Plates that can be used on any new vehicle owned by and titled in Colorado to the manufacturer
PRM, ATL and ATK: Apportioned plate. Vehicles licensed for interstate commerce
SCL: Amateur call letter. Owner possesses a valid amateur radio license issued by the Federal Communications Commission
SMM: Special mobile machine. Equipment driven or pulled over the public highways to a specific destination
SMX: SMM equipment that doesn’t conform to Colorado lighting requirements
TRK: Special-use truck. Examples: mobile medical vans, trash compactors, concrete trucks
TPR: Transporter. Dealers and government agencies, repossession agents, tow cars
TVW: Any tractor primarily used to pull trailers and semi-trailers
Source: Colorado Department of Revenue/Division of Motor VehiclesMy friend Joe Weisenthal argues that Bitcoin is "now in a terrible state of hyperdeflation," with the currency's value rising from $13.50 to $100 in just the last three months:
So a few weeks ago, a pizza might have cost you one Bitcoin. Today it might only cost you a fifth of a Bitcoin, which sounds great, but then if you're looking at the above chart, why would you spend anything? Why would you buy a pizza (or pot or anything else) when tomorrow your Bitcoin will be worth more? |
intimidate anyone in the neighborhood, it could be viewed at a hate crime.
Right now, detectives have no suspects in the vandalism.
The 30-minute video "Kony 2012" by Invisible Children has been viewed nearly 80 million times on YouTube but has faced sharp criticism in Uganda. Some critics have said the video oversimplified the conflict, and a screening earlier this week of the video in a town once terrorized by the Lord's Resistance Army received overwhelmingly negative feedback.
Copyright Associated Press / NBC 5 Dallas-Fort WorthMP3 Audio
Starting Jan. 1, every woman in the Marines Corps was supposed to meet a new physical standard by performing three pullups. But that’s been put off.
The Marine Corps announced it quietly. There was no press conference; just a notice on its social media sites and an item on its own TV show, The Corps Report.
Lance Cpl. Ally Beiswanger explained the pullup test had been put off until sometime next year, to gather more data and “ensure all female Marines are given the best opportunity to succeed.”
So far women Marines are not succeeding. Fifty-five percent of female recruits tested at the end of boot camp were doing fewer than three pullups; only 1 percent of male recruits failed the test.
The three pullups is already the minimum required for all male Marines. Now the Marine Corps has postponed the plan, and that’s raising questions about whether women have the physical strength to handle ground combat, which they’ll be allowed to do beginning in 2016.Is Instagram going around stealing users’ accounts and distributing them to employees? That’s the far-out claim from designer Brian Hoff, who says his wife’s Instagram account, with the likely much-desired username of “@kathleen” was taken from her control and is now being used by another Kathleen, who also happens to be a current Facebook/Instagram employee.
Shock! Horror! Outrage!
From Brian’s reporting of events, which he’s shared here on Medium, he first noticed something was up a few months ago when he was tagging his wife in an Instagram photo. Her account name no longer appeared as “@kathleen,” but rather “_____kathleen.” At the time, he paid the situation little regard, assuming it may have had something to do with her privacy settings.
Still, his wife tried reaching the company for help through its now dormant @InstagramHelp Twitter account, but never heard back. Apparently, getting her account fixed was not a top priority, as it seems his wife was not much of a heavy Instagram user – something which Brian alludes to in the post, noting, “she’s not a regular on the service anymore.”
However, he tells us that while his wife wasn’t an active poster, she would occasionally log in and view photos using her account.
There’s no mention in Brian’s post of either he or his wife trying other channels in order to get help after this initial attempt failed, but he tells us that she did actually try to email them at contact@instagram.com as well (an address that used to generate an automatic work ticket).
Several months later — aka this morning — Brian asked his wife to look at a photo on Instagram, and she found that she could no longer log in. Her @Kathleen username and password just didn’t work.
And to answer the question whether or not his wife may have simply forgotten her password or something of the like, he says that’s not the case. “My wife is quite technical. We both run a successful boutique design agency and she worked as a Yahoo and Flickr employee for a number of years,” Brian says.
After doing a little digging, he realized that her account “@Kathleen” had been given away to another Kathleen, who he determined was an Instagram employee. Duh-duht-duh!
Brian stops just short of calling out the employee for stealing the account herself, but he clearly has an ax to grind with Facebook, stating in the post that:
I’m not saying that the new @kathleen personally stole or assisted with the compromise of her account, but shit, you sure as hell can’t see something doesn’t smell just a tad funky.
He also complains that there are things that have changed post-acquisition, referring to the lack of response on the company’s Twitter account: “Not answering support says all that you need to know about what will or will not change. When you stop actually caring; when you stop actually communicating; everything changes.”
Man, there’s nothing like losing a good username on a popular social service to really fire people up, right?
Speaking with us, he elaborates further, making the point that while the situation is odd, his larger complaint is with the lack of customer service response, not necessarily the lost username itself.
Playing by social media rules
Social networking services have unofficial rules around dormant or inactive accounts, and how long they have to remain unused before they’re put back into circulation. For instance, there was a time when if you knew someone inside Twitter, you could grab a dormant account name if the account holder had been inactive for a long enough period of time. A number of those with the coveted three-letter Twitter accounts acquired them through this method, in fact.
Now that Twitter is huge, it’s no longer just a matter of who you know, of course. But businesses and brands can formally request access to Twitter usernames under Twitter’s Trademark Policy procedures.
What the official situation is at Facebook-owned Instagram is less clear – the company doesn’t offer any sort of guidelines on its site around how you could contact them with a trademark claim, much less how you could request the takeover of a dormant account. (Though its Terms of Service states that you can take legal claims around trademarks and copyright violations to arbitration if it comes to that.)
In other words, it’s reasonable to assume that the new @Kathleen simply saw an unused account and asked for it.
And yes, maybe that’s wrong since Brian’s wife was allegedly never given the chance to claim her account before redistribution.
“Customer Support for these types of unfortunate events do no exist and users feel helpless in the matter,” Brian laments. “While my wife doesn’t post on a regular basis, she still often looks at photos and likes photos of others in her stream. Do you think if she had a handle like, for example, @k_ath_l33n, that it would be left open because of lack of posting? I think the desirable name made it a target. Doesn’t make it right though,” he says.
The situation is one example among many in what’s becoming something of an alarming trend: that sometimes the only way to get help with a customer service complaint like this is writing a damning blog post, and waiting for the story to get picked up more broadly. (Like this!)
Instagram responded to TechCrunch’s inquiries about the matter, after looking into the situation this morning and provided the following statement:
Like many social services, Instagram has a policy of reassigning usernames from accounts that have been inactive for a significant length of time. While the policy is standard practice and will continue, Instagram employees strive to always put members of the Instagram community first, and so we will be returning the name to the previous owner.
Image credit: ShutterstockFaced with one of the worst crime surges in Baltimore’s history, city lawmakers are grappling with proposals that would impose a one-year mandatory sentence for unlawfully possessing a firearm within 100 yards of certain public places, such as parks, schools and houses of worship. With more than 200 murders already this year, frustration among leaders in Baltimore is palpable, but their focus is misdirected. State law already prescribes harsher mandatory minimum penalties for most gun cases, and those have done little to end the horrific bloodshed our city has endured these past couple of years.
Public data extracted from the Maryland Judiciary Case Search, an online database of state court cases, yielded 3,733 Baltimore City Circuit Court gun-related cases filed by prosecutors between January 2015 and June 2017. In three out of four gun crimes — 2,852 of 3,733 cases — prosecutors already wielded a five-year mandatory minimum because of the defendant’s record or the nature of the charges; in other words, only a quarter of the gun cases do not already contain charges that carry a mandatory penalty. There is perhaps no better proof that mandatory penalties are not a panacea for crime than the fact that statutory minimums already exist, yet gun violence continues to soar.
The latest version of the City Council bill developed to address the carnage adds a mandatory one-year penalty for second offenses or situations in which the gun is tied to another crime. This risks diverting energy and resources from prosecuting ruthless gangs and unrepentant killers — violent repeat offenders — who require our undivided attention by shifting some of the focus to defendants with less serious conviction records, if any at all. It’s a strategy that’s also more likely to target younger, black citizens. In fact, of the 881 gun defendants in the data set whose cases do not already trigger a mandatory penalty, 96 percent are African-American; 63 percent were under 25 years old, 9 percent were minors, and none had felony convictions.
These are not the serial offenders believed to be driving the murder crisis unfolding in Baltimore today. To concentrate on them in the name of public safety threatens to consign more young black men to the revolving door of poverty and prison. At a time when Baltimore needs to heal divides and rebuild trust in its communities, proposals that echo the failed policies of the past are painful to hear. For many, mandatory minimums are synonymous with institutional and structural racism, 100-to-1 crack-cocaine sentencing disparities, racial profiling and the misguided, interminable war on drugs. Gun violence is decimating our neighborhoods, and public outrage is long past due. But reflexively recycling the regressive strategies of the 1980s will not make us safer and only risks further erosion of public trust.
It is also inaccurate to claim, as some have, that judges are mainly responsible for gun defendants prematurely returning to the streets. Take a look at the just over 2,000 gun cases resolved since 2015 in which a five-year mandatory minimum sentence applied — some for felony firearm possession, some connected to drug trafficking and some used in violent crimes from robbery to murder. Nearly 40 percent of them were dropped by prosecutors or placed on the inactive “stet” docket; of the more than 270 that went to trial, almost two-thirds of them ended in an acquittal on all counts. According to this analysis, the outcomes were nearly as disappointing for the 700-plus resolved gun cases carrying no mandatory penalty: The State’s Attorney’s Office dropped or stetted 26 percent of those cases; only nine resulted in a conviction at trial.
The fact is the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office already has ample tools under Maryland law to address both first-time, as well as repeat, gun offenders, but they often don’t get to use them. Overall, since 2015, prosecutors dropped or stetted 35 percent of all gun crimes an average of six months after they decided to indict them, and lost another 65 percent of those they took to trial. The judiciary cannot be blamed for cases that are dropped or lost at trial. And criticizing judges — who, by oath and office, generally cannot respond — is a dangerous national trend we should not fuel.
There certainly are instances where a sentence dictated by the legislature matches the appropriate sentence in an individual case. But sometimes a one-year prison sentence for illegal gun possession is too high, and categorically barring a judge from giving a first-time offender a second chance is unwise. Conversely, sometimes a one-year sentence is too low: In 2012, for example, a circuit court judge in Baltimore City appropriately sentenced a defendant convicted of gun possession charges to eight years in prison (the maximum available in that case), even though he had only one prior conviction for simple drug possession and no mandatories applied. This was after the city prosecutor who handled the case filed a detailed sentencing memorandum and presented substantial evidence of the defendant’s likely participation in two prior homicides.Press play to begin today’s tape show
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We walked up the eight million stony steps to Mount Bonnell for respite.
It was a shaky walk for my feet.
I nearly stumbled.
But, in the end, I somehow caught myself.
This was our first time there at dusk.
All we wanted was to feel the air move and cool our skin.
You know, in some places, the air moves.
It’s called wind.
But Austin, in the summertime, is stagnant and sweltering.
Austin, in the summertime, knows no forgiveness.
Clandestine lovers perched on rocks and shady nooks.
The beast with two backs.
Someone sneezed and then farted and then said,
“Permiso.”
He couldn’t control himself as well as he could
excuse himself.
We only brought the music in our souls and
a camera.
Mount Bonnell is one of Austin’s attractions.
It’s an arid height.
At dusk, when sunlight grows scarce, it’s a dangerous place
for people who have trouble walking,
or have no depth perception.
I have trouble walking.
I have no depth perception.
My brain has suffered something like thirteen strokes.
At least that’s when the doctors stopped counting.
At thirteen.
Seeping blood has killed off whole regions.
Neurons are now dead matter.
Brown and inert.
I had to relearn how to walk.
I had to relearn how to tell depth.
Thank you, Brain, for being elastic.
God bless your elasticity.
But you still have seizures.
You still have electrical rampages
that make me beat the ground real hard.
My favorite fruit is watermelon.
I don’t mind the seeds.
I eat them for protein.
While my daughter made light trails with our camera,
painting the sensor with colors and trippy shapes
780 ft above sea level,
I lit my cigar and had a meaningful thought
that ultimately left me wondering:
There’s a difference [on the order of eternity] between what we can see
and what we can’t.
Between the seen and unseen.
On which should I fix my eyes?
::Keep it locked on TOE::
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RedditThe testing duties will be shared by BMW juniors Louis Deletraz and Jesse Krohn, as well Alexander Sims and George Russell.
Deletraz is the 18-year-old son of former F1 driver Jean-Denis Deletraz and the 2015 Formula Renault 2.0 NEC champion. The Swiss driver will move to Formula 3.5 with Fortec next season.
Krohn, 25, is a BMW GT driver and finished runner-up in ELMS' GTE class in 2015 alongside Henry Hassid and Andy Priaulx.
27-year-old Sims, a race winner in GP3, F3 and British FR2.0, drives a BMW Z4 GT3 in British GT, having helped Marco Attard to the title in 2014.
The youngest name in the line-up - 17-year-old Russell - is another F3 race winner and the 2014 champion of Britain's BRDC F4 category.
The test will take place on December 1-3.George Will joined the chorus talking about the prospect of impeachment for President Barack Obama after last week’s admission from the Internal Revenue Service that it had targeted groups with the phrases “tea party” or “patriot” in their tax-exempt applications for extra audits.
On Sunday’s broadcast of ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Will proposed a scenario wherein the Bush administration had targeted groups with the word “progressive” in their names and concluded the situation would be much different in terms of expressions of outrage.
“Mr. Hicks, when he was in Libya, said his jaw dropped at the explanation back here,” Will said. “This was a jaw-dropping moment. In response to a question at American Bar Association convention, a second-level IRS person said, ‘Oh by the way, we did target these people.’
“The Tea Party people have known about this and were working on this,” Will continued. “But they said — it was just some odd underlings out in Cincinnati who did this and there was no political motive whatever involved. Now the question is, how stupid do they think we are? Just imagine, Donna Brazile, if the George W. Bush administration had an IRS underling, he’s out in Cincinnati, of course, saying we’re going to target groups with the word ‘progressive’ in their title. We’d have all hell breaking loose.”
Will noted that one of the items in the 1973 impeachment articles of then-President Richard Nixon, which ultimately led to his resignation, described the Nixon administration’s use of the power of income tax audits in a “discriminatory matter.”
“This is the 40th anniversary of the Watergate summer here in Washington,” Will said. “’He has, through his subordinated and agents, endeavored…to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigation to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner,’ — Section 1, Article 2, the impeachment articles of Richard Nixon.
Follow Jeff on TwitterA Brisbane resident has thrown out his census letter believing it was junk mail because it was addressed to "The Resident".
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has posted out letters, containing crucial online login numbers so households can complete the census.
Anyone who doesn't risks copping a $180 fine for each day they go without completing it.
The man, from the north Brisbane suburb of Zillmere told AAP that he thought he was being "buzzed" by personalised junk mail when he saw it was addressed to "The Resident".
"I just glanced at it and thought it was junk mail and threw it in the recycle bin," he said.
An ABS spokeswoman says it's yet to receive any feedback about people binning letters because they've been mistaken for junk.
She said if anyone has made a mistake they should call the census hotline - which is already struggling with the volume of calls - to get a new one.
"To my knowledge we haven't had any inquiries about people chucking out their letters. People are more worried about receiving them in time for the census because there seems to be a delay in rural areas," the spokeswoman told AAP.
"We were trying to advise everybody that the census is happening and if you do throw it in the bin, it's unfortunate because you won't be able to log on and complete the census."
She advised that anyone calling the census hotline, should do so after 5pm because of long wait times being experienced during office hours.
Census night is Tuesday, August 9.
© AAP 2019Expect stocks to tumble if Donald Trump has a great first debate night.
Wall Street doesn't want a President Trump (with the exception of a few hedge fund managers and Trump supporters, like Carl Icahn). As the old saying goes, the market loves good news, it can deal with bad news, but it hates uncertainty. And Trump is the motherlode of uncertainty.
"The typical investor just can't contemplate the possibility of a Trump victory," says Cary Leahey, chief U.S. economist at Decision Economics.
As polls tighten -- CNN now calls it a "dead heat" -- Wall Street is having to come to terms that the possibility of a President Trump is real...and rising. With the debate looming on Monday, the Dow fell 167 points.
A strong debate performance by Trump on Monday will exacerbate those worries.
"If for some reason Trump puts on a presidential showing...and Clinton stumbles for whatever reason, then the market may take another reassessment," says Leahey. That's the polite way of saying, stocks are likely to fall.
The reality is stocks are already pretty pricey. They aren't at bubble level, says Tim Anderson, managing director of MND Partners. But with the economy stalling at ho-hum growth of 1% to 2% and companies expected to have a sixth quarter of falling earnings, investors are hitting the "pause" button.
Brexit and the U.S. presidential race only add to the hesitation.
Related: Voters say 2016 is the ultimate 'lesser of two evils' election
Are we in for another Brexit vote? Traders are starting to wonder. Consider what happened in the lead up to Brexit: few thought it would happen until polls began to tighten shortly before the election. Stocks in the U.K. and Europe -- and even around the world -- began to zig and zag up and down as sentiment shifted. Then markets plummeted (albiet only for a few days) are Brexit.
"I think this one needs a fat lady singing," says economist Diane Swonk of DS Economics. Uncertainty will reign "until we know the outcome of the election and who's going to be in key post."
In a new report out this week, Wells Farg (WFC)puts the probability of a Clinton win at only 50%. The bank says that would be "neutral" or "slightly positive" for investors. In contrast, a Trump victory would be "negative" or "slightly negative."
Many Wall Street banks have reached a similar conclusion: Clinton would be better for the economy and market.
"Markets, in general, are apt to do better under a Clinton Administration," said UBS in late August.
Related: Here's how the 'king of debt' plans to balance the budget
Trump wants to impose a massive tax cut and scale back regulations, which the business community likes. But he also wants to restrict trade and immigration, and his policies could add significantly to the debt. Investors fear this could lead to a trade war -- and even a recession. They also don't know how to deal with his unpredictability.
"It remains impossible to know what Mr. Trump really wants." " wrote Stefan Kreuzkamp, chief investment officer at Deutsche Bank, in a recent report.
For now, U.S. stock indices are close to record levels and U.S. government bond yields are very low. Investors appear to be pricing in a Clinton win. If Trump continues to surge, investors will have to figure out just how scared of Trump they really are.More than 100 protesters were arrested Monday after trying to enter the House of Commons during a demonstration on Parliament Hill against a proposed oilsands pipeline project.
Hundreds of people flocked to the Hill to voice their displeasure with TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline project, a $7-billion plan to ship crude oil from Alberta to Texas.
Greenpeace Canada spokesman Peter McHugh promoted the event as "a historic mass act of civil disobedience over the tarsands," which also included members from the Council of Canadians.
But the attempt by protesters to jump a fence and enter the Centre Block was orderly. The CBC's Karina Roman said there was even laughing and joking between police officers and those taken into custody.
RCMP officials said more than 400 people attended the protest, and 117 people were arrested, charged with trespassing and released.
Rochelle Sauvé said she and a busload of her friends from Peterborough, Ont., climbed the fence and were arrested, ticketed $65 and banned from Parliament Hill for a year. She said it was worth it.
"I hope the actions of those who choose to sit-in today can act as an inspiration to people across Canada," said Sauvé.
Gitz Deranger was one of many First Nations protesters also in attendance. He said his community near Fort Chippewayan is plagued by health problems as a result of its proximity to the oilsands.
Dozens of RCMP police officers and security guards have gathered on Parliament Hill to deal with hundreds of oilsands protesters. (CBC)
"Our indigenous way of life is being threatened by the tarsands. You destroy our land, you destroy us," said Deranger.
Large police presence greets protesters
The civil disobedience was inspired by action in Washington, D.C., in late August where Canadian actress Margot Kidder and dozens of others were arrested.
Conservatives call protesters 'extremists' Conservative MP Jason Kenney described the protesters as "extremists" in a post on his Twitter account Monday. "Sad to see about 200 extremists on the Hill today who want to kill livelihood of hundreds of thousands of Cdns [sic] working in the energy sector," he wrote. Conservative MP David Anderson, the parliamentary secretary to Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, also called the protesters extremists in response to a question from NDP environment critic Megan Leslie. Outside question period Leslie said she believed the protesters we're simply expressing their beliefs. "They are trying to say something," said Leslie. "We are trying to say something in the House as well. This pipeline expansion will result in uncontrolled expansion of the oilsands and that's something that we question. There are serious problems with this pipeline, both environmentally and when it comes to jobs for Canadians."
Protesters, who signed up at a website called Ottawa Action, arrived around 10 a.m. for a sit-in around the Centennial Flame.
Dozens of RCMP officers and security guards were also patrolling Parliament Hill.
Organizers hosted a seven-hour training session for protesters Sunday that was closed to the media.
"Participants are responding to a call to action for a large peaceful protest where many will risk arrest to tell the Harper government they don’t support his reckless agenda," said McHugh in a news release.
"Participants will also use this action to tell Harper we need to turn away from the tarsands and start building a green-energy economy that respects indigenous rights and prioritizes the health of the environment and communities."
The event featured more than 20 environmental and indigenous organizations and boasts the support of a dozen Canadian celebrities.
Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians, has said the government needs a conversion plan to move to alternate energy sources.
"Tarsands mining has destroyed much of Alberta's water table and will put the fragile Ogallala Aquifer [the world's largest known aquifer] in peril. We join with the millions of Americans who oppose the expansion of this deadly industry," she said in a statement.
Police arrested dozens of protesters who tried to climb over a barricade and enter the House of Commons, but there was no violence. (Ashley Burke/CBC)
Greenpeace co-founder supports oilsands in statement
But in a statement released by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers Monday, the co-founder of Greenpeace supported the oilsands.
Former leader Patrick Moore, who has written a book on why he left Greenpeace after 15 years, has publicly denounced Greenpeace in the past calling them anti-human and "anti-science."
"I've seen the land reclamation progress at oilsands sites," said Moore in the statement, "It's a necessary, staggeringly complex process and evidence shows the land will be reclaimed as thriving ecosystems after oil sands are developed to help meet the world's growing energy needs."
Ottawa police warned motorists to avoid the area near Parliament Hill during the mass protest.
The last large Greenpeace event on Parliament Hill led to 20 arrests after protesters climbed the West Block and unveiled large banners advocating government action to combat climate change.This is the most current map of the province of Nibenay.
Ruled from Bruma, Nibenay possesses moderate wealth compared to the other three Cyrodiilic provinces. Most of this wealth comes through the only major city Bruma via the gold road connecting to Skyrim and Gideon. It's secondary source of income comes from it being the central Airship port, providing the province a constant stream of travelers from all over the continent.
Unfortunately Nibenay suffers economically due to it's geographical location, wedged between mountain ranges and the Nibean Bay, along its shared boarder with impoverished Gideon, a generous source of bandits and thieves. That in combination to it's close proximity to the Daedric Wastes makes this province the last stop for any merchant.
Nibenay has the heaviest Black Dragon presence out of the three provinces mainly due to Bruma containing the monument marking the spot where the first Dragon Lord, Ruvaak'Se'Brom died in battle.
While most of the wealth flows from Bruma, the Nibean islands are a major source of seafood and fish, earning the area the nickname 'The Fishbowl.'
The populace consists of mainly Imperials and Argonians, with a secondary population of Nords.
While lacking in more than one major city, Nibenay is host to many coastal villages and towns, mainly run by powerful Argonian Families, descendants of the refugees of Black Marsh.To the average plant-eating human, the thought of a plant turning the tables to feast on an animal might seem like a lurid novelty.
Now, science is showing just how remarkable these macabre traits really are.
A new study probes the origins of carnivory in several distantly related plants -- including the Australian, Asian and American pitcher plants, which appear strikingly similar to the human (or insect) eye. Although each species developed carnivory independently, the research concludes that the biological machinery required for digesting insects evolved in a strikingly similar fashion in all three.
The findings hint that for a plant, the evolutionary routes to carnivory may be few and far between.
"It suggests that there are only limited pathways for becoming a carnivorous plant," says University at Buffalo biologist Victor A. Albert. "These plants have a genetic tool kit, and they're trying to come up with an answer to the problem of how to become carnivorous. And in the end, they all come up with the same solution."
The research, "Genome of the pitcher plant Cephalotus reveals genetic changes associated with carnivory," which will be published on Feb. 6, 2017 in Nature Ecology and Evolution. It was conducted by an international team led by Mitsuyasu Hasebe, PhD, of the National Institute for Basic Biology in Japan and SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies) in Japan; Kenji Fukushima, PhD, of the same institutions and the University of Colorado School of Medicine; Shuaicheng Li, PhD, of BGI-Shenzhen in China; and Albert, PhD, a professor of biological sciences in UB's College of Arts and Sciences.
How to become a pitcher plant: a narrow evolutionary road
Pitcher plants capture insects by luring them into a pitfall trap -- a cupped leaf with a waxy, slippery interior that makes it difficult to climb out. A soup of digestive fluids sits at the bottom of this chamber and breaks down the flesh and exoskeletons of prey.
Australian, Asian and American pitcher plants possess these features despite having evolved independently to become carnivores, as Albert and colleagues discovered in a 1992 study published in the journal Science.
The new paper builds on this older work, conducting a deeper investigation into how unrelated pitcher plants came to share so much in common.
As it turns out, the path to carnivory was remarkably similar for the three species examined -- Cephalotus follicularis (the Australian pitcher plant, related to starfruit), Nepenthes alata (an Asian pitcher plant related to buckweat) and Sarracenia purpurea (an American pitcher plant related to kiwifruit). A genetic analysis, which included sequencing the entire genome of Cephalotus, found strong evidence that during their evolution into carnivores, each of these plants co-opted many of the same ancient proteins to create enzymes for digesting prey.
Over time, in all three species, plant protein families that originally assisted in self-defense against disease and other stresses developed into the digestive enzymes we see today, genetic clues suggest. These enzymes include basic chitinase, which breaks down chitin -- the major component of insects' hard, exterior exoskeletons -- and purple acid phosphatase, which enables plants to obtain phosphorus, a critical nutrient, from victims' body parts.
Enzymes in a fourth carnivorous species, the sundew Drosera adelae, a relative of Nepenthes that is not a pitcher plant, also appeared to share this evolutionary road.
'Constraints on the available routes' to carnivory
The findings represent an example of convergent evolution, in which unrelated species evolve independently to acquire similar traits, say co-authors Hasebe and Fukushima.
"Such parallel development often points to a particularly valuable adaptation," Hasebe says.
As Fukushima explains, "Carnivorous plants often live in nutrient-poor environments, so the ability to trap and digest animals can be indispensable given the dearth of other sources of nourishment."
It's striking that the plants studied took such a similar route to becoming predators, the co-authors say. Convergent evolution often works this way: For example, Albert and colleagues showed in a previous study that while coffee and chocolate plants developed caffeine independently, they co-opted closely related proteins to produce caffeine.
The new study's results "imply constraints on the available routes to evolve plant carnivory," the authors write in Nature Ecology and Evolution. This prospect is underscored by unusual commonalities between digestive enzymes in Cephalotus and Nepenthes plants.
During the course of evolution, building blocks of enzymes called amino acids are often swapped out and replaced by other amino acids. In C. follicularis and N. alata, basic chitinases and purple acid phosphatases share numerous identical or highly similar amino acid substitutions that don't occur in non-carnivorous species, suggesting that these alterations may help these enzymes function in special, carnivorous ways.
Similarly, the enzyme RNase T2, which breaks down a material called RNA in insect cells to produce food for plants, had multiple evolutionarily convergent amino acid substitutions in C. follicularis and a common ancestor of N. alata and D. adelae.Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has urged Iraqi Kurds to cancel an independence referendum planned for next month.
Speaking to reporters in Baghdad on Wednesday, Cavusoglu called the referendum a "mistake" and said he had travelled to Iraq to underline the importance of the country's "territorial and political integrity".
"Our expectation from Erbil is clear, that is the cancellation of the referendum, as the interests and future of the Kurds lie in a united Iraq," he said.
Cavusoglu will meet Massoud Barzani, president of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), in Erbil later in the day.
READ MORE: The looming question of Kurdish independence in Iraq
Kurds have been seeking an independent state since at least the end of World War One, when colonial powers divided up the Middle East and left Kurdish-populated territory split between modern-day Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria.
Turkey, which has a large Kurdish population and is battling Kurdish rebels, has close ties with Iraq's autonomous region but is strongly opposed to an independent Kurdish state.
Iran and Syria also oppose an independent Kurdistan.
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's government has rejected the planned referendum as "unilateral" and unconstitutional.
The United States and other Western nations fear the vote could ignite a fresh conflict with Baghdad and possibly neighbouring countries, diverting attention from the ongoing war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS).
'When is the right time?'
Earlier this month, Rex Tillerson, the US secretary of state, formally asked Barzani to postpone the referendum.
But Kurdish leaders said they have already waited too long.
"In 100 years we haven't had the right time, when will be the right time for the referendum?" Sadi Ahmed Pire, a spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, told Al Jazeera.
"We have our weaknesses, but they are our own, not imported from somewhere else."
The referendum is expected to take place on September 25.
Kurdish officials emphasise that a yes vote would not lead to an immediate break with Baghdad, but rather a long process of negotiating an amicable secession.
With a population of about 5 million, Iraq's Kurdish region already enjoys a high degree of autonomy, including its own parliament and armed forces.
Since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, relations between the region and Baghdad have become strained over a range of issues.
Baghdad stopped payments to the KRG in 2014.
Contentious issues include the sharing of oil revenues and control of some areas, such as the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.A Winnipeg man arrested in a sex-trafficking case with ties to slain teen Tina Fontaine has been sentenced to time served for sexually exploiting a vulnerable 17-year-old girl.
Jesse Thomas, 32, pleaded guilty Monday, on what was to be the first day of a seven-day trial, to one count of receiving a material benefit from the sexual services of a person under 18. Thomas had been in custody since June 2015.
In a plea bargain, the Crown stayed six additional charges, including human trafficking, procuring, kidnapping and sexual assault.
According to an agreed statement of facts provided to court, Thomas and others, including the victim, occupied a Furby Street apartment from which the victim provided sexual services. Thomas provided "security" and received a cut of the victim's proceeds.
Court heard the 17-year-old's services were advertised on a website. The Crown and defence did not reach an agreement on who placed the ad or how the girl came to be present at the apartment.
The victim was described as a chronic runaway who suffered from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
Had the matter gone to trial, it was uncertain if the victim would have been able to provide helpful testimony, said Crown attorney Daniel Chaput.
"She would have struggled in court," he said.
At the time of Tina Fontaine's death, her aunt told CBC News that the 15-year-old had stayed at the Furby apartment for a weekend in the weeks leading up to her disappearance and killing.
Fontaine's body was pulled from the Red River in Winnipeg in 2014. Her death became one of the country's most infamous murdered Indigenous women and girls cases.
Raymond Cormier has been charged with second-degree murder in Fontaine's death.Jessica Campbell and Jack Lanzillotti were walking near Beacon and Fairfield streets when they were hit by a car on Saturday.
The couple had been strolling through the Back Bay Saturday evening, the end of an idyllic first day of summer. Less than two hours earlier, Jessica Campbell posted a photo online of the sun setting over the Charles River.
About 9:15 p.m., police said, one vehicle collided with another, flipped, and struck Campbell and her boyfriend, 28-year-old Jack Lanzillotti, near the intersection of Beacon and Fairfield streets.
Lanzillotti, an Emmy-winning production manager for the Red Sox, died at the scene. Campbell, 27, a retail analyst who had been scheduled to run in a Boston Athletic Association 10K race Sunday morning, died at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said Boston Police spokeswoman Officer Rachel McGuire.
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Two people in cars involved in the crash were taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center with non-life-threatening injuries, said McGuire. The extent of their injuries was unknown, and police had not released their identities |
at the State University in Milan the day before (May 6), and were waiting for the arrival of Maria Carrozza, newly nominated Minister of Education.
A few meters away, around thirty former workers of the Consorzi di Bacino were also demonstrating against their job losses, as they have been doing for several months. A group of neo-fascist extremists entered their ranks. They were led by Salvatore Lezzi, a local member of Forza Nuova who was tried in 2003 for alleged involvement with organized crime. Neo-Fascists started taunting the students, then attacked them.
More sources and information are here.
Policemen who had been standing nearby then immediately charged and dispersed the students with anti-riot batons. Two more charges followed, as police chased students in the alleys behind the square. One student was injured. Several other students and researchers were identified by police; they were all released but they reported intimidating behavior during their questioning. Police attacked left-wing activists once more during the afternoon, for no apparent reason, as they had regrouped and formed a rally in Via San Sebastiano.
This episode of violence closely follows the violent repression of student protest in Milan and it comes as a sinister start for the term of Angelino Alfano, the Minister of the Interior coming from the ranks of Berlusconi’s party.
Meanwhile, biased media keep criminalizing dissenting voices and protesting students even when they are suddenly attacked at a peaceful demo, while neo-fascists pose undisturbed as representatives of the “workers”.Happy Valentine's Day: Itemizers can finally file taxes
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- On Monday, the Internal Revenue Service will begin accepting itemized tax returns, after having pushed back the process due to Congress' delay finalizing the tax code this year.
That delay -- during which the IRS reprogrammed its processing systems -- meant that if you itemize deductions on Form 1040 Schedule A, you weren't able to file your taxes earlier than Feb. 14.
Itemized deductions include mortgage interest, charitable donations, medical expenses, along with state and local taxes.
Taxpayers were also forced to hold off if they were claiming deductions for college tuition as well as out-of-pocket expenses for teachers.
But you had the green light to file any time if you were claiming other education credits, the child tax credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit or the rest of the tax breaks available this year.
While about 50 million taxpayers itemize their deductions or claim the deductions affected by the delay, the IRS said that only about 9 million of those taxpayers actually file early enough to be affected.
So happy Valentine's Day to all you itemizers: Your tax season has officially begun.Bernie Ecclestone says the German Grand Prix will not return to the Nurburgring in 2017.
The Nurburgring held a deal to alternate the hosting of the race with Hockenheim each year, but was unable to host this year's German Grand Prix due to financial issues. The 2016 race will be held at Hockenheim, but the chances of it returning to the Nurburgring in 2017 are look increasingly slim.
"I don't believe that it will happen," Ecclestone told Motorsport-Magazin. "We can say for sure, that there will be no race."
Ecclestone said he was willing to buy the Nurburgring to ensure its future, but the owners at the time opted for a higher bidder who was unable to resolve the circuit's financial problems.
"It's a pity, because when the Nurburgring was for sale, I agreed to buy it," he said. "They came back to me and told me that they had a better offer, maybe one or two million higher than my offer. I said: 'I made only one offer. If somebody wants to pay more, sell it to him.' They've sold it to a person and this person resold it.
"The stupidity was that because of two million they've lost somebody who had guaranteed that there would have been races for 100 years and who would have tried to improve things. They ran away for a few dollars more. And what did they achieve? It's disappointing and annoying for me. That's why we've lost the Nurburgring."The United States halted a shipment of weapons from Iran heading for Yemen, Secretary of State John Kerry said, as he accused Tehran of continuing its support of anti-government rebels.
The Saudi press Agency reported that Mr Kerry told US lawmakers: “We have stopped a shipment of weapons coming from Iran to Yemen, which is evidence of the continuation of Iran’s support for some groups.”
Mr Kerry faced questions from both the Senate foreign relations committee on Tuesday, and the House foreign affairs committee on Thursday on the State Department budget, including testimony on the recently implemented nuclear deal between Iran and world powers.
A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition fighting to restore the internationally recognised Yemeni president, Abdrabu Mansur Hadi, to power also said its ships had intercepted a ship last week carrying relief and food supplies, including high-tech communications devices.
He said the ship from Iran was on its way to resupply the Houthis, according to SPA.
The fresh claims came as a coalition air raid north-east of the rebel-held Yemeni capital Sanaa killed at least 30, witnesses said.
The air raid targeted three rebel vehicles as they entered a market in the town of Naqil bin Ghaylan, killing at least 30 Houthi insurgents and civilians, one tribal source in the area told AFP news agency.
The area is part of the Nihm region, where coalition-backed loyalists have been advancing against the rebels as they try to close in on Sanaa.
The coalition, in which the UAE plays a crucial role, launched an air campaign in late March 2015 against the Iran-backed rebels and their allies, including troops loyal to the former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
The Iran-backed Shiite rebels have controlled Sanaa since September 2014 and had placed Mr Hadi under house arrest.
But he escaped, initially seeking refuge in second city Aden last year before fleeing to the Saudi capital, Riyadh, as the rebels advanced on the southern port.
Mr Hadi returned to Aden after loyalists backed by UAE troops drove the rebels out of there and four other southern provinces in the summer.
Mr Hadi’s government accused this week Lebanon’s Hizbollah of sending fighters to support the Houthis, saying it had evidence of the Shiite militia’s involvement.
* With additional reporting from Agence France-PresseThe malware responsible for disrupting Iran's nuclear facilities also infected the network of energy giant Chevron during its spread.
Stuxnet, which is alleged to be part of a US-led operation to stop Iran from becoming nuclear weapons-capable, infiltrated nuclear enrichment facilities in Natanz, Iran, in 2010 and successfully modified its industrial grade equipment to malfunction. Stuxnet's payload was specific to the systems in place in Iran, but its spreading mechanism was not as picky. As a result, the malware managed to escape from the facility and spread far beyond its initial target.
Stuxnet only delivers its payload if the industrial equipment is one of two Siemens Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and a specific network card is used. Nevertheless, this had lead some researchers to speculate on the effects that Stuxnet may have on other targets with similar industrial equipment in place. Until now, no companies fitting the description had reported being infected.
However, Mark Koelmel, Chevron's general manager of its earth sciences department, has now told The Wall Street Journal that its network had been infected shortly after Stuxnet's discovery in July 2010.
Although the energy giant had been infected, Stuxnet's achieved its aim of identifying it as an innocent target and withheld its payload. As a result, it caused no damage to Chevron's systems and the company was able to remove it.
"Two years ago, our security systems identified the Stuxnet virus. We immediately addressed the issue without incident," Chevron told ZDNet's sister-site CNET.
Although Chevron wasn't adversely affected by Stuxnet's payload, the identification and removal of the malware does require action by all that are infected. This cost, while small, is significant when the total number of infected businesses is considered — an oversight that Koelmel criticised the US government for.
"I don't think the US government even realised how far it had spread," he said. "I think the downside of what they did is going to be far worse than what they actually accomplished."
This includes several subsequent iterations or modified copy-cats of Stuxnet, such as Duqu, Flame, and Gauss. Kaspersky believes that some of them may have been created by the original authors of Stuxnet.An initiative to license, regulate and tax marijuana sales in Washington has collected enough valid voter signatures to go before voters in November, if the Legislature does not enact it first.
Washington may be in the unusual position this November of voting on both same-sex marriage and legalization of marijuana.
The State Elections Division reported Friday that Initiative 502 has garnered more than 278,000 signatures, far more than the 241,153 it needed.
I-502 goes to the Legislature, which can enact it into law, or reject it and send the measure to the ballot, let it go to the ballot without action, or offer the voters I-502 and an alternative written by lawmakers.
“Passing this measure will free up law enforcement resources, allowing police and prosecutors to focus on violent criminals instead of low-level marijuana users,” said Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes, a sponsor of the initiative.
Holmes, in an e-mail, added: “I’m personally a) anxious to embark on a statewide campaign, and b) glad to have another subject for my discussions with Jenny Durkan.”
Durkan is the present U.S. Attorney for Western Washington. Two of her predecessors are part of the New Approach Washington campaign that is promoting I-502.
Washington is one of 16 states that have approved medical marijuana, although federal law still forbids possession and sale: Marijuana is up there with heroin as a Schedule 1 drug, officially more dangerous than meth.
The feds have stepped up marijuana enforcement along the West Coast in recent months. Agents have raided dispensaries in Seattle and Tacoma believed to be fronts for sales bound for export beyond Washington. The U.S. attorney for Oregon, and county prosecutors, have threatened owners of buildings that house medical marijuana dispensaries.
I-502 is backed by two former U.S. attorneys — John McKay from the Bush II administration and Kate Pflaumer who held the job under President Clinton — as well as Seattle’s former agent-in-charge Charles Mandigo.
It is also supported by a bevy of the usual liberal suspects, from Washington State Democrats to TV’s travel guru Rick Steves.
Nationally, a bill that would allow states to legalize and regulate marijuana sales is sponsored by two men who can be considered bookends of the U.S. House of Representatives — conservative/libertarian Republican Rep. Ron Paul, and liberal Democratic Rep. Barney Frank.
Advocates of marijuana legalization have included such luminaries as the late conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., and former Secretary of State George Shultz. President Obama tells in his autobiography of getting high in high school.
Rep. Paul, running for President, has repeatedly argued that the War on Drugs is “a total failure”, saying it has not prevented 100 million Americans from lighting up while at the same time destabilizing the U.S.-Mexican border.
I-502 would license and regulate distribution of marijuana under supervision of the state Liquor Control Board. Cannabis would be sold, to those over 21, in marijuana-only state stores.
A 25 percent excise tax would be slapped on wholesale and retail sales. The income, estimated at $215 million, would be divided between the state General Fund and health and drug prevention programs.
Washington is not the only state facing a decision on the drug. Advocates of marijuana legalization in Colorado claim enough signatures to “regulate marijuana like alcohol.”
Voters from liberal Washington to conservative Arizona have enacted laws legalizing (at the state level) sale of marijuana for medical purposes. Colorado has issued 88,000 medical marijuana cards.
Seattle, in 2003, enacted a city initiative saying that marijuana enforcement should be given the lowest priority in law enforcement. The city’s annual Hempfest is the best attended such event in North America.
In 2010, however, California voters rejected outright legalization by a 54-46 percent vote.ORLANDO, Fla. - (August 30, 2016) – Orlando Pride has claimed rookie defender McKenzie Berryhill off of waivers, the Club announced today. In addition, defender Steph Catley has been placed on the season-ending disabled list after suffering a metatarsal fracture and hamstring strain during the Rio Olympics.
“McKenzie was a player that we looked closely at in the draft this year, and she came into serious consideration, but was selected by Portland,” Pride Head Coach Tom Sermanni said. “We see her potential and really like her defensive qualities from the footage we’ve watched. She’s a pure defender: dominant and tough. These remaining games are an opportunity for us to have a closer look at her in our environment and hopefully make her part of our club for the future.”
Berryhill, 23, was selected by Portland Thorns FC in the third round (No. 21 overall) in the 2016 National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) College Draft. In her first professional season, the Phoenix, Ariz. native appeared in five matches for the Thorns.
A graduate of Arizona State University, Berryhill totaled six goals and four assists over 76 matches on the Sun Devils’ backline. Over her four-year career in Tempe, Berryhill was named a First-Team All-Pac-12 and NSCAA First-Team All-Pacific Region honoree.
Orlando is on the road for its next two matches, traveling to face the Houston Dash on Sept. 3 and Sky Blue FC on Sept. 7. The Pride return to Camping World Stadium for their final two matches of the 2016 regular season, hosting Sky Blue on Sept. 10 and reigning NWSL Champion FC Kansas City on Sept. 24.When sending data over the network, chunking is pretty much a given. TLS has a maximum record size of 16KB and this fits neatly with authenticated encryption APIs which all operate on an entire message at once.
But file encryption frequently gets this wrong. Take OpenPGP: it bulk encrypts the data and sticks a single MAC on the end. Ideally everyone is decrypting to a temporary file and waiting until the decryption and verification is complete before touching the plaintext, but it takes a few seconds of searching to find people suggesting commands like this:
gpg -d your_archive.tgz.gpg | tar xz
With that construction, tar receives unauthenticated input and will happily extract it to the filesystem. An attacker doesn't (we assume) know the secret key, but they can guess at the structure of the plaintext and flip bits in the ciphertext. Bit flips in the ciphertext will produce a corresponding bit flip in the plaintext, followed by randomising the next block. I bet some smart attacker can do useful things with that ability. Sure the gpg command will exit with an error code, but do you think that the shell script writer carefully handled that case and undid the changes to the filesystem?
The flaw here isn't in CFB mode's malleability, but in OpenPGP forcing the use of unauthenticated plaintext in practical situations. (Indeed, if you are ever thinking about the malleability of ciphertext, you have probably already lost.)
I will even claim that the existance of an API that can operate in a streaming fashion over large records (i.e. will encrypt and defer the authenticator and will decrypt and return unauthenticated plaintext) is a mistake. Not only is it too easy to misunderstand and misuse (like the gpg example above) but, even if correctly buffered in a particular implementation, the existance of large records may force other implementations to do dangerous things because of a lack of buffer space.
If large messages are chunked at 16KB then the overhead of sixteen bytes of authenticator for every chunk is only 0.1%. Additionally, you can safely stream the decryption (as long as you can cope with truncation of the plaintext).
Although safer in general, when chunking one has to worry that an attacker hasn't reordered chunks, hasn't dropped chunks from the start and hasn't dropped chunks from the end. But sadly there's not a standard construction for taking an AEAD and making a scheme suitable for encrypting large files (AERO might be close, but it's not quite what I have in mind). Ideally such a scheme would take an AEAD and produce something very like an AEAD in that it takes a key, nonce and additional data, but can safely work in a streaming fashion. I don't think it need be very complex: take 64 bits of the nonce from the underlying AEAD as the chunk number, always start with chunk number zero and feed the additional data into chunk zero with a zero byte prefix. Prefix each chunk ciphertext with a 16 bit length and set the MSB to indicate the last chunk and authenticate that indication by setting the additional data to a single, 1 byte. The major worry might be that for many underlying AEADs, taking 64 bits of the nonce for the chunk counter leaves one with very little (or none!) left.
That requires more thought before using it for real but, if you are ever building encryption-at-rest, please don't mess it up like we did 20 years ago. (Although, even with that better design, piping the output into tar may still be unwise because an attacker can truncate the stream at a chunk boundary: perhaps eliminating important files in the process.)
Update: On Twitter, zooko points to Tahoe-LAFS as an example of getting it right. Additionally, taking the MAC of the current state of a digest operation and continuing the operation has been proposed for sponge functions (like SHA-3) under the name MAC-and-continue. The exact provenance of this isn't clear, but I think it might have been from the Keccak team in this paper. Although MAC-and-continue doesn't allow random access, which might be important for some situations.Image caption Mark Duggan was travelling in a Toyota minicab when he was stopped by police
Police seals on the minicab Mark Duggan was travelling in before he was shot by officers were broken a day later, Snaresbrook Crown Court has been told.
Jurors heard a vehicle recovery driver saw a police officer seal the doors but soon after driving it away he was told to return the car to the scene.
Another recovery driver said when he later collected the car from north London the seals had been broken.
Kevin Hutchinson-Foster, 30, denies giving Mr Duggan an illegal handgun.
Mr Duggan's fatal shooting in Tottenham last year sparked riots which spread across London and then to other cities in England.
'Unusual' instruction
Mr Hutchinson-Foster is accused of handing over a gun to Mr Duggan 15 minutes before he was stopped by police in Tottenham on 4 August.
Nicholas Goldmsith, the driver of a recovery vehicle used by the police to transport the car away from the scene in Ferry Road, told the court he had watched a police officer seal each of the doors on the Toyota minicab.
En route to the police pound in Perivale, west London, with the car on his trailer, he received a call telling him to turn around and take the minicab back to Ferry Road, the court heard.
He said he was told to put it about 40ft (12m) from where he collected it, in an area he was told had already been searched.
Mr Goldsmith, who had worked for the private recovery contractor CNS Motors for two years, said he was not told the reason for what he described as an "unusual" instruction.
Jurors also heard that in a statement given to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, a second recovery vehicle driver, Colin Hodge, said when he picked up the car from the scene later the same day, the seals on the doors were broken.
David Cunningham, a police forensic pound officer, told the court the car arrived at the pound in Perivale on 5 August with the door seals broken and he resealed them.
The case continues.Sen. Jeff Flake Morning Joe/MSNBC/Youtube One of the most hotly debated elements of the newest Republican attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act has come over the bill's protections for people with preexisting conditions.
While the authors of the Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson plan say the bill protects people with preexisting conditions, critics and health policy experts argue that it leaves openings for those people to get charged much more for insurance.
One of the bill's authors, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, got in a Twitter fight with NPR over the issue.
One GOP senator on Thursday, however, seemed to suggest that the new bill could leave sick Americans worse off. Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, a Republican supporter of the Graham-Cassidy bill, said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Thursday that the new plan could allow states to undermine protections for people with preexisting condition. He argued, however, that that wouldn't end up happening.
"There are provisions in there, I've heard it said, that would allow a race to the bottom and states to deny coverage or allow insurance companies to deny coverage [based] on preexisting conditions," Flake said. "If they're able to, de jure, de facto, they won't be able to."
Many policy experts have argued that the waivers created in the Graham-Cassidy bill could allow states to remove some of the regulations that protect people with preexisting conditions under Obamacare — as long as it lowers overall costs.
The legislation includes a line that states must show how their new system "intends to maintain access to adequate and affordable health insurance coverage for individuals with preexisting conditions."
The vague language, according to healthcare analysts and industry groups, gives significant leeway to the Department of Health and Human Services and states to determine the definition of "adequate and affordable."
This could, in theory, bring down the overall cost for the system as sicker, more expensive to cover people would effectively be priced out of the system. Lowering the overall costs for insurers would allow them to lower premiums. It would, however, undermine the protections for sick people.
Flake acknowledged that possibility, but said it would never happen because states would not pass a law or request a waiver that included such a provision.
"In reality, is any governor or state legislature going to deny coverage based on preexisting conditions?" Flake asked.
"Yes, yes they are," host Joe Scarborough said in response.UPDATED at 6:55 p.m.
Gov. John Bel Edwards plans to appeal to higher court a state district judge’s ruling Wednesday that invalidated his executive order forbidding workplace discrimination of LGBT employees in state government agencies and by private companies contracting with the state.
Nineteenth Judicial District Court Judge Todd Hernandez, of Baton Rouge, ruled that Edwards exceeded the scope of his authority with his executive order protecting lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender. He issued a permanent injunction forbidding the state from enforcing Edwards’ order, finding that regardless of what the governor intended, the order “creates new and/or expands upon existing Louisiana law as opposed to directing the faithful execution of the existing laws of this state.”
“We fully intend to appeal this issue, which is how the parties knew that this matter would ultimately be resolved.” Edwards said in a prepared statement. The next step would be to go to the First Circuit Court of Appeal in Baton Rouge.
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+2 Closing arguments filed in dispute over LGBT-rights order Lawyers for Louisiana's governor and attorney general submitted their closing arguments Frid…
“I applaud Judge Hernandez for basing his ruling on the law, not politics,” Attorney General Jeff Landry said in a prepared statement. “My challenge has always been about upholding the checks and balances on executive authority as established in our state Constitution.”
It’s the latest skirmish between the governor and attorney general since both were sworn into office on Jan. 11. Landry is seen by many Republicans as the most likely challenger for Democratic Edwards’ reelection in 2019.
Landry had rejected 31 state contracts because they included language that protects gays and transgender employees from workplace discrimination. Landry refused the contracts stating “these provisions should not contain language exceeding what the law requires.”
The Edwards administration asserted that Landry was “injecting his political beliefs” into the task of checking to see if the private lawyers contracted by the state for particular jobs were qualified to do the work.
Landry said Hernandez found that state law “provides that the office of the attorney general is vested with the authority to use his/her discretion in approving contracts for private legal counsel to state agencies, boards and/or commissions.”
An immediate impact of the decision involves healthcare coverage for some state employees. The Governor’s Office has decided to remove the wording, on which all parties already had agreed, from a contract in order to get it approved in time to avoid disrupting insurance coverage.
The contract still needs to be approved by the House Appropriations committee and the Senate Finance committee, both of which are meeting this week.
Edwards said the Hernandez ruling recognizes the governor as the constitutionally superior officer to the attorney general, but found the executive order was not in a governor’s authority to implement.
A Republican first elected to the bench in 2001, Hernandez found that Edwards’ order breached the “separation of powers” doctrine in the state Constitution. However, he denied Landry’s additional claims that the order also violated other parts of the state and U.S. constitutions.
Landry’s lawyers had argued that the Louisiana Legislature had repeatedly considered – and rejected – measures that would have extended protections to the gay and transgender community.
“With great respect for the role of the Louisiana Legislature,” Edwards said, “we continue to believe that discrimination is not a Louisiana value and that we are best served as a state when employment decisions are based solely on an individual’s qualifications and job performance.”
Edwards’ attorneys argued that the executive order was not creating new law, merely directing policy for state employment and contracts.
Past governors have issued nondiscrimination orders based on sexual orientation, but Edwards was the first to extend protections to transgender people.
The governor’s order says, in part: “no state agencies, offices, departments or commission boards shall harass or discriminate on the basis of race, color, sexual orientation or gender identity.”
In April, when Edwards signed the order, he said lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people were not protected from employment discrimination under Louisiana law.
Matthew F. Block, Edwards’ executive counsel, said Wednesday the order supported efforts to attract companies to Louisiana. He pointed to the National Basketball Association’s decision to move its 2015 All-Star Game to New Orleans from Charlotte because North Carolina passed a state law forcing transgender people to use public restrooms matching their gender assigned at birth.
“After efforts to advance his extreme agenda failed by large bipartisan majorities in the Legislature, John Bel Edwards took it upon himself to replace the people’s will with his own. Fortunately for the families and businesses in our state, the court ruled (Wednesday) that the Governor’s executive fiat will not fly in Louisiana,” Landry replied. “We do not live under a King in Louisiana; we have a Governor, an independent Attorney General, an elected Legislature, and a court system who are all involved in governance along with others. Gov. Edwards must live within the Constitution.”The new season of America’s Next Top Model with Tyra Banks will premiere on Tuesday, January 9 at 8PM ET/PT, VH1 announced today. The new season, which will have no age limits on contestants for the first time in the franchise’s history, also will feature a VH1 crossover with RuPaul’s Drag Race fan-favorites Valentina, Katya and Manila.
The new season is set to include guest appearances by former judge Nigel Barker and season three winner Eva Marcille, Director X, beauty and social media guru Patrick Starr, choreographer Jermaine Browne, supermodel Jourdan Dunn and Hip Hop artist Maejor, among others.
Producers promise that the show also will boast more contestant diversity than past seasons.
As previously announced, supermodel and body activist Ashley Graham, Paper Magazine Chief Creative Officer Drew Elliott and celebrity stylist and image architect Law Roach will return as judges.
Tyra Banks and Ken Mok continue as executive producers. America’s Next Top Model is produced by 10 by 10 Entertainment in association with The Tyra Banks Company and distributed by CBS Television Distribution. In addition to Banks and Mok, executive producers are Paul Buscemi and Jaimie Glasson.on •
Journalist Andrew Gilligan has written an article against me, quoting sentences cut in half, and even inserting words to misrepresent my views, for the sake of media sensationalism. Furthermore, his article indirectly challenges my right, and the right of other Muslims, to employment within the public sector (along with every other citizen). Instead of focusing the discussion on my actual ideas, Gilligan goes to spin them and attack me personally, using conveniently anonymous sources to avoid being sued for gross slander, reporting wild claims about my views – despite the fact that my actual views are completely different to his portrayal and widely known. Gilligan uses deliberately isolated sentences cut in half in an attempt to make it look sympathetic to ISIS (a disgusting Baathist terror group), despite the fact that I’ve been one of the most outspoken critics of ISIS, both on TV and in (electronic) print!
Gilligan’s History of Doubted Journalistic Impartiality
Gilligan has a reported history of doubted impartiality, with doubts raised about his ‘ability to present his material in a subtle way’ and his ‘slip[s] of the tongue’ by his former colleagues at the BBC. Gilligan, who is known for his baiting of many British Muslim activists and speakers, was slammed for his double standards against British Muslims by Mehdi Hasan as being a former employee of the Iran backed ‘Press TV’, with Mehdi remarking:
‘Gilligan is a journalist who makes lots of money from “outing” as many British Muslims as he can as “Islamists” or “extremists”, often on deeply dubious grounds, and with the aid of selective quotation, yet at the same time also makes lots and lots of money working for a foreign country [Iran] that is explicitly, openly and proudly Islamist and based on the rule of the clerics and a version of sharia law’ The Truth about Andrew Gilligan, 2010
Ridiculously False claims that I worked at the ‘heart of counter-Terrorism’
It is typical of many sensationalist media articles to make spurious personal attacks and claims using the common gutter tactics that were deployed by the article against me, especially from ‘anonymous sources’ which give Gilligan the freedom to publish unsubstantiated and patently false claims that I had access to ‘top secret files’, secretly ‘hated Britain’, or that I worked in counter-terrorism! HMIC has already refuted the claim themselves (the organisation Gilligan alleged employed me) and made clear that I never worked in counter-terrorism. HMIC’s role is to monitor the police and publish their findings in public reports freely downloadable from their website! – hardly classified material.
Needless to say, I have never worked in the government, nor in any government Counter-terrorism work, team or department. Any claim that I did, seems deliberately designed to tout the government fear mongering line of ‘the need to root out extremists from the public sector’ by claiming scare stories of ‘entryism’ and ‘extremists having access to counter-terrorism work’. Such fear mongering indirectly implies that Muslims with dissenting opinions from the state ideology cannot be trusted for potentially ANY employment, creating second class citizens based upon beliefs. In this response article, I’ll respond to the points about my position and views, to refute the false claims made against me in an attempt to make a sensationalist story.
Andrew Gilligan claimed that it is wrong to work for the government while criticising it. This is not only morally concerning, but wrong. He alleged that I worked for HMIC and that this was a part of government. However HMIC are independent of government. If you read HMIC’s website it says itself:
HMIC is independent of Government and the police: HM Inspectors of Constabulary…are not employees of the police service or government.
The work of HMIC is to account the government, investigate the police and report corruption or bad practices, and publish these reports to the public. In essence, HMIC do no different to many rights and public organisations that monitor the government and hold it to account in public. Furthermore, I have never been ‘fired’, had my contract terminated, or been dismissed by HMIC, nor have HMIC made any such claim. HMIC have never claimed I made ‘extremist’ comments nor that I was involved in ‘extremists activities’.
Positive Reactions by Media and Public Campaigners
My views are so well known, that many people were outraged by Gilligan’s misrepresentation, and came to my defence. I’d like to extend my thanks to Michael Nugent, a well known Atheist and Secularist campaigner from Ireland (and president of the organisation Atheist Ireland) for writing an article in defence of my actual beliefs, pointing out the contradictions in Andrew Gilligan’s piece about me – and showing how he took an article I wrote attacking ISIS, and selectively quoted incomplete sentences from it to make me look sympathetic to to ghastly terror group I was actually refuting.
I’ve had the honour of debating Michael a number of times on topical issues, and it is a testament to his character that he took the time to speak out objectively in defence of someone with a different set of beliefs from his own.
A journalist, Sam Leith, from the London Evening Standard also wrote a more balanced article, examining the source material Andrew Gilligan selectively quoted from and concluding:
‘If you drill down it seems apparent [Abdullah] is not quite the pantomime bogeyman we’re encouraged to see. In a response to yesterday’s report, he points out he does not cheerlead for IS: “Islam condemns ISIS as it considers that both the cause and the tactics must be correct, and Islam unreservedly condemns terrorism and the targeting of civilians”’ ‘The question this story raises is not so much how a jihadi hate-preacher (which [Abdullah] does not seem to be) got a job at HMIC, as how much should a state tolerate dissent, and of what character might that dissent be?’
Gilligan’s article has misrepresented my views by his typical style of using isolated out-of-context and half-sentenced quotes, which can be easily refuted when anyone reads the full articles (and sentences) they were taken from. An demonstration of this is available below:
Do I support ISIS by comparing them to Western armies?
Absolutely not! Gilligan appears to have done a deliberate hatchet job on an intellectually objective article I wrote actually about the correct way to refute ISIS propaganda. Why didn’t Gilligan quote the part of the article that said ‘IS[IS] is not a State, if they were they were would not be recognisably Islamic when compared to the mercy and wisdom of the Prophet’s (saaw) example. Lastly, they are not a Caliphate‘, and this: ‘I.S. have adopted patently unIslamic practices and strategies, like blowing up civilians in market places (e.g. Baghdad), kidnapping of innocents for ransom, and execution of those from other Islamic groups who voice criticism and political dissent…If I.S. committed these crimes, but had disavowed their use, then whilst that would still be inexcusable, at least they would have admitted their wrongdoing against Islamic commandments/distanced their actions from Islamic commandments. However, the justification of targeting civilians IS KUFR (disbelief)…It is I.S’s JUSTIFICATION of their practices that are against the Islamic rules in warfare and treatment of civilians, that alone, immediately renders false any claim to being Islamic’, but Gilligan didn’t quote that, as it would be not sensational enough, nor would I look like the crazed fanatic he’d probably like to depict me as. The article, when originally posted was very popular and was used as an almost textbook response systematically destroying ISIS’s propaganda. Gilligan’s use of the article to make it seem like I support ISIS is the height of disingenuity on his part, and a further affirmation of the judgements of his erstwhile colleagues at the BBC about him. Gilligan took an article refuting and condemning ISIS and ‘turned’ it into an article ‘supporting ISIS’ – what’s Gilligan’s next trick? Turning water into wine?
Gilligan quoted me saying that ISIS behave no different to Western armies, but that wasn’t praise of ISIS, but a condemnation. Because as anyone who reads the full article (and my many other works refuting Al Qaeda’s methodology of terrorism), I explained that Western history is replete with horrific atrocities perpetrated by British, American and French armies against natives of other lands, and German (and Japanese) civilians in world war two.
Is my description outlandish? But perhaps words are not as effective as pictures, do you think the following is something that resembles ISIS in any way?
Of course, I’m not the only critic of Western foreign policy throughout history, but I am a vocal Muslim critiquing foreign policy – which may be why Gilligan takes issue. For example, Kevin McDonald wrote an article saying ‘Isis jihadis aren’t medieval – they are shaped by modern western philosophy’, why didn’t anyone call him an ‘extremist’? Is it because he isn’t a Muslim? Can you see why such discriminatory (and arbitrary) labels of ‘extremist’ for views equally expressed by others, make Muslims feel that they are given second class treatment and denied the right to dissent along with their fellow non-Muslim citizens?
When Gilligan quoted me saying that denying anyone’s claim to a legitimate Islamic State is wrong if is based upon their school of thought, I was not claiming that ISIS follow a school of thought of Islam, but rather telling the reader that when condemning such groups we must use the correct grounding and not use sectarian arguments. ISIS do not follow a school of thought of Islam, and as it happens I’ve said many times on TV and in the very article that Gilligan misquoted, that ISIS’s methodology is unIslamic (since they justify something expressly forbidden in Islam). I even blast Anjem Choudary on a TV debate for daring to suggest the absurdity that ISIS and Al Qaeda have a legitimate difference of opinion within Islam!
Did I say ‘non-Muslims would be punished in hell’?
Answer is: nowhere. Andrew Gilligan is slyly taking an article where I talk about theodicy and justice in the hereafter, where I talk about the Quran’s theological concept of ‘Kafir’ (which means someone who is insincere and rejects the truth once they have recognised it), and I discuss how insincerity to |
knew he would remind them to restrict their shooting range to a distance based on a formula he devised: their age, plus one foot, because their arm and wrist muscles were still developing. So that was nine feet, no further, for Jaeson. Six for Josh.
They knew they would play a game of HORSE and maybe learn some new trick shots and most of all laugh because that's what they did when he was around, which wasn't often enough. So they waited for the day his 14-year-old Porsche Carrera would pull into the driveway of their renovated Victorian house.
Instead, when Jaeson was summoned from St. Peter's School unexpectedly and quickly -- a teacher rushed him out of lunch period without telling him why -- he saw 20 or 30 cars crammed into the driveway and parked along the street outside his house. His father's car wasn't in the caravan.
Once inside the house his mother hugged him, and she was crying, and she told him and his brother about their father, and Jaeson ran upstairs into the bathroom and looked into the mirror and started crying. Josh just went to his room and stared out the window, confused, wondering why everyone in the house had tears, and also trying to process the news: My daddy died? What exactly does that mean?
And: When is he coming home?
* * *
Pete Maravich's heart stopped beating a quarter-century ago in a Pasadena gym, during a pickup game. He was 40. He left behind some floppy socks, plenty of basketballs with worn pebbles, grainy video that would survive technology and go straight to YouTube, scoring records that seem unreal and unreachable even today, tons of fans who still worship his immortalized name, his wife Jackie and two sons who remain tortured by his loss even as young adults.
The NBA All-Star Game is this weekend, just across Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, where Pistol Pete had his greatest NBA years, and not far from Baton Rogue where he virtually invented basketball at Louisiana State. His skills were perfect for the breezy, wide-open All-Star showcase. Maravich was David Copperfield with the ball, famous for passing and shooting on a variety of deceptive moves, causing whiplash and breaking ankles before that term found its way into the basketball dictionary. If you could choose a dreamy starting five for an All-Star Game, you couldn't go wrong with Magic, Michael, Dr. J (ABA version), Earl the Pearl and the Pistol.
Maravich was announced as a Hall of Fame inductee at the 1987 All-Star Game in Seattle, and it was the first memory that Jaeson, who went on the trip, had of his father. Maravich died a year later. Also, the 1997 All-Star Game in Cleveland was where Jaeson and Josh spent "the best weekend of our lives." That was the celebration of the league's 50th Anniversary Team, uniting the 50 greatest players of all time. Forty-nine were still living. Repping Maravich were two awestruck teenagers who spent two unsuccessful days trying to keep their jaws from hitting the floor. Hearing stories about their father from strangers had become the norm for them, and the tales and tributes never stopped coming in Cleveland.
Pete Maravich was known for his showy moves before Showtime. (Getty)
Magic Johnson said: "Your dad was the original Showtime."
Isiah Thomas: "I got all my moves from your father's videos."
Kevin McHale: "Loved being his teammate. Learned a lot from him."
George Gervin, laughing: "Sit down and lemme tell you 'bout the time when … "
These players, some of whom were suckered by a Maravich no-look pass, filled in the blanks, polished off their own memories of Pistol, spoke almost religiously about a player who was clearly before his time in terms of style and showmanship and skills. It was a lot to digest for two boys whose heads were woozy from it all, who never had the pleasure of seeing their father play in person.
"It was bittersweet for us," said Jaeson. "I felt a little resentment. He was the only player who was deceased. We were the only family members on that podium representing a player. It was a huge honor and at the same time it was heartbreaking. Instead of us being in the stands looking at him, we had to stand in his place."
The high lasted a few days after their flight home and then, sadness and reality paid a visit once again and never left them. To honor his name, Jaeson and Josh wear tattoos of their father's uniform numbers and a pair of floppy socks, Pete's trademark. Hidden underneath the ink are the psychological scars. Imagine, learning mostly about your dad not from first-hand experience but the tales of others. Imagine, falling in love with basketball but never having a basketball father watch your games in high school or college or beyond. Imagine, needing help to guide you through the tough times when the ball sometimes deflates and never getting any advice from him. Imagine being the sons of Pete Maravich, a basketball icon and reformed alcoholic and born-again Christian, and watching your childhood come and go without a father who could've made a difference in your life's journey.
"To grow up in his shadow, especially around here, it takes a toll, man," said Jaeson, wearily. He is now 34 and finally has the benefit of reflection. "We couldn't be more proud of him. But I always say being his son has been a blessing and a curse."
* * *
On a great night, Jaeson Maravich might sleep five hours. On a bad night, he'll get the equivalent of a catnap. He has long suffered from an anxiety that doctors never quite diagnosed, but he and his family are quite sure it's indirectly linked to stress related to his father's death.
He is friendly, if somewhat guarded. His home is small and meticulously well kept, with framed memories of his father on almost every wall, none more cherished than the photo of Pete, eyes lasered at the basket, launching an off-balanced jumper that broke Oscar Robertson's NCAA career scoring record.
He lives alone with his dog and coaches neighborhood kids. He wants basketball to be a big part of his life, but isn't certain the feeling is mutual. He's had a long and intense affair with the game. It took him through five colleges in six years and a short tryout with the Mavericks before dropping him at his doorstep in Covington. The game put him through the emotional wringer at times and it began the day after his father died.
"Talk about being in a twilight zone," he said. "They wanted me to go to practice, to keep my mind off of everything. That was impossible. Even though I was 8, I was aware of it. I remember riding in that car to the gym. I was not excited to go to the gym. Didn't want to do it. Didn't want to do anything."
Because Jaeson spent the most time with his father by virtue of being the oldest, it hit him the hardest. He wanted nothing to do with the game as a kid in the immediate aftermath. He drove himself hard in middle school, averaged almost 30 points a game, and that only managed to spook him. Parents, his classmates and his coaches all saw him as being special, suggesting the apple didn't fall far.
"People would ask for his autograph so one day he had a friend switch jerseys and pretend he was Jaeson," said Jackie Maravich, Pete's widow. "Jaeson didn't want to deal with any of that."
Billy Packer wanted to fly in and do a story for CBS. It was overwhelming for a 14-year-old with a Hall of Fame ghost as a father. After his ninth grade year, he ran away from the game.
"I didn't play because I couldn't deal with the pressure," he said. "I shied away from it."
When Pete Maravich was that age, he was already whipping behind-the-back passes and splashing shots from half court. Pete's mom would pack a brown bag in the morning, kiss his forehead and send him off to the gym, where he wouldn't return until just past dinnertime. The game consumed Pete quickly and totally, mainly because of his father, Press Maravich.
Pete Maravich died just eight months after his dad Press (left). (Getty)
Press was Pete's coach from crib to college, and the tales of the two and how they connected became folklore. In his autobiography, Pete confirmed most of it, about how he'd dribble a ball from the window of a slow-moving car, about playing in almost total darkness to improve his hand-eye, about being one of the few white boys in the '60s who'd venture into black neighborhoods to seek out the best competition. Pete became obsessive about learning the game and mastering it.
"Pete never got that chance to have the relationship with his sons that his father had with him," said Jackie.
Jaeson grew to about 6-foot-5 as a senior in high school and gave the game another try. He played it well enough to get some attention from colleges; Tim Floyd wanted him at Iowa State. But Jaeson needed more experience and went to prep school in New Hampshire, the beginning of a lengthy, strange and maddening post-high school ride.
He hurt his back and lasted one semester. After six months of rehab back home, he tried the University of Alabama, but didn't fit with coach Mark Gottfried's style. He went to Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College because it was closer to home and finally, basketball showed mercy on him.
"When he came here he was kind of reserved and to himself," said Bob Weathers, the coach.
"Jaeson was searching for something," said Wendell Weathers, the coach's son and an assistant at the time. "He was real introverted. He walked through the halls with sunglasses on, almost like he was trying to hide who he was."
Right away, Bob Weathers knew the kid had spark, the same loose and carefree playing style as his famous father. Fans packed the tiny gym and sometimes were turned away for fear of violating the fire code. Feeling unburdened -- and finally healthy -- Jaeson averaged 27.3 points while at MGCCC and major schools, including Kentucky, started giving pitches.
Jaeson went to McNeese State because it was away from the glare and close to home, but almost immediately he re-injured his back. He left campus and gave up the game. He was taking courses at a local community college when a friend urged him to try William Carey.
"Who's that?" asked Jaeson.
Actually, more like, what's that. William Carey College is an NAIA school in southern Mississippi that threw him a basketball lifeline, and Jaeson took it. He stayed two years, the longest he ever spent in one place. He made All-America third- and first-team in 2003 and '04. That second season was stressful because the Maravich name, along with Jaeson's smooth jumper, brought lots of attention. Newspaper stories were written. Folks were curious. Other players came at him hard. The gym was packed.
"Street and Smith's magazine had me preseason All-American and player of the year," said Jaeson. "I was worried. My mind started racing. I said to myself, 'I've got to achieve something.' I think I slept three hours a night the whole year. I was stressed."
He had a solid senior year anyway, averaging over 18 points and shooting 40 percent on three-pointers. In his final game, he scored 41 points. He wanted to play pro ball, and played well enough at the Portsmouth Tourney, the main NBA combine, to get a camp invite in Dallas.
After he was cut by the Mavericks, all of the old demons returned. His insomnia kicked in at a high level. He felt depressed. He rejected an offer to play professionally in Lithuania and later regretted it. He went home, knowing he'd played his final game.
"Let me tell you, Jaeson can play right now," said Josh the other day, his voice rising.
"I don't know about that. I'm kinda old now," said Jaeson.
"No, no," said Josh, now leaning forward in his chair. "He has range and quickness. He could play for the Pelicans right now. Right now. They have a spot for Austin Rivers. C'mon."
Rivers is in his second season with the Pelicans and, like most young players, his transition from college to the NBA hasn't come without a burp. But you can't help but wonder if the flash of resentment from Josh was partly due to the advantage Rivers had over the Maravich boys. Like Josh and Jaeson, Austin's father enjoyed a fruitful NBA playing career and left his own mark, although much less significant than Pistol Pete's. Unlike Pete, Doc Rivers spent many hours with his son and served as a sounding board and was around precisely when he needed to be. You see, Doc Rivers lived and Pete Maravich didn't.
* * *
Much more than Jaeson, Josh at age 31 looks like his father. The eyes, the nose, the long mop-top hair -- he could play the role of a young Pistol Pete in a movie. Except when he was a boy, all Josh wanted to do was any activity other than basketball. It didn't grab him by the windpipe. At least at first.
When the game finally entered his blood, it refused to leave and so another Maravich boy was left to deal with the self-placed pressure to be someone he was not. Josh was less polished than Jaeson in every way on the court but still good enough after high school to get the attention of several schools.
He dodged the vagabond journey followed by his brother and stuck with one school throughout his college career. That school was Louisiana State, precisely where his mother and brother did not want him to go.
Jaeson, for example, never would've gone to LSU and played in an arena called the Pete Maravich Assembly Center, or the "P-Mac." Because Josh really didn't know his father all that well and the few memories gathered by a 5-year-old soon became faint, he didn't feel the same burden as a kid that Jaeson felt.
"It hit me earlier," said Jaeson. "It hit him later."
The sucker punch came fairly quickly and was delivered by John Brady, the coach at LSU, who didn't have a scholarship for Josh. When Josh decided to walk on anyway at LSU, Brady was trapped. He tried to discourage Josh, saying it wasn't a good idea. Josh disagreed and wanted to feel a connection with his dad and thought of no better way than to wear the same school uniform. And so Brady simply threw up his hands.
Former LSU coach John Brady did not give Josh Maravich much playing time. (Getty)
"Well," he said later, "I didn't want to be known as the LSU coach who turned down Pete Maravich's son."
After all, how could it be a disadvantage to have Pete Maravich's kid on your bench? Josh was 6-foot-3 and skinny yet aggressive and backed down to no one on the court. In preparation for college in 2003, he wanted a new look, so he changed his hairstyle to a spiky crew cut.
"First day of practice," said Josh, "we're in the video room and he says, 'Son, I don't know you and you don't know me. But that s--- right there ain't gonna fly.' He was talking about my hair."
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Josh said when he scored in practice against the first-teamers, Brady would often bring practice to a halt, not to commend Josh, but to admonish the player he beat for a basket. In those flash moments of glory, during his highest moments on a college floor, in a building named after his father, Josh never felt lower.
He especially remembers the day before the Ole Miss game when he went strong to the rim and the whistle blew and play stopped and he heard Brady bellow: "Hold up, hold up. What's going on here? This is Josh Maravich. Josh Mar-a-vich. You let him beat you like that? If you can't guard goddamn Josh you can't guard anyone."
LSU coaching legend Dale Brown made a guest appearance at one of those whistle-blowing, belittling practices. He stood up and walked out. Brown sensed Brady was insecure and felt threatened. Brown liked Josh, liked the Maravich family. He had the boys attend his summer basketball camp right after Pete's death and remembers little Josh clutching his mother's leg upon arriving, begging her not to leave him at camp, then refusing to go home when she returned later than afternoon to pick him up.
"He's a Damon Runyon character," Brown said about Josh. "Got a great spirit about him."
That spirit was broken, not by the sounds of the student body that chanted We Want Josh at games, but the coach who largely ignored those pleas. Maravich played scant seconds in 13 games over three years. He took three shots, made two.
"[Brady] hated me," Josh said. "By my third year, I lost the passion for basketball. While they were practicing, I was in the dungeon by myself, just shooting. The man didn't give a shit about me."
Jaeson: "Brady destroyed him mentally."
Josh: "He'd take me to his office and beat me down. Just being verbally abusive. Me not having any male figures around while somebody is slamming you, well, I lost my identity." (Now coaching at Arkansas State, Brady didn't reply to a request to comment for this story.)
If only his father were alive then …
Butch Pierre was the top assistant under Brady and laughed the other day when the subject of Josh's cameo playing time was raised.
"My son plays for John Brady right now at Arkansas State, he's a walk-on like Josh, and coach will be up 20-25 points and doesn't play him, either. My wife doesn't understand."
Pierre turned serious when asked about Brady chopping down Josh in practice: "It wasn't nothing against Josh. Coaches can sometimes be misunderstood because they're trying to motivate a player in some fashion. I would've explained that to Josh had I known. It's bad that he feels that way because Josh was a good teammate who played at the same school as his father and handled everything well."
Josh never quit the team, though. Never budged from his reason to attend LSU, to honor his father in some way, to be close to him, to get to know him on some wayward level. On Senior Night, he was the only senior who didn't see a split-second of playing time, and this was a game against Vanderbilt in a 12-point victory. The fans chanted for their favorite walk-on. Jackie Maravich and Jaeson were in the stands, steaming. Josh was embarrassed. After the game, at a local watering hole where the players gathered, Brady walked in. He extended his hand to Jaeson. His hand was left hanging.
Josh had one more year of eligibility but chose not to give Brady the pleasure of blowing that whistle again. So he took his degree and left and is currently exploring what he wants to do next. And this is where it gets wickedly ironic. Pete Maravich never won a championship and retired from the Celtics the year before they won the title in 1981 because his battered knees couldn't take more pounding. Josh Maravich left LSU the year before the Tigers went to the Final Four because his battered confidence couldn't take more pounding either.
Maravich averaged better than 24 points per game over his 11-year NBA career. (Getty)
* * *
Dale Brown has been around basketball his entire life. He has coached poor players, well-off players, players from the country and players from the city, players who went to the NBA and players who earned an MBA. He has also coached players whose fathers were good-to-great on the college and NBA levels and says we wouldn't understand the baggage those kids carry.
"It's a tremendous burden," Brown said. "I had Bill Walton's son Adam. I've had others. Everybody thinks those boys have the same gene. I had Julius Erving's kids in my camp and believe me when I say they didn't have it. There's always pressure to compete with what their dad did. When they can't, it shuts them down. Some begin to develop an inferiority complex."
There are exceptions, of course. Even in today's NBA. Steph Curry might be a better shooter than his father Dell, who owned a buttery jumper in his NBA days. Klay Thompson's father was Mychal, an NBA champ and valuable sixth man for the Lakers. There's Tim Hardaway Jr., making a name for himself with the Knicks. And Al Horford, who's had three times the career of his father, Tito.
In New Orleans, over in the Garden District, two kids picked up a football and tried to follow their father, the quarterback of the Saints. Peyton and Eli Manning have done quite well as Archie's boys, winning three Super Bowls between them. They're headed to the Hall of Fame someday. The success of the Mannings hits close to home for the Maravichs, if only because the Mannings were born and raised, well, so close to Covington.
"There was a Manning special on TV and I turned it off," said Jaeson. "I'm certainly happy for their success, and they come across like nice guys. That's not the point. I just got extremely bitter. I honesty believe if my father and my grandpa was around I would've been in the NBA for 10-15 years. Because I never would've quit. I would've had one of the best players of all-time teaching me. Everything I learned about the game was self-taught."
* * *
The injuries and insecurities and bad timing piled up against Jaeson, not to mention the sleepless nights caused by anxiety. Josh, too, suffered physically, tearing his Achilles and killing his chances of sticking in semipro ball, which he tried after his LSU days.
Pete Maravich was changing as a person right around the time his boys were born. He became a more spiritual person and gradually came to grips with his retirement from the game. He looked forward to fatherhood.
"He cried when they were born," said Jackie Maravich (who has long since remarried). "Pete was so excited, especially when Josh arrived, because I wanted another son, someone else for Jaeson to play basketball with or whatever."
She said Pete often talked about his father Press and how he'd raise Josh and Jaeson just as Press raised him.
Jaeson Maravich in front of his dad's portrait at the family home in Covington, Louisiana. (Shaun Powell)
"His daddy was brilliant," she said. "But I wonder if Pete would've pushed basketball on the boys the same way. I don't know if he'd want that pressure on them."
Their childhood has come and gone, along with their checkered college basketball experience. There's no way to relive that, to magically rewind the calendar and hope for a better result, because one fact will forever remain unchanged: Pete Maravich wouldn't be around anyway.
It was a shock to doctors that he lasted as long as he did. His heart defect was rare; his autopsy revealed he was missing one of two arteries that act as the blood supply to the heart. Given his devotion to basketball and how often and intensely he played it as a kid, Maravich was extremely fortunate to reach adulthood. Like many of the tricks he did with the ball, Maravich reaching 40 was somewhat miraculous, making you wonder, How did he pull that off?
Did Maravich know, later in life, that he was on the clock? He died eight months after Press, and Jackie remembers Pete whispering, "I'll see you soon" in the ear of his dying father. When he knelt on one knee and looked into the faces of his young sons in January of 1988, just before he left for California on business, and a few days before he collapsed, was Maravich giving his boys their marching orders, you know, just in case?
Jaeson and Josh Maravich will be the first to say there are scores of fatherless kids with far greater issues and challenges who manage, best they can, every day, and even succeed. Pete Maravich's sons don't want anyone's pity and never asked for it, actually.
They only wanted a Hall of Famer to come home and tote them up to the attic in their renovated Victorian and raise the hoop once again. Six feet high for Jaeson. Five for Josh.Photo: Lise Åserud / NTB scanpix
Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik has not been treated "inhumanely" by being held in isolation in prison, an Oslo appeals court ruled on Wednesday, overturning a lower court ruling.
"Breivik is not, and has not, been subjected to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment," the appeals court wrote in its verdict.
The 38-year-old right-wing extremist, who killed 77 people in 2011, will appeal against the verdict to Norway's highest court, the Supreme Court, his lawyer Oystein Storrvik announced immediately after the verdict was published.
In April 2016, an Oslo district court stunned the survivors and families of the victims when it found the Norwegian state guilty of treating Breivik "inhumanely" and in a "degrading" fashion, in breach of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The lower court judge noted in particular Breivik's lengthy isolation regime. He has been held apart from other inmates since his arrest on the day of the attacks, and his lawyers argued that has been detrimental to his mental health.
The state appealed against that ruling and on Wednesday it won its case.
"There are no clear indications that Breivik has been subjected to isolation damage during his prison sentence," the appeals court found.
In July 2011 Breivik, disguised as a police officer, tracked and gunned down 69 people, most of them teenagers, at a Labour Party youth camp on the island of Utoya, shortly after killing eight people in a bombing outside a government building in Oslo.
The appeals court also upheld the lower court's ruling that Breivik's right to privacy, as guaranteed by Article 8 of the Convention, had not been violated. He had argued the strict controls on his correspondence with the outside world breached his rights.After years avoiding the paranormal-TV trend, Showtime finally enters beast mode with Penny Dreadful, a series that raises classic literary monsters from their public domain graves to terrorize Victorian London. Get ready for the scares in Sunday’s premiere with a little background reading (and watching).
Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (1845-1847)
"Penny dreadfuls" were serialized adventure and horror stories sold in 19-century England—like this one, which set the standard for vampire fiction back when Bram Stoker was still in diapers.
Where to read: The collection of penny dreadfuls is available online through Project Gutenberg.
House of Frankenstein (1944)
The peak of Universal’s "Golden Age of Horror," starring the Bolt-Necked One, Count Dracula, the Wolfman, and other creepy-campy creatures. The original monster crossover.
Where to watch: The film can be easily found online, but Universal has also packaged it in a DVD double feature with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Find it here.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-)
The movie was a fright, so hit the books instead: Alan Moore’s acclaimed comic series reimagined a lineup of Victorian-era literary icons (from Dr. Jekyll to The Invisible Man) as heroes defending the British Empire.
Where to read: It’s available in bookstores and in e-book form, but you can preview the first issue online.
El Orfanato (The Orphanage) (2007)
Juan Antonio Bayona, who directed Penny Dreadful’s first two episodes, also helmed this chilling Spanish-language film, about a woman who returns to her childhood orphanage.
Where to watch: Amazon.
The Prestige (2006)
Christopher Nolan’s psychological thriller doesn’t have a roster of literary monsters, but its dueling-magicians story set in 19th century London strikes a similar sinister tone.
Where to watch: YouTube, Amazon.
Sanctuary (2008 – 2012)
Where do mutants and monsters go in the modern world? Syfy’s take on the mashup formula—about a scientist protecting "Abnormals"—featured Bigfoot, Nikola Tesla, and John Druitt.
Where to watch: Syfy has since taken down full episodes, but Google Play has the series available for streaming.
Skyfall (2012)
Penny Dreadful creator John Logan proved his chops in adapting classics with this James Bond installment that taught Ian Fleming’s old spy some new tricks.
Where to watch: Netflix, YouTube, Amazon.Sasha Harmon Matthews, 12, works on a cartoon superhero likeness of Cara Rosenburg, an avid reader and girl scout. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Nicole Levy
"Do you like capes?"
That's one of three questions Upper West Side resident Sasha Harmon Matthews, 12, asks her subjects when she draws them as "everyday superheroes."
With three comic books already under her belt, the young cartoonist is taking commissions to illustrate ordinary children and adults as characters with capes, boots and gear emblematic of their unique hobbies and interests — and she's donating 100 percent of her profits.
Matthews had raised at least $2,248 for the American Civil Liberties Union as of Thursday afternoon.
"I knew I wanted to raise money for a charity, so I wanted to do it in a way that would be fun, like with drawing," said the 7th grader, a student at M.S. 54 who was "feel[ing] a little bit down about certain current events" when she launched her project a month ago.
Matthews' parents, photographer and interactive designer Scott Matthews and New York Times journalist Amy Harmon, were the first models to receive the superhero treatment in pen and Sharpie.
(Credit: Sasha Harmon Matthews)
But word of Matthews' fundraising initiative spread beyond the immediate family when her father — or her "publicist," as she jokingly calls him — wrote about the project on his Facebook page.
She has since drawn 36 "everyday superheroes." Their ranks include an anti-litter activist, an astrophysicist studying binary stars, a sommelier and a Presbyterian pastor.
“I have a super-questionnaire for anyone who would like to delve into the process of getting themselves a superhero," Matthews explained of her process. "First of all I ask if they like capes, and as you can see, every single person said yes...Then I also ask for any favorite colors that the person might have. And the most important question is what is their special hobby or interest.”
The actual illustration takes about two hours to complete, said the artist, who draws influence from the X-Men, Calvin and Hobbes and Squirrel Girl comics.
Most patrons donate between $50 and $100 for the novelty of having their own likeness, or a family member's, transformed by the cartoonist's work. Many use them as avatars on their social media accounts, Scott Matthews said.
Upper West Side resident Pamela Guerrara attaches the image she commissioned of her 11-year-old daughter Juliana, a fencer and musician, to all her personal emails.
"I always look for opportunities where my kids can feel that they're going to be heard and they're going to make a difference," said Guerrara, a mother of two. "So I think that's what really attracted me to Sasha's project, because she's figured out at such a young age to make her mark on the world.
"Everybody just does a lot of complaining, and she's figured out how to use her talent to do something about it," she added.
"A lot of people feel powerless right now and just kind of sad in general," said Matthews. "And I just wanted to highlight the fact that you can really do something.
"Even if you think you’re ordinary, you’re actually special.”
The ACLU agrees with Matthews, said the organization's director of special gifts, Liz FitzGerald.
"Like Sasha, we think that the world is full of everyday superheroes," FitzGerald wrote in an email. "We see them in our clients and supporters who are willing to speak truth to power and stand up for their rights every single day. If Sasha is an example of what we can expect from the next generation of civil liberties activists, we know that we’re in good hands."Chapter Text
"Myc, why are we sharing a bunk bed in a caravan?" Five year old Sherlock asked looking up at his fifteen year old brother. "I thought we were going to Disneyland."
"It seems brother dear that our nanny has pocketed the money and decided to spend two weeks trapped with us in the cheapest caravan she could find." Mycroft replied as Sherlock's mouth formed a little 'o' shape.
"No rides then." Sherlock said, a little disappointed.
"No women dressed up as princesses either." Mycroft said happily.
"Good, I hate girls!" Sherlock groaned.
"Me too little brother, me too." Mycroft sighed trying not to think of all the Prince Charming's that were there too, dressed in tight suits. "I tell you what you can have the top bunk, but only if you put a pillow next to you to stop you falling out." Sherlock grinned. That was a yes then Mycroft thought as he started to pull their things out of their suitcase to put in the tiny wardrobe.
After an oddly deep sleep both Mycroft and Sherlock woke to the smell of bacon cooking. Mycroft's stomach rumbled in anticipation.
"Come on boys, breakfast time." The nanny shouted. Mycroft bolted before returning to lift his stranded brother down from the top bunk.
"Don't eat all the bacon. I need a wee first." Sherlock said as he shuffled into his Heman slippers.
Sherlock went to the toilet, washed his hands and made his way down he hall to the kitchen. His eyes widened in surprise when he saw the food laid out on the table. A full cooked breakfast was on his plate, 2 sausages, bacon, scrambled eggs, beans and mushrooms.
"Would you like some orange juice Sherlock?" The nanny asked holding out a jug in front of her. Sherlock nodded beaming. It looked like this holiday wasn't going to be so bad after all.
"What are you doing here on your own? Where's your mummy?" The little boy asked a look of concern on his face. Sherlock was sitting in the sand dunes picking out bits of driftwood so he could make a sword. He looked over at the boy, he was wearing grey shorts, and bright blue jelly shoes but had a thick cream cable knit jumper and t-shirt on.
"My brother's over there." Sherlock said pointing at Mycroft who was eyeing the boy suspiciously.
"That's alright then." The boy said holding his hand out. "I'm John, I'm seven." Sherlock held his shook John's hand.
"Sherlock and I'm five and 27 days." Sherlock replied, John giggled. "Where are your parents?" Sherlock asked.
"My big sis is over there." John said pointing at a girl who was climbing up a tree. John plopped down in the sand beside Sherlock.
"Whatcha doing then?" He asked.
"Making a sword." Sherlock replied pronouncing the silent 'w'.
"Cool!" John said as he pulled a bit of wool off the end of his jumper. "You can use this to hold on the cross bit if you want." Sherlock's eyes lit up.
"Brilliant, then I can go to the beach and be a pirate!" Sherlock exclaimed lining his two bits of wood up to tie the string around.
"Not allowed on the beach today cause of the jellyfish." John said sadly.
"Jellyfish." Sherlock said as his eyes lit up.
"Yeah they're poisonous." John stated. Sherlock picked up his unfinished sword and took off.
"Oi don't go without me." John shouted giggling as he took off after Sherlock.Convicts in Australia hijacked the British ship the Cyprus in 1829. When they were eventually captured, William Swallow, leader of the pirates, and some of his men were put on trial. They gave an account of sailing to Japan in 1830, but no one believed them. Almost 200 years later, the story was considered a legend -until now. Nick Russell searched through 19th century Japanese writings and found and translated an account from samurai Makita Hamaguchi that confirms a Western ship showed up at Shikoku island on January 16, 1830.
Hamaguchi wrote of sailors with “long pointed noses” who were not hostile, but asked in sign language for water and firewood. One had burst into tears and begun praying when an official rejected an earlier plea.
A skipper who looked 25 or 26 placed tobacco in “a suspicious looking object, sucked and then breathed out smoke”.
He had a “scarlet woollen coat” with “cuffs embroidered with gold thread and the buttons were silver-plated”, which was “a thing of great beauty, but as clothing it was gaudy”.
Hamaguchi’s watercolour sketch of the coat has what Russell said may be a telling detail on the sleeve: a bird that could be a swallow, the skipper’s own stamp on a British military officer’s jacket taken as a souvenir in the mutiny.
The skipper gave instructions to a crew that “in accordance with what appeared to be some mark of respect” followed orders to remove their hats “to the man, most of them revealing balding heads”.
They “exchanged words amongst themselves like birds twittering”.
Japan was isolationist at the time, so a few days later, orders came down to repel the foreigners. After some cannon fire, the ship left. Read more of how the Japanese saw the strange foreign pirates at |
PT...
I really so seriously don't think that's funny, karen. It's likely true, and very, very, very terrifying.
COMMENT #31 [Permalink]
... Greg said on 8/1/2008 @ 1:51 pm PT...
flash backs of memories of Bobby Seals? makes you wonder whatever became of the little airman that Norman Menitta talked about with the 9/11 Commision, i'm sure he could clear things up as to exactally what that order the Cheney was so sure was still in effect was all about
COMMENT #32 [Permalink]
... Floridiot said on 8/1/2008 @ 2:26 pm PT...
COMMENT #33 [Permalink]
... Bob Bilse said on 8/1/2008 @ 2:30 pm PT...
Bush and Pelosi are different, but is it "different" enough? Brad, your comment about your head rolling, after Nancy made her comment, somehow reminded me of a quote I once saw by Gore Vidal (whom, I believe, at times, overstates cynicism to make a point): "It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people". *
Some other quotes relating to the subject of party politics and presidents: "Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so. Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates. As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests. Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin. Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested only in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil. '...That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president...' The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent. The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return. We're not a democracy"......................................Gore Vidal
COMMENT #34 [Permalink]
... Floridiot said on 8/1/2008 @ 2:42 pm PT...
Ya gotta love Mr Vidal. He just wrote a letter to the Obama camp saying that he'stiff armed' the progressive movement. LOL
COMMENT #35 [Permalink]
... Lora said on 8/1/2008 @ 7:54 pm PT...
Yeah Pelosi said it: she can't get some of the democratic agenda passed if she's busy trying to impeach Bush. Heh she gave it away right there. But it ain't about being too busy. She's accepting a pittance (and possibly some illusory political security) in return for not turning up the heat on those criminals, and she's selling out our country.
COMMENT #36 [Permalink]
... yvonne said on 8/1/2008 @ 8:45 pm PT...
Peeeeee-losi is a neocon and is obviously complicit in the crimes of the bush regime. If not for her complicity, this regime would have been brought down long ago. She's even spouting off the right-right BS of "where's the proof"--like we're all a bunch of idiots, which is obviously what she thinks. I wonder how many, if any, women were convicted of war crimes during the Nuremberg trials? Maybe she can be the first woman for that as well. Our govt has an investation of traitors that must be exposed and the guilty forever disgraced in the pages of history. As another commenter stated at another blog website, these are very bad people and while we're all making polite discussion, they're taking us down. Enough with the polite talk already, we need to take action and display our anger and outrage--the traitor Pelosi has been very successful at keeping us at bay. (Pelosi = Lieberman in drag.)
COMMENT #37 [Permalink]
... Bamboo Harvester said on 8/2/2008 @ 12:22 pm PT...
IMHO ~ pelosi took Impeachment off the table because
she made "A Deal With The DEVIL" under the table. I fear that Deal that allows some of us to be here..... At least For now...
COMMENT #38 [Permalink]
... abacus said on 8/2/2008 @ 2:51 pm PT...
Zinn - Election Madness
The Progressive March 2008 Issue
http://www.truthout.org/...rd-zinn-election-madness I'm not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death. I'm talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes-the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth. But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.
COMMENT #39 [Permalink]
... The Oracle said on 8/2/2008 @ 7:37 pm PT...
Pelosi's comment, taken alongside her defense of why she views herself to be a good Democratic Speaker "Well, we increased the minimum wage, didn't we?" makes one think of someone rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic while it was sinking. And this recent hissy fit by Republicans in the House because Pelosi, as Speaker, wouldn't allow a floor vote on offshore oil drilling stands in stark contrast to Pelosi letting the recent FISA fiasco take place, with retroactive immunity being given both to the criminally complicit telecoms and members of the Bush administration, by derailing court cases being held to uncover the truth. Pelosi (and no doubt Steny Hoyer) is doing everything possible to block criminal proceedings beginning against Republican members of the most corrupt administration in American history, while offering up crumbs (important crumbs, yes, but still less important than investigating and stopping the Bush/Republican crimes). So, Pelosi "allows" Rep. Conyers to hold "impeachment" hearings, but with the word "impeachment" being forbidden during proceedings, and with no follow through being contemplated...because anti-impeachment Pelosi will make certain that nothing will ever be considered by the full House involving holding George W. Bush (and Dick Cheney) accountable for their criminal acts. Which, no doubt, is why "inherent contempt" will never be employed against all the criminal Republicans thumbing their noses at Congress and refusing to even appear, even after receiving an official, constitutional, congressional subpoena. Who would have ever thought that a Democratic House Speaker would actually be running interference for the Bush Crime Family, as well as all the culture of corruption Republicans and lapdog DLC DINO Blue Dog Democrats?
COMMENT #40 [Permalink]
... Ancient said on 8/4/2008 @ 10:58 am PT...
Check it out, one definite RAT, and several american one-step-up-three-steps-back losers! http://www.c-spanarchive...clipStart=&clipStop= I am having trouble finding and posting this. HMMMMMMMMM.... imagine that! I'm not against secruity, but military roughshod is another story! WAKE UP AMERICA
COMMENT #41 [Permalink]
... Ancient said on 8/4/2008 @ 11:15 am PT...
If you can get it to work, it takes patience. Its a long clip, and the rest of the story doesn't come out till later.
COMMENT #42 [Permalink]
... Ancient said on 8/4/2008 @ 11:52 am PT...
Hey 99, can you help me find a good clip of the hole shaul mofaz thing? Cause it doesn't seem to show the inflamitory words I viewed!?!?!? Anybody else watch this weekend? Whats up?
COMMENT #43 [Permalink]
... Ancient said on 8/4/2008 @ 12:12 pm PT...
And BTW lindsey graham makes me want to PUKE! Lie-ber-man was never really elected and everybody here better GOD DAMN KNOW IT.
COMMENT #44 [Permalink]
... Agent 99 said on 8/4/2008 @ 12:23 pm PT...
I don't know which whole Shaul Mofaz thing you're talking about, but you could do a Google video search. Here's a little bit on ForaTV for those who want to get the flavor. Here's the original quote that got me hissing and spitting about his evil.
In the most explicit threat yet by a member of Ehud Olmert's government, Shaul Mofaz, a deputy prime minister, said the hardline Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "would disappear before Israel does". Otherwise I'm swimming with the alligators today and you could probably pin it down better than I could... since you know what you're talking about....
COMMENT #45 [Permalink]
... Ancient said on 8/4/2008 @ 2:46 pm PT...
Thanks 99 for helping, but I'm looking for the cspan video of the thing...it was quite enlightening as far as media casts goes. I was just trying to post the whole original show, which doesn't seem to be available, which I thought you may be more better than I at archiving.
COMMENT #46 [Permalink]
... Ancient said on 8/4/2008 @ 3:46 pm PT...
Oohppps, that's archiving I meant. Somehow, fact means more than allgators today.
COMMENT #47 [Permalink]
... Ancient said on 8/4/2008 @ 3:56 pm PT...
Holy shit, I was right on spellin and dastardtly deeds!
Post it here now...please help.
COMMENT #48 [Permalink]
... Agent 99 said on 8/4/2008 @ 5:36 pm PT...
Ancient The link you gave was an hour and thirty-seven minutes long. How much more complete do you want? The links I gave had almost as much. Considering I have no idea what you're talking about, WHAT further could be posted now, how further could I help? I admit I'm sleep-deprived, but if you can link one thing from C-SPAN you can link any of them.
COMMENT #49 [Permalink]
... Damail said on 8/9/2008 @ 8:22 am PT...Birth Control Pill Causes Autism
In many parts of the world, including the U.S., U.K., Canada, Japan and Scandinavia, "The rates were flat through the late '80s, and then suddenly a massive rise happened at same time"
These were the countries who legalized and experienced a rapid increase in the use of birth control pills. This did not happen in countries like Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Portugal, and Oman, who never legalized or adopted birth control pills on such a massive scale
It would be expected that countries like Spain, Italy, Portugal, France, Germany, and Oman would have such low autism rates (two orders of magnitude lower than us) because their religions prohibit them from taking any birth control measures, including abortion, the pill, and the morning after pill. The fact that the autism rates in Mexico, China, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Venezuela is an order of magnitude higher than these West European nations, and an order of magnitude lower than ours, can be explained by their legalization of birth control, but an implementation at a much lower rate than us.
Across the country, from state to state, the states with the highest percentage of Catholics (and thus the lowest rates of contraception) have the lowest rates of autism, whereas those with the lowest percentage of Catholics (and thus the highest rates of contraception) are also the states with the highest rates of autism, with 1 in 718 children in Vermont vs. 1 in 67 children in Minnesota (a difference of more than one order of magnitude, larger than the differences across most countries).
How Else Can the Huge Gaps in Autism Rate in Europe be Explained?
Country 1988 2011 US 5 150 S Korea 5 126 Japan 5 60 Canada 1 22 Hong Kong 2 16 China 1 16 Mexico 1 14.3 Saudi Arabia 1 13 Indonesia 1 11.7 Venezuela 1 11 Portugal 1 9.2 France 1 5 Denmark 1 4 England 0.11 3 Germany 1 1.9 Oman 1 1.4 Italy 0 0 Spain 0 0
"The Pill was approved for use in June 1999. According to estimates, only 1.3 percent of 28 million Japanese females use the Pill, compared with 15.6 percent in the United States. The Pill prescription guidelines the government endorsed require Pill users to visit a doctor every three months for pelvic examinations and undergo tests for sexually transmitted diseases and uterine cancer. In the United States and Europe, in contrast, an annual or bi-annual clinic visit is standard for Pill users. However, as far back as 2007, many Japanese OBGYNs now only require a yearly visit for pill users, with the tri-annual visits only recommended to those who are older or at increased risk of side effects.[11]"
"I wonder if anyone has done a study to determine if there is a correlation between the rise in the use of birth control pills and the rise in autism and/or ADHD. The use of birth control is now in about the third generation, since it was women in the 1970’s that began using it widely. Perhaps there were genetic affects on the children that weren’t apparent (both boys and girls) whose mothers stopped taking the pill to have a child, but when the girls grew into their 20’s and began using birth control pills too, (in the 1990’s) perhaps the effects were cumulative. Now in 2011 some of those children would be 3rd generation “pill” users and in their child bearing years. There may be some unknown genetic problems in the reproductive systems in either sex as a result of a mother’s/grandmother's/great-grandmother's use of birth control pills. There also seems to be a correlation with race, since use of the “pill” became acceptable among whites first, then blacks, then Hispanics, hence the “lag” in incidence. It would be interesting also to know if other first world areas such as Canada or the European Union are experiencing the same increases in autism and ADHD and what the birth control use was, and if third world nations are showing the same incidence but not using birth control pills."
Finland
Autism in Northern Finland.
Source Department of Pediatrics, Clinic of Child Psychiatry, University of Oulu, Finland.
Abstract Recent research reports show that autistic spectrum disorders may actually be more common than previously believed. General awareness and clinical knowledge of these disorders have increased, and the criteria in the ICD-10 and the DSM-IV are also now more detailed. The diagnostic criteria and the methods of ascertainment influence the prevalence. The age specific incidence obtained in this study showed the cumulative incidence to be lowest, 6.1 per 10,000, in the oldest age group of 15- to 18-year-old children, and highest, 20.7 per 10,000, in the age group of 5-7 year-olds, when the criteria of the ICD-10 and the DSM-IV were used. In this study, almost 50% of the autistic cases had a tested IQ above 70. The degree of autism, as assessed by the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS), varied from mild autistic features in 8.5% through moderate in 58.5% to severe in 33.0%.
PMID: 11095038 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
England
Introduction
Christian ideas about contraception come from church teachings rather than scripture, as the Bible has little to say about the subject. As a result, their teachings on birth control are often based on different Christian interpretations of the meaning of marriage, sex and the family.
Christian acceptance of contraception is relatively new; all churches disapproved of artificial contraception until the start of the 20th century.
In modern times different Christian churches hold different views about the rightness and wrongness of using birth control.
Liberal Protestant churches often teach that it is acceptable to use birth control, as long as it is not used to encourage or permit promiscuous behaviour.
Less liberal churches only approve the use of contraception for people who are married to each other.
Since these churches regard sex outside marriage as morally wrong (or if not wrong, as less than good), they believe that abstaining from sex would be morally better than having sex and using birth control.
The incidence and changes in incidence with time are unclear in the UK.[52] The reported autism incidence in the UK rose starting before the first introduction of the MMR vaccine in 1989.[53] A 2004 study found that the reported incidence of pervasive developmental disorders in a general practice research database in England and Wales grew steadily during 1988-2001 from 0.11 to 2.98 per 10,000 person-years, and concluded that much of this increase may be due to changes in diagnostic practice.
United States
On June 10, 1957, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Enovid 10 mg (9.85 mg norethynodrel and 150 µg mestranol) for menstrual disorders, based on data from its use by more than 600 women. Numerous additional contraceptive trials showed Enovid at 10, 5, and 2.5 mg doses to be highly effective. On July 23, 1959, Searle filed a supplemental application to add contraception as an approved indication for 10, 5, and 2.5 mg doses of Enovid. The FDA refused to consider the application until Searle agreed to withdraw the lower dosage forms from the application. On May 9, 1960, the FDA announced it would approve Enovid 10 mg for contraceptive use, which it did on June 23, 1960, by which time Enovid 10 mg had been in general use for three years during which time, by conservative estimate, at least half a million women had used it.[23][36][41]
Although FDA-approved for contraceptive use, Searle never marketed Enovid 10 mg as a contraceptive. Eight months later, on February 15, 1961, the FDA approved Enovid 5 mg for contraceptive use. In July 1961, Searle finally began marketing Enovid 5 mg (5 mg norethynodrel and 75 µg mestranol) to physicians as a contraceptive.[23][24]
Although the FDA approved the first oral contraceptive in 1960, contraceptives were not available to married women in all states until Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 and were not available to unmarried women in all states until Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972.[20][24]
The first published case report of a blood clot and pulmonary embolism in a woman using Enavid (Enovid 10 mg in the U.S.) at a dose of 20 mg/day did not appear until November 1961, four years after its approval, by which time it had been used by over one million women.[36][42][43] It would take almost a decade of epidemiological studies to conclusively establish an increased risk of venous thrombosis in oral contraceptive users and an increased risk of stroke and myocardial infarction in oral contraceptive users who smoke or have high blood pressure or other cardiovascular or cerebrovascular risk factors.[23] These risks of oral contraceptives were dramatized in the 1969 book The Doctors' Case Against the Pill by feminist journalist Barbara Seaman who helped arrange the 1970 Nelson Pill Hearings called by Senator Gaylord Nelson.[44] The hearings were conducted by Senators who were all men and the witnesses in the first round of hearings were all men, leading Alice Wolfson and other feminists to protest the hearings and generate media attention.[24] Their work led to mandating the inclusion of patient package inserts with oral contraceptives to explain their possible side effects and risks to help facilitate informed consent.[45][46][47] Today's standard dose oral contraceptives contain an estrogen dose that is one third lower than the first marketed oral contraceptive and contain lower doses of different, more potent progestins in a variety of formulations.[23][24][25]
Australia
The first oral contraceptive introduced outside the United States was Schering's Anovlar (norethindrone acetate 4 mg + ethinyl estradiol 50 µg) on January 1, 1961 in Australia.[48]
Germany
The first oral contraceptive introduced in Europe was Schering's Anovlar on June 1, 1961 in West Germany.[48] The lower hormonal dose, still in use, was studied by the Belgian Gynaecologist Ferdinand Peeters.[49][50]
Britain
Before the mid-1960s, the United Kingdom did not require pre-marketing approval of drugs. The British Family Planning Association (FPA) through its clinics was then the primary provider of family planning services in Britain and provided only contraceptives that were on its Approved List of Contraceptives (established in 1934). In 1957, Searle began marketing Enavid (Enovid 10 mg in the U.S.) for menstrual disorders. Also in 1957, the FPA established a Council for the Investigation of Fertility Control (CIFC) to test and monitor oral contraceptives which began animal testing of oral contraceptives and in 1960 and 1961 began three large clinical trials in Birmingham, Slough, and London.[36][51]
In March 1960, the Birmingham FPA began trials of norethynodrel 2.5 mg + mestranol 50 µg, but a high pregnancy rate initially occurred when the pills accidentally contained only 36 µg of mestranol—the trials were continued with norethynodrel 5 mg + mestranol 75 µg (Conovid in Britain, Enovid 5 mg in the U.S.).[52] In August 1960, the Slough FPA began trials of norethynodrel 2.5 mg + mestranol 100 µg (Conovid-E in Britain, Enovid-E in the U.S.).[53] In May 1961, the London FPA began trials of Schering's Anovlar.[54]
In October 1961, at the recommendation of the Medical Advisory Council of its CIFC, the FPA added Searle's Conovid to its Approved List of Contraceptives.[55] On December 4, 1961, Enoch Powell, then Minister of Health, announced that the oral contraceptive pill Conovid could be prescribed through the NHS at a subsidized price of 2s per month.[56][57] In 1962, Schering's Anovlar and Searle's Conovid-E were added to the FPA's Approved List of Contraceptives.[36][53][54]
France
On December 28, 1967, the Neuwirth Law legalized contraception in France, including the pill.[58] The pill is the most popular form of contraception in France, especially among young women. It accounts for 60% of the birth control used in France. The abortion rate has remained stable since the introduction of the pill.[59]
Japan
In Japan, lobbying from the Japan Medical Association prevented the Pill from being approved for nearly 40 years. Two main objections raised by the association were safety concerns over long-term use of the Pill, and concerns that the Pill use would lead to diminished use of condoms and thereby potentially increase sexually transmitted infection (STI) rates.[60] As of 2004, condoms accounted for 80% of birth control use in Japan, and this may explain Japan's comparatively low rates of AIDS.[11]
The Pill was approved for use in June 1999. According to estimates, only 1.3 percent of 28 million Japanese females use the Pill, compared with 15.6 percent in the United States. The Pill prescription guidelines the government endorsed require Pill users to visit a doctor every three months for pelvic examinations and undergo tests for sexually transmitted diseases and uterine cancer. In the United States and Europe, in contrast, an annual or bi-annual clinic visit is standard for Pill users. However, as far back as 2007, many Japanese OBGYNs now only require a yearly visit for pill users, with the tri-annual visits only recommended to those who are older or at increased risk of side effects.[11]
http://sfari.org/news-and-opinion/news/2011/researchers-track-down-autism-rates-across-the-globe
The first prevalence studies in any region typically find low numbers. For instance, the new study in Brazil found 27.2 cases of autism per 10,000 people, and last year's report from Oman found 1.4, compared with the oft-quoted U.S. average of 66. Similarly small numbers (see map) have come out of studies in China (16.1), Indonesia (11.7) and Israel (10).
These low rates are likely to be the result of the methods used, experts say. Most first-pass epidemiological studies are based on a review of medical records, which are often incomplete or non-existent, depending on the state of a country's healthcare system and the number of clinics with experts qualified to diagnose childhood disorders. "A records-based approach can only count the cases that you can see," Grinker says.
This is also a problem in the U.S. Data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows the highest autism prevalence in states with the best autism health and support services, such as Arizona (121 cases per 10,000 people), Missouri (121) and New Jersey (106). In contrast, areas with fewer services have lower rates, such as Alabama (60), Arkansas (69) and Florida (42).
Over time, however, as more parents and clinicians become familiar with autism, prevalence goes up. In many parts of the world, including the U.S., U.K., Canada, Japan and Scandinavia, "The rates were flat through the late '80s, and then suddenly a massive rise happened at same time," Fombonne says. The rise is probably not due to a mysterious global environmental exposure, he says. "It's more likely to reflect new concepts of autism worldwide."
Low autism prevalence is not confined to poor countries. A handful of small studies in France, for example, have found rates around 5 cases per 10,000 people. One study in Germany calculated it to be 1.9, and another in Portugal 16.7.
Differences in scientific approach among these countries may affect the results, notes Mayada Elsabbagh, research associate at Birkbeck University of London.
"In some European countries, they have very psychodynamic views about autism," she says. "If you don't think this disorder is driven by biological causes, then you wouldn't think there was any use in doing epidemiological studies or trying to understand causal pathways."
Elsabbagh is working with 11 international researchers on a systematic review sponsored by the World Health Organization, including articles published in languages other than English.
"Some of us started with the bias that there's nothing out there, but it turns out there's a lot, they just don't tend to be in mainstream journals," she says. The report is expected to be published later this year.
http://www.stellamarie.com/index.php/2010/06/24/autism-rates-per-state
In case you can't see the pic:
Autism Rate Per State Public Schools, 8-year-olds
Minnesota 1/67
Oregon 1/77
Maine 1/80
Connecticut 1/99
Rhode Island 1/104
Pennsylvania 1/105
Indiana 1/106
Massachusetts 1/107
National Avg 1/110
New Jersey 1/114
Wisconsin 1/120
Nevada 1/124
Virginia 1/127
Maryland 1/127
Michigan 1/128
California 1/128
New Hampshire 1/138
Missouri 1/140
North Carolina 1/140
US & Outlying 1/143
Georgia 1/145
Wyoming 1/149
New York 1/151
Arizona 1/153
Florida 1/155
Ohio 1/158
\Illinois 1/158
Washington 1/159
Delaware 1/160
Texas 1/163
Nebraska 1/168
Utah 1/175
D.C. 1/178
Kentucky 1/181
Idaho 1/185
W. Virginia 1/193
S. Dakota 1/199
Tennessee 1/205
Hawaii 1/206
Alaska 1/212
S. Carolina 1/217
Kansas 1/219
N. Dakota 1/219
Arkansas 1/224
Alabama 1/227
Montana 1/233
Colorado 1/273
New Mexico 1/275
Louisiana 1/295
Oklahoma 1/309
Mississippi 1/317
Iowa 1/718
Vermont -
http://www.child-psych.org/2009/12/a-closer-look-at-the-new-cdc-autism-prevalance-rates.html
In sum, the 2006 data came from 11 states (Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wisconsin). Teams at these sites reviewed the records of 8-year-old children living in specific communities. The teams reviewed medical/health and educational records for evidence of a probable autism diagnosis (education records were only monitored in 6 of the 11 states). When probable cases were identified, the records were then reviewed by clinicians to provide a final diagnosis based on DSM-IV criteria. The total number of ASD cases was then compared to the population of 8-year-olds for each target community.
The average ASD estimate across all sites was 9 per 1,000 children (1 in 111 children), but there was significant variability between the states:
Alabama: 1 in 166
Arizona: 1 in 82
Colorado: 1 in 133
Florida: 1 in 238
Georgia: 1 in 98
Maryland: 1 in 108
Missouri: 1 in 82
North Carolina: 1 in 96
Pennsylvania: 1 in 119
South Carolina: 1 in 116
Wisconsin: 1 in 131
Those sites that included a review of educational records had higher prevalence than those that relied only on health records:
Sites that included health and educational records: 1 in 98 children
Sites that included only health records: 1 in 133 children
Prevalence for boys alone
Alabama: 1 in 110
Arizona: 1 in 53
Colorado: 1 in 87
Florida: 1 in 137
Georgia: 1 in 60
Maryland: 1 in 64
Missouri: 1 in 52
North Carolina: 1 in 59
Pennsylvania: 1 in 89
South Carolina: 1 in 70
Wisconsin: 1 in 79
The picture is much better for girls.
Prevalence for girls alone
Alabama: 1 in 345
Arizona: 1 in 204
Colorado: 1 in 294
Florida: 1 in 1000
Georgia: 1 in 294
Maryland: 1 in 417
Missouri: 1 in 213
North Carolina: 1 in 294
Pennsylvania: 1 in 303
South Carolina: 1 in 385
Wisconsin: 1 in 435
Increases in ASD diagnoses from 2002 to 2006 among 8-year-old children
Alabama: 82%
Arizona: 95%
Colorado: 27% (not statistically significant)
Florida: No 2002 data
Georgia: 34%
Maryland: 37%
Missouri: 66%
North Carolina: 60%
Pennsylvania: 58%
South Carolina: 43%
Wisconsin: 46%
AVERAGE: 57% increase.
Budget Reductions
The issue: Numbers of special-ed students grow as number of dollars shrink.
Race, morale, paperwork. For many districts, these issues pale compared with the daunting reality of smaller budgets and larger numbers of special-needs kids. "Autism is growing exponentially," says Baldwin County's Carpenter, which now has four center-based programs for elementary, middle and high school kids with autism. In her district of 26,000 students, 4,000 or about one in six students receives special services. "About 25 to 30 of our kids require a licensed nurse at all times, for things like catheterization. That means there's always an LPN on campus with the child, and an LPN must travel on the school bus, too," she adds. For some kids, that requires two shifts per day. And these kids also require a paraprofessional, which means the school gets hit up for another salary. Dual certification is one solution Carpenter's exploring.
In the old days, a district might simply have said we can't handle it and sent a child with severe needs out of district. But out-of-district placements are not an option for lots of schools. Susan Kelch in El Paso says that the Texas School for the Blind is 400 miles away, making outplacement a moot point. And states don't much like outplacement, anyway. "We were sanctioned for sending too many kids out of district," explains Elaine Dykeman, CSE-CPSE supervisor for Ravina-Coeymans Selkirk School District in upstate N.Y. "We had to bring our numbers down." Dykeman says 65 of the district's 430 special ed students are outsourced. The majority of children who are going out of district are students with behavior problems.
Dykeman says the district has experienced a paradigm shift in the way it educates special-needs students. General ed teachers are being told that a student is a student is a student, and if you're the content specialist, you're going to teach them all. "That caused quite a hoopla," she says. To help teachers through the change, Dykeman created several programs. First, the district got a $40,000 grant to study the kind of professional development needed to move special education forward. Now teachers are being trained in functional behavioral management, developing co-teaching programs and working on RTI models. The district is also testing a variety of six- to 10-week reading programs to see which strategies work best for different students. And Dykeman's team has put Instructional Support Teams in place in every school to identify at-risk students earlier.(AP) — Walgreen Co.'s fiscal third quarter earnings jumped 16 percent compared with last year, aided in part by a lower income tax rate, but the drugstore chain's performance again fell short of Wall Street's expectations.
Deerfield-based Walgreen also left investors and analysts hanging after announcing quarterly results today. Walgreen executives said they are considering their option to complete a takeover of Swiss health and beauty retailer Alliance Boots — a move that could involve an overseas reincorporation — but they won't be ready to discuss their next step until late July or early August.
Related: Joe Cahill on Business: "Big changes in store at Walgreen"
For the fiscal third quarter, Walgreen said an increase in foreign income helped knock its tax rate down to 31.5 percent, compared with 38.7 percent last year. As a result, the company's income tax provision dropped $43 million in the quarter.
The lower-than-expected tax rate contributed a benefit of at least 8 cents per share toward the company's bottom line, Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Ajay Jain said in a research note that described Walgreen's overall earnings as weak.
Walgreen Co. earned $722 million, or 75 cents per share, in the quarter that ended May 31. That's up from $624 million, or 65 cents per share, a year ago.
Adjusted earnings excluding one-time items totaled 91 cents per share, two cents below average analyst expectations. The drugstore chain also fell short in its fiscal second quarter.
'SQUEEZED FROM BOTH SIDES'
Walgreen's revenue climbed 6 percent to $19.4 billion. Analysts expected $19.44 billion in revenue, according to FactSet.
Walgreen is feeling pressure from both drugmakers who are raising prices and payers like health insurers that are reducing what they will pay for prescriptions, said Vishnu Lekraj, who covers the company for Morningstar.
"They're getting squeezed from both sides, both from the supplier and the customer," he said.
Walgreen acquired an initial 45 percent stake in Alliance Boots in 2012, and it has an option to buy the rest of the company next year. Alliance Boots runs the largest drugstore chain in the United Kingdom.
Company executives told analysts today that they have to consider a host of variables like the deal's capital structure and what it could do for Walgreen's tax rate before they discuss their decision later this summer.
"We are working around the clock to try to understand all the above so that we are able |
international counterparts on training and ways to improve people management, especially in SMEs.”Get the latest from TODAY Sign up for our newsletter
Jan. 12, 2016, 12:01 PM GMT / Updated Jan. 12, 2016, 8:30 PM GMT / Source: TODAY By Eun Kyung Kim
President Obama, on the eve of his final State of the Union address, rejected the message Donald Trump has capitalized on in his presidential campaign.
"The message that Donald Trump's putting out has had adherence a lot of times during the course of our history. You know, talk to me if he wins. Then we'll have a conversation about how responsible I feel about it," he told TODAY’s Matt Lauer in an exclusive interview less than a week after making an emotional speech on gun control efforts.
“But I'm pretty confident that the overwhelming majority of Americans are looking for the kind of politics that does feed our hopes and not our fears, that does work together and doesn't try to divide, that isn't looking for simplistic solutions and scapegoating but looks for us buckling down and figuring out, 'How do we make things work for the next generation.'"
Obama also expressed disappointment that he enters the final year of his term in a deeply divided country, politically.
RELATED: TODAY at the White House — see all the highlights!
"It's a regret," he said, and one he plans to address in his final State of the Union. Yet, “I could not be prouder of what we've accomplished,” he insisted. “And sometimes we look at the past through rose-colored glasses. It's been pretty divided in the past. There've been times where, you know, people beat each other with canes."
TODAY was live from the White House Tuesday, providing viewers with a tour inside rooms rarely ever seen by the public. In addition, Vice President Biden joined Savannah Guthrie for an exclusive interview.
"Yes, I think it's possible,'' Biden told Savannah when asked whether he could imagine Trump taking the Oval Office.
The interviews and visit come just hours before Obama makes his final appearance before a joint session of Congress.
Obama's comments mark his first since addressing the nation last week, when he used his executive authority to skirt congressional lawmakers and tighten gun-purchasing rules.
RELATED: Joe Biden: 'It's possible' Donald Trump could be the next president
The president admitted he was surprised by how emotional he got during that news conference. He said he didn't expect that recalling the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which he described as "one of the worst (days) of my presidency," would set off such an emotional response.
But he said timing of the event probably played a role. He had just returned from a Christmas vacation where he spent a lot of time with his wife and two daughters, one of whom will be going away to college soon.
That, along with seeing families of the Sandy Hook victims, “who I’ve gotten to know over the course of several years, and thinking about how any parent feels with that loss, it felt very personal to me.”
Obama also admitted that earlier in his presidency, he probably would have choked back the emotion.
"I might have clamped it down," he said, admitting "there's no doubt that I am looser now."
Obama acknowledged that the nation has endured deep trauma over the past ten years, including Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq war and the worst financial crisis to hit the country. But he said the public also should focus on the nation's resiliency.
“It is sometimes important for us to step back and take measure of how far we've come,” he said. “The economy right now is doing better than any other economy in the world by a significant margin. We remain the strongest nation on earth by far."
And despite Trump's claims about the impact of terrorism and immigration on the nation, "there are no existential threats facing us.”
Asked if he could envision Trump one day delivering a State of the Union address, Obama said: "Well, I can imagine it — in a "Saturday Night (Live)" skit."
"Look, anything's possible," he continued. "And I think we shouldn't be complacent. I think everybody's got to work hard."
Obama said if he had the chance to go back and advise an earlier version of himself, he would recommend that he "communicate constantly and with confidence" to the public because Americans have a consistent need to hear from their president.
"This place has a tendency to isolate you," he said.Over the years, GIGABYTE has released many products that are good, and many other products that are good AND focused on overclocking (think their SOC Force motherboards). One thing we haven’t seen on from them, on that front, is within their GPU lineup. Sure, the Windforce line is more than solid with the cooler, but their new Extreme line should take their video cards to another level. GIGABYTE promises a better overclocking GPU with their sorting technology, dubbed Gauntlet sorting, high factory overclocks, good cooling, durability, protection, and being “Xtreme” friendly. Let’s take a look and see what they did on the GTX 970 Extreme we have to review!
Specifications & Features
Below is a list of specifications and features from the GIGABYTE media kit. We all know the GTX 970 silicon (GM-204) comes to the table with its 28 nm process, so we will just get into the card’s specifications.
The base clock comes in at 1190 MHz, with a ‘base’ boost of 1342 MHz. This is a difference of 139 MHz on the base clock from the reference design GTX 970s, so it is a pretty healthy boost. The memory comes in at 7.1 Gbps or 1774 MHz ‘non DDR5’ rates which rests on the 256 bit bus. For I/O, there are DL DVI-I, HDMI, and three DisplayPorts. GIGABYTE recommends a 600 W PSU for this card (though I feel that is really overestimating unless you are truly going extreme and modifying the BIOS – more on that later).
More details can be found at the GIGABYTE webpage for the GTX 970 Extreme.
GIGABYTE GTX 970 Extreme Specifications Chipset GeForce GTX 970 Core Clock Base/Boost clock: 1190/1342 MHz (ref: 1051/1178) Process Technology 28 nm Memory Clock 7.1 Gbps (ref: 7 Gbps) Memory Size 4GB Memory Bus 256-bit Memory Type GDDR5 Card Bus PCIe 3.0 Direct X / Open GL DX12 / 4.5 Max Resolution (Digital / Analog) 4096 x 2160 / 2048 x 1536 Multi-View 4 I/O Dual-Link DVI-I (1) / HDMI (1) / DisplayPort (3) Power Requirement 600 W (with two 8-pin external power connectors)
Below is a list of features from GIGABYTE’s media guide.
With the Extreme series comes a set of mostly unique features on their cards. The first is their GPU Gauntlet Sorting. This alludes to the fact that the GPUs are binned better than some other series, but the tangible differences are in the hardware used. It has a total of 12 phases for power to assist with higher overclocking capability and needs versus the reference models with half that. It comes with better, Titan X grade, chokes and capacitors for cooler running and more durability.
A high-end overclocked GPU deserves a great cooler when you can pump more volts through it, and GIGABYTE doesn’t disappoint here. They use their venerable Windforce 3 cooling system that has composite copper heat-pipes, a special fin architecture, unique fan blade design (delivers 23% more airflow via special triangle design at the end of the fans which is then directed through the fan by a “3D stripe curve”). Like a lot of manufacturers, GIGABYTE’s Windforce 3 cooler uses what they call 3D-Active Fan which leaves the fans off until higher loads or temperatures hit the card, 60 °C in this case. You can see the fan’s status by looking at the two LEDs on the stop of the card. One says “stop”, the other says “silent” to display which mode it is in/the fans are moving or not.
Next up is something that benefits everyone, but in particular the extreme crowd that will want to take this card cold… it has a conformal coating! This coating helps keep moisture, corrosion, and dust off the PCB. I don’t recall ever seeing a GPU with a conformal coating before. We have seen a motherboard with it (ASRock OC Formula series), but not a GPU.
Another cool value-add on the GIGABYTE 970 Extreme is the PCIe smart detection LEDs that are on the PCIe power leads. If there is any instability in the power or no power at all, the LED will flash letting you know there is an issue. It also logs the information into their overclocking software, OC Guru II, which will further aid in troubleshooting problems with the device.
Wrapping up some of the major features, we end with GIGABYTE’s Ultra Durable VGA designation. This entails 2 oz of copper on the PCB, solid caps, metal chokes, and upgraded MOSFETs (lower RDSon).
There are all kinds of goodies on here to help get the most out of the silicon on the board, that is for sure! You can find a more complete list on their website (images also Courtesy of GIGABYTE).
GPU Gauntlet™ Sorting
Forged with only the top-notch GPU, the GIGABYTE XTREME GAMING graphics cards guarantee the higher overclocking capability in terms of excellent power switching, ensuring the highest performance without compromising system reliability.
WINDFORCE 3X Cooling System
The WINDFORCE 3X cooling system features with composite copper heat-pipes, special fin architecture, unique blade fan design, and GIGABYTE ‘Triangle Cool’ technology, together delivering an effective heat dissipation capacity for higher performance at lower temperature.3D-Active Fan with LED Indicators
GIGABYTE’s XTREME GAMING graphics cards are equipped with
3D-Active Fan, the industry’s first 0dB semi-passive fan design
introduced by GIGABYTE back in 2007.
The fans will remain off when the GPU is under a set loading or temperature for low power gaming. Besides, LED fan indicators on the top of the graphics card provide an instant display of whether the fans are spinning or not. Aerospace-grade PCB Coating for Best Protection
PCB applied with a breathable aerospace-grade coating to shield against moisture, dust, and corrosion for a complete protection. PCIE smart power detection with LED indicators
Be alert when PCI-E voltage is unstable with the smart power LED indicators. Any power abnormality is also recorded in the system through OC GURU utility software for troubleshooting. 12-phase power design and Titan X-grade Chocks and Capacitors
Built for extreme overclocking with 12 power phases backed by highest-grade chokes and capacitors for supreme durability.
GPU-Z
Next is our always gratuitous screenshot of GPUz to validate the specifications… and it does! The GTX 970 works on the GM204 core which sports a total of 1664 shaders with a pixel fill rate of 66.6 GPixel/s and a texture fillrate of 123.8 GTexel/s. ROPs and TMUs come in at 56 and 104 respectively. The memory totals 4 GB of Elpida based GDDR5 on the 256 bit bus. It comes in at a clock speed of 1774 MHz (7100 MHz GDDR5) which translates to 227.1 GB/s bandwidth. Stock clocks are 1190 MHz core that boosts to at least 1342 MHz (1443 MHz actual sustained).
Photo Op – Meet the GIGABYTE GTX 970 Extreme
Retail Packaging and Accessories
In the slideshow, you will first notice the retail packaging for the Extreme series of cards is a bit different than their normal line. Here we have a black on orange theme with the GIGABYTE Extreme Gaming symbol prominently placed on the front of the package. Also, on the front, is the model of the card inside, as well as a couple of its high-level features. The back of the box goes into more details we went over above such as the 3D-Active fans, LED control, and the GPU Gauntlet. Inside the box is another box with the GPU sitting inside its anti-static bag surrounded by form fitting foam. The accessories include the driver disk, quick installation guide, a 6 to 8 pin converter, and a wrist or headband.
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The Card
Below you can finally see what the card looks like! We see the Windforce 3 cooler and its triple fan setup, a dual slot cooling solution. The shroud is mostly black with a grey accent between the back two fans. We see it does come with a backplate to protect the PCB. The top of the card has LEDs for the Windforce writing, as well as the words ‘silent’ and ‘stop’ flanking that wording. Silent and stop are lit up depending on which mode the fan is in. Around the fans, there is a unique and really cool looking circular LED which by default glows orange (again you can control the color of these as well as any ‘motion’ through the OC Guru II software). It is a good looking card that should fit well with a lot of build themes due to its neutral color scheme and variable color LEDs.
A Closer Look
Taking a look at the I/O we see a typical complement of DVI (DL DVI-I flavor), HDMI, and three full size DisplayPort ports. For this version of the GTX 970, you will need two 8-pin PCIe connections. With those, the card can accept 375 W if you include the PCIe power. This thing seems ready to go places with that amount of power available, no?
As usual, I took apart the card to show off the PCB as well as the heatsink with its the finely brushed (not mirror) finish on the copper base and the six heatpipes that make their way through the fin array. You can see that all the memory and VRM area is cooled. I was a bit worried about the three smaller fans being a noisy when spinning up, but it wasn’t an issue until the fan reached around 80% (which only happens when set manually).
Below is a picture of the Elpida W4032BABG-70-F memory IC’s used.
Monitoring/Overclocking Software – OC Guru II
Pictured below is GIGABYTE’s GPU monitoring and overclocking software, OC Guru II. This software is able to monitor conditions on the card like temperature and fan speed. It will also allow you to change the LED color and style, as well as put an on screen display. It also has graphing capabilities as well so one can see a history of metrics if you choose. I have no issues with the software as far as how easy it was to use or its looks. Very simple and straightforward folks!
Performance
Test Setup CPU Intel 6700K @ Stock (for the motherboard – 4.0 boost to 4.2 GHz) Motherboard ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme RAM 2×4 GB DDR4 GSkill Ripjaws 4 @ 3000 MHz 15-15-15-35 2T 1.35 V Graphics Card GIGABYTE GTX 970 Extreme
Stock: Core 1190 MHz / 1342 MHz Boost (1443 MHz actual boost), 1774 MHz vRAM
Overclocked: Core 1266 MHz / 1418 MHz (1533 MHz actual boost), 1902 MHz vRAM Solid State Drive OCZ Vertex 3 Power Supply SeaSonic SS-1000XP (80+ Platinum) Operating System Windows 7 x64 SP3+ Graphics Drivers 358.91 Equipment Digital Multimeter
Other cards used for comparison are as follows (links are to their reviews):
Benchmarking Method/Settings
Note all testing below uses 1920×1080 screen resolution (settings also carry over to 2560 x 1440 and Surround/Eyefinity testing if applicable).
All Synthetic benchmarks were at their default settings. 3DMark 11 = Performance Level, 3DMark Fire Strike = Extreme default setting.
= Performance Level, = Extreme default setting. Unigine Valley Benchmark v1.0 – 1080p, DX11, Ultra Quality, 8x AA, Full Screen
– 1080p, DX11, Ultra Quality, 8x AA, Full Screen Unigine Heaven (HWbot) – Extreme setting
– Extreme setting Crysis 3 – Very High settings with 8xMSAA/16xAF (2nd level when you procure and use the Crossbow to get across the level and kill the Helicopter)
– Very High settings with 8xMSAA/16xAF (2nd level when you procure and use the Crossbow to get across the level and kill the Helicopter) Metro:LL – DX11, Very High, 16xAF, Motion Blur – Normal, SSAA Enabled, DX11 Tessellation – Very High, Advanced PhysX – Disabled, Scene D6
– DX11, Very High, 16xAF, Motion Blur – Normal, SSAA Enabled, DX11 Tessellation – Very High, Advanced PhysX – Disabled, Scene D6 Battlefield 4 – Default Ultra setting (Tashgar level – ‘on rails’ car scene)
– Default Ultra setting (Tashgar level – ‘on rails’ car scene) Final Fantasy XIV:ARR – Default Maximum setting
– Default Maximum setting Dirt: Rally – 1080p, 8x MSAA, everything on Ultra that can be, enable Advanced Blending
– 1080p, 8x MSAA, everything on Ultra that can be, enable Advanced Blending Grand Theft Auto V – 1080p, high settings.
– 1080p, high settings. Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor – 1080p, everything Ultra that can be (Lighting quality High), FXAA and Camera + Object Blur, DOF/OIT/Tessellation enabled.
– 1080p, everything Ultra that can be (Lighting quality High), FXAA and Camera + Object Blur, DOF/OIT/Tessellation enabled. More detail is in our article: Overclockers.com GPU Testing Procedures
Synthetic Benchmarks
We, as usual, start off with our synthetic benchmarks. First, we will look at the heavily tessellated Unigine Valley. In this test, the GTX 970 Extreme scored 2,568 points. This is about 5% slower than the slightly more expensive R9 390 and a whopping 24%+ to the last generation flagship, a highly overclocked 780 Ti.
Moving on to Unigine Heaven (Hwbot Extreme version), the GIGABYTE 970 scored 3,158.9, beating out the venerable and highly overclocked Galax GTX 970 HOF+ by over 5%. Again we see it falling short of the R9 390 by 5% (on the nose) and losing out by a large margin over 20%, to the 780 Ti.
The next set of benchmarks are from Futuremark. 3DMark 11 and 3DMark (Fire Strike – Extreme). In Fire Strike (Extreme), the GIGABYTE GTX 970 Extreme scores 5,494 points beating out the 390 by 3% and falling just shy of the 780 Ti here by 3%. A solid showing in this modern benchmark.
In 3DMark 11, an oldy but goodie, the GIGABYTE GTX 970 Extreme scored 15,745, beating out the HOF by over 4%, but again falling behind the 390 (3%). The 780Ti is a bit over 1% faster in this test.
Gaming Benchmarks
In our first look at games, we start out with Crysis 3. In this set of testing, the 970 manages 39 FPS easily beating out the HOF by nearly 3 FPS (or almost 10%), while falling behind the 390 by about 5 FPS or almost 15%. Still, 39 FPS in Crysis 3 on Ultra is a pretty good showing.
In Dirt: Rally, the 970 Extreme posts 57.9 FPS easily beating out the R9 390 by almost 20 FPS and 35%! It seems clear that this game, though it is an AMD ‘Gaming Evolved’ title, needs some optimization work on the AMD side. The 780 Ti powers through it though beating the 970 by around 8 FPS. Almost 60 FPS in Ultra? A good showing here.
Last up here is Metro: Last Light. In this title, the GIGABYTE 970 Extreme hits 54.7 FPS while beating everything else except that pesky 780 Ti.
Looking at some less stressful on the GPU titles, we start with Battlefield 4. Here the 970 Extreme shows 80 FPS just a hair behind the 390, and barely beating the HOF. That 780Ti is still leading the way.
In Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, the GIGABYTE 970 hits 83.6 FPS stock beating out the 390 by 2 FPS.
Last, but not least, is GTA V. Here the 970 manages 73.3 FPS easily beating out the R9 390 by nearly 6 FPS and falling behind the 780 Ti by around 5 FPS.
One last image, this is for 2560×1440 resolution. Outside of Crysis, everything is above the magic 30 FPS line for playability so you should be set on that resolution as well. Just keep an eye on vRAM use in certain titles to prevent going much over the 3.5 GB mark which can cause potential hitching due to increased access of the remaining 500 MB which is a lot slower.
I did not present the results at 5760×1080 since more than half of these titles dipped well below the 30 FPS threshold. You will want another 970 to drive that resolution properly, but you again can run into a vRAM issue so you need to be careful.
Temperatures & Power Consumption
Below we see the temperatures I read from our testing methods. Surprising to me was that the temperatures matched up across the board when overclocked and stock. So shocked was I, that I took the time to re-run the tests, but came up with the same data. The card ended up sitting idle at 37 °C and under load at 66 °C. The fan spun up to around 68% for 66 °C and was nearly inaudible.
On the power consumption side, during stock testing, I peaked at 270 W in 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme. After overclocking, that number went up about 22 W to 292 W peak (at the wall). While this card will likely use a bit more power since its clocks are high out of the gate, a quality 500 W PSU is still plenty for taking this card to its ambient cooled and stock BIOS limits. If you are going to get crazy and start modifying the BIOS and adding voltage over what you can already do, perhaps something more is in order.
Pushing the Limits
It’s here that I took the gloves off, rolled up my sleeves a bit, raised up the voltage and got to see where I landed. I managed to get the core stable at 1555 MHz (actual) @ 1.26 V (+54 mV), while I was pushing the memory (on stock voltage, mind you) to 1977 MHz. That seems to be just about the limit on the core. I had more voltage to go, but it just didn’t seem to respond to it. The power limits on this card were not even close to being capped which is a great thing. Most cards, you cannot raise it up much at all without hitting it and seeing throttling. I have to admit, I was looking for 1600 MHz on this card, but 1555 MHz was solid. I dug into the BIOS and it seems its power limit is something around 300 W which explains while at stock I was sitting around 65% of the power limit. Hopefully, NVIDIA will loosen their stranglehold on these partners with the power limit.
Conclusion
The GTX 970 has been out for quite some time, over a year, and new models from NVIDIA’s partners are still trickling out. The GIGABYTE GTX 970 Extreme promised to bring more robust power delivery, and binned GPU for better overclocking performance. It really feels like GIGABYTE looked squarely at its competitors in this enthusiast segment and wanted to play in the same sandbox. To keep it short and sweet, it looks like they met those high level goals. The power delivery is right up there with the 970 HOF I tested several months ago, and the clockspeeds too. Currently, it is one of the highest clocked GTX 970s available trailing only the Zotac cards and matching an EVGA SSC Gaming card. However, those cards do not have the power delivery this one does and I doubt they bin it as GIGABYTE states they are. For those that want to take the card cold, GIGABYTE has you covered and it comes with a conformal coating to help prevent moisture from reaching the electronics. This is, as far as I can recall, a unique feature for a video card.
But, it’s not all in the power delivery. You need to keep things cool. GIGABYTE keeps everything on the card cool with their Windforce cooling which has three fans to move cool air through the fin array. I though with the fans being smaller noise may be an issue after they spin up (remember they don’t turn on until 60 °C), but I could barely hear them with its default profile. As you saw above, temperatures were kept in check at the same default fan profile coming in at 66 °C. Seems like the Windforce cooler is doing its job!
If I were to register an issue with the card, it is the fact that it does not have a dual BIOS. Though the power limits are pretty high already, BIOS flashing for this level of card is almost a given for the enthusiast and extreme overclocking crowd. I would have liked to have seen that option available.
Pricing on the GIGABYTE GTX 970 Extreme comes in at $379.99 (its MSRP) at Newegg. That Zotac with slightly higher clocks comes in at a mind blowing $649 (3rd party seller raking people over the coals), while the EVGA comes in a bit lower at $349.99. That EVGA is only using a 6 phase setup, the Zotac though has some ‘power boost’ caps on the back (not sure on power phases… other reviews curiously do not mention that). It is even more robust than the mighty 970 HOF!! Outside of that outlandishly priced Zotac AMP!, and the ASUS Strix for $386 (also 3rd party), this is the next highest priced GTX 970. That said, its default clockspeed and boost are the highest outside of the Zotac offerings. Which means out of the box, it should be the fastest GTX 970 (again minus that incredibly overpriced Zotac). With the great aftermarket cooling, both effective and quiet, the souped up power delivery area and binning, the price point fits in among other GTX 970’s. If we take a look at the R9 390, one of its competitors, outside of Crysis 3, it is just as fast or faster performance wise. There are some R9 390’s on sale for $299, but most R9 390’s fall around the low to mid $300 range. I would like to see ALL GTX 970’s priced a bit lower to compete a bit better with these cards as the performance difference is, generally, not too much. I have seen articles today about NVIDIA dropping their prices too, so hopefully that is across the line.
If you are in the market for am appropriately priced, fastest, and hassle free GTX 970 out of the box, you just found it. If you are looking to overclock a GTX 970 to the limits and need the most robust solution to do so, look no further. The GIGABYTE GTX 970 Extreme is Overclockers.com approved.
– Joe Shields (Earthdog)Image copyright Reuters Image caption The front of the bus was ripped away in the collision
At least 16 people have been killed and 30 others injured in a collision between a freight train and a bus at a level crossing in northern Mexico.
Pictures showed the bus split in half by the force of the crash, in the town of Anahuac in Tamaulipas state.
Local reports said the driver of the bus may have ignored the stop light at the crossing.
The bus was reported to have been carrying about 60 passengers although it only had seating for 40.
A statement by the train's operator, Kansas City Southern de Mexico, confirmed there had been "a lamentable accident" at about 17:25 (23:25 GMT) on Friday.
A Mexican official quoted by AP news agency said investigators were looking into whether the bus driver had tried to beat the train to the crossing.
Local Mayor Desiderio Urteaga said two children were among the dead. The bus driver was reported to have survived.
The bus had been travelling north from the city of Nuevo Laredo in Tamaulipas to the state of Coahuila.Walt Flanagan Net Worth: Walt Flanagan is an American reality television personality, comic book store manager, comic book artist, podcaster, and songwriter who has a net worth of $600 thousand dollars. Walt Flanagan was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey in October 1967. He is a long-time friend of actor Kevin Smith and turned Kevin on to comic books. Flanagan manages Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash comic book store in Red Bank, NJ. He co-hosts the Tell 'Em Steve-Dave! Podcasts with Bryan Johnson and Brian Quinn. Flanagan is also featured in the AMC reality TV series Comic Book Men. Walt has appeared in the films Clerks., Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Vulgar, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and Clerks II. Since 2012 he has been a featured cast member on the TV series Comic Book Men. Flanagan has been cited as the influence for the character Brodie in Mallrats and originated the character Olaf in Clerks. He is the artist for the original comic series Cryptozoic Man. Walt is married to Debra Flanagan and has two daughters. His family's home sustained catastrophic damage from Hurricane Sandy.Government spying on us using credit card Info (VIDEO)
Number of View :12290
A newly released US government document revealed federal law enforcement agencies have been tracking the use of credit cards, member cards and travel reservations online without obtaining warrants.
Security researcher Christopher Soghoian obtained the document, which outlines the digital tracking of those under criminal investigation, was obtained under a sunshine request. The document showed the US Justice Department was following targets via credit card companies, calling cards and store membership programs.
The digital surveillance and tracking was carried out without a court order and without any oversight.
Soghoian explained the government has been known to be able to access credit card history, the information the documents reveal however is they are now doing so in real-time, showing what, when and where an individual is purchasing an item.
“In the past they were able to get historical information with a subpoena,” he explained. “The surprising thing is they’re able to track you in real time without having a judge really revue whether that is ok, there is no sort of Fourth Amendment protections.”
Another concern is the tracking of airlines, merchandise, shopping clubs, other service loyalty and membership programs. Basically, the government can track what you do, where you do it and when – ranging from vacation travel to grocery shopping.
“They’re not getting any judicial oversight of these requests. We really don’t have any sort of check and balance. There is no audit trail. We don’t know how many of these requests are happening. There’s not really any protection against abuse,” said Soghoian. “This is potentially a very large program.”
There is no law that gives law enforcement officials the power to gain real time or prospective transactions. The law only allows for officials to request historical records.
“What they have done is just said, well we have the authority,” he said. “Until a bank tells them to get lost and fights it out in court, the courts really won’t weigh in on the issue. So, we have no real protection here. We’re waiting for a bank to stick up for their customers’ privacy. But, until that happens this made up authority will continue to be used.”
Related articles
Related posts:LONDON (Reuters) - A huge drop in French business activity meant the euro zone’s recession dragged on in March but British services firms provided a rare glimpse of economic sunshine, posting their best month since August.
The Euro sculpture is pictured in front of the headquarters of the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt January 24, 2012. REUTERS/Lmar Niazman
Business surveys on Thursday showed the decline in French services businesses is now at its steepest since the nadir of the 2008-09 recession, outstripping even the downturns of struggling Spain and Italy.
In Germany, the region’s biggest and most resilient economy, growth slowed to a near-stall last month.
Unusually, Britain bucked the trend after rising new orders helped services companies like banks, hotels and restaurants record their fastest growth since last summer’s London Olympics.
Overall though, the latest batch of purchasing managers indexes (PMIs) showed most of Europe’s major economies, at least in the euro zone, fared poorly in the first quarter of the year.
“With these PMI readings, we’re likely to be in contraction territory even for the second quarter,” said Juergen Michels, lead euro area economist at Citi in London.
Despite the clear economic weakness, economists do not expect the European Central Bank to announce any major easing of monetary policy this Thursday.
But the accumulation of dismal data could prompt a more dovish tone from ECB President Mario Draghi, who in January identified “positive contagion” sweeping through financial markets as a result of his policies.
“This positive contagion we’re seeing in financial markets is not feeding through to real economic activity,” said Michels, pointing out that financing conditions are not improving for households or medium and smaller companies across the region.
Markit’s Euro zone services PMI fell to 46.4 in March from 47.9 in February. It has spent all but one of the last 20 months rooted below the 50 threshold dividing growth from contraction.
It was also down a tick from a preliminary reading of 46.5 reported two weeks ago.
That at least suggested the mishandling of Cyprus’s 10 billion euro bailout at the end of March had no immediate impact on the private economy, survey compiler Markit said.
But it added that anecdotal evidence suggested the Cyprus debacle had still had a disquieting effect.
“The recession is deepening once again as businesses report that they have become increasingly worried about the region’s debt crisis and political instability,” said Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit.
The poor PMIs piled pressure on the euro on Thursday, while the yen sank across the board after the Bank of Japan unveiled a set of bold easing measures. <MKTS/GLOB>
FAILING FRANCE
The dismal French PMI boded ill for the euro zone’s No.2 economy for the next quarter at least.
The Markit services purchasing managers’ index fell in March for the eighth month running to 41.3 from 43.7 in February, hitting its lowest level since February 2009.
“The very weak support readings for the president (Francois Hollande) suggest it will be very difficult to go ahead with far-reaching structural reforms that are likely to lift productivity growth in the economy anytime soon, said Michels at Citi.
French consumer spending and budget deficit data last Friday highlighted the enormous task facing the government, which insists it can meet its pledges to revive growth and the public finances.
By contrast, the British services PMI added to some early evidence the UK economy could narrowly avoid a third recession in five years.
The main Markit/CIPS Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for the dominant service sector climbed to 52.4 in March from 51.8 in February.
“Nonetheless, we are concerned that bad weather in January and March could impact on the GDP calculations, so we still think it will be 50-50 on whether the UK does indeed post a positive Q1 GDP number,” said James Knightley, senior economist at ING in London.Read Part Six HERE
They had her.
For all the crimes the Hitman had committed in his lifetime, he had never felt punishment like knowing these sick fucks had Melissa. Knowing he had failed to protect her.
Not just failed – helped. They couldn’t touch Melissa while the Teacher was alive. They wanted to but Melissa’s mother had put up too much resistance. And the Teacher had wanted Melissa to stay his ‘special girl’. Now, the Teacher was a corpse and Melissa was in their hands.
He thought about the remaining members of the Teacher’s circle. The computer wizard’s name was George Elliott. He was the youngest of their club. The Hitman had done his research and found a sordid history of child pornography, but he’d had to dig deep. The records had been hidden well, scratched out of existence to any normal consumers of news. But, like a dark shadow in the unforgiving sun, the history followed George. At least, it followed him if you knew where to look. Now he was one of the few remaining, and he had Melissa.
The Hitman’s car roared as he raced towards the mansion in the countryside. Caution and a measured approach had once been his rules, ones he never intended to break. The Highway had a limit that he was breaking by double. The rubber tyres screeched and stunk of fire. I’m coming, Melissa.
The other one, Trust fund. It was so obvious now who must have paid for the Hitman before. How he got caught up in all this. Trust fund. Thomas Henderson. The Hitman still didn’t recognise that name, but a quick search brought back the entitled son of a billionaire who kept himself to himself and owned a mansion outside of the city.
The sun was setting when the Hitman broke from the outskirts of the city. He tore across empty fields and past farms, dark shapes with the baleful sun hiding behind them. It didn’t take long to reach the address, but the Hitman felt his heart pounding as though he’d been running a marathon |
I don’t remember why. So we still mention it in Redux with me. Because I think that I probably read Elm architecture at some point. I’m pretty sure that I did not understand it. Because the first version of Redux did not follow Elm architecture at all. It’s something Andrew came up with. And he’s saying he also probably also read Elm architecture and did not understand it because of the syntax.
Tyler: And now it’s just part of the history, yeah.
Dan: But it was part of the subconscious kind of thing. But anyway at that time I didn’t try Elm or Om. But I made this proposal and it was accepted and then I had like six months to prepare. But I was like Stampsy was running out of funding at the same time I was trying to polish a drag and drop library. So I kind of just like did not think about the talk for a long time, I was trying to implement a Flux hot loader, like React hot loader but for Flux, and I realized it’s really hard because the state has captured the local variables that there is no access to so you can’t really like transplant it when you change a module, you can’t really put those into the new version. But what if we separated the state from the logic. Like that would allow us to do that. So I think Redux was just like an attempt to actually make a proof of concept of, “There is a Gist, like really old Gist about time travel in Flux. Which if you scroll my Gist far enough maybe you’ll find it.” I was trying to figure out what is the minimal version of Flux that would work with hot reloading and it’s pretty crazy like it’s funny. It’s naive. We were chatting with, I don’t remember who I was chatting with, but I was chatting with someone and they said that I’m not even sure, it was my idea.
Yeah. I don’t remember who suggested it but basically, we had this idea that Redux would be a cool name because we have these Reducer functions and it is Flux. And it sounds really good, Redux. I was watching I think, Jeremy Morrel if I’m not mistaken, I was watching his talk where he was explaining Flux conceptually as a reduce operation over time. And I was thinking what if it was actually like a reduce operation like literally. And so yeah. and after a while, Redux is a really good name, I like it. Maybe I should like turn it into a proper library, and so I think somebody gave me the name from, like the npm name. Yeah. And I just, I was trying to make a proof of concept of Flux where I could change the logic. And it would let me time travel. And it would let me reapply the future actions on the code change. So that was like, the goal. And I know people kind of liked it even before it was released. And like they started saying, “Do you use it in production?” I was like, “Wait. I’m not sure if it’s actually like usable in production.” So I was trying to like write a proper, the readme was ridiculous it was super long and you had like decorators syntax. And like all explain everything in a very rude way. Yeah. It was incomprehensible to anyone who wasn’t already in the middle of all of it. But then it exploded after the conference and I spent some time writing the docs.
Tyler: So how was, this all happened just like incredibly fast. Like from your perspective, how was it going from someone who’s like even like pre-Stampsy, right? Like even to that you were doing like C# stuff to all of a sudden Redux. It’s like the thing that every web app like uses, right? Like it’s just so popular, how was managing that, both from a personal standpoint you now have issues you’re dealing with like Github issues? And you going to have like this like fame that’s like put upon you, whether you ask for it or not, like how is that?
Dan: I don’t know, I think it was so bit overwhelming at first, and I’ve just learned to deal with it. So like I think I spend an unhealthy amount of time on like managing issues and pull requests and stuff. But I also didn’t have a full-time job so it was like, I really didn’t have a work life balance at all. Eventually, I kind of learned to onboard contributors and just like, if somebody’s motivated and they seem talented just give them like commit rights. I think this is all kind of from the program I was talking about where Yury just said, like here is the keys to the root users. Try not to screw up my websites, please. I kind of follow the same way though. People are going to make mistakes anyway and like you’re going to make mistakes anyway so you might as well like, if they don’t have, at least like I have this kind of influence and visibility. Might then just like let them do their thing and I get there. But it’s also, it’s not entirely altruistic or something. Because like, in a way I’m making them core maintainers and co-contributors is important for making them more visible but it also means that they’re going to get into this potentially unhealthy situation where they take the project too seriously and can’t manage work life balance and stuff like this. In a way it feels like, you know, in Tom Sawyer in the first chapter there is this guy who is painting the fence. And he’s like, “Wow. This is so amazing.” and the other guy just believes it and picks it up. It’s just a trick and I kind of feel this way about open source, is that yes, there are some good things. But there are also bad things. And, “Hey. Take the whole package and yeah. Pass it on.”
Tyler: What have you managed, what you’ve done too, because I know in the last year things have gotten better as far as it seems you’re going on more vacations. Is there anything that you’ve done to help that? Or it’s literally just like, “Go on vacations and don’t bring your computer charger.”
Dan: I just voted contributors to the projects that I don’t intend to maintain actively. Yeah. And I just am watched everything. And I mean I have a full time job working on open source now, I have to focus like on specific things. And it’s just now that I’m not going to do these things that I maybe want to do. And t it’s just competing for my attention and I’m just not doing it.
Tyler: Yeah. Makes sense.
Dan: And I stopped writing code at home.
Tyler: Oh yeah. That’s probably a big one too.
Dan: Yeah. I was just tired. Like if you do this full time it’s not as much fun to like do it
Tyler: At home too.
Dan: Yeah.
Tyler: Yeah, exactly you’re not a 17-year-old kid in Russia anymore. All right so what I’m going to do now is, thanks again for telling that story I think I think a lot of people will find it interesting. what I want to do is I saw questions here and we don’t have a lot of time left, so it’s kind of like rapid fire. I’ll ask you and you have like anywhere from a sentence to like 30 seconds to answer them. [00:51:40] we’ll be done. So the first one I have is, you mentioned this one before. This is kind of random, Thomas, you have mentioned is an incredible manager and a few people Christopher S_ has mentioned the same thing. What makes Tom so effective at that role?
Dan: I think he just like trusts people. In my experience is hard very good people and he just trusts them. So like he doesn’t get in their way he doesn’t dictate what to do and just like he is doing everything he can to empower you basically. And get things out of the way And if there are any like people issues. He’s going to handle them so like he’s going to talk to somebody, he’s going to talk to you he’s just very good at supporting people. What’s your favorite open source project right now?
Dan: React.
Tyler: Besides React.
Dan: Yes. It’s still React.
Tyler: All right. I’ll take it. I’ll let that one slide.
Dan: I’m sorry. It’s true.
Tyler: No. You’re good. I mean if that’s the answer, that’s the answer.
Dan: I’m honest.
Tyler: What does building for the web look like in three to five years?
Dan: I’ve no idea. But I hope that there’s less configuration.
Tyler: Knowing what you know now, if you had to learn to program all over again, how would you do it?
Dan: I wouldn’t do it.
Tyler: Really?
Dan: I don’t imagine what it’s like to do it again. I don’t have the mental energy anymore.
Tyler: Yeah. To go through…
Dan: Yeah. I don’t know how I’ll do it. Like it was too hard.
Tyler: How do you measure success?
Dan: Success of what?
Tyler: Anything.
Dan: It feels good. Like if something gives you good vibes then it’s probably a success.
Tyler: What’s been your favorite memory throughout this whole process?
Dan: So I mean, it’s again like unhealthy open-source. But I remember…so when I was 14, I read a book about Erlang. Which is like super random, I don’t why I did that. I just remember reading about functional stuff and how Erlang can replace modules upon time while the program runs, and it seemed pretty cool. And then there was this Brad Victor video where he changed code …And I had this idea that, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do that in web development?” And and then like I was playing with React for a long time and it was really good at like, it was really the declarative and then I was porting the project to Webpack as RequireJS was super slow and the RequireJS optimizer produced a single bundle so it was too large. I was migrating the project to Webpack and I saw the page about Hot module Replacement. I had no idea what it means so I asked on StackOverflow, “What is Hot Module Replacement in Webpack?”
And Tobias Koppers, creator of Webpack, he answered like, “Here’s what it means from a compiler’s point of view. From a user’s point of view, Webpack’s point of view…” A lot of information but some of it made sense and I was like, “Can I use this to Hot reload React components?” And this felt like, “Wow. I can put these two different things together to produce something valuable.” And I started like I couldn’t resist prototyping this, and I started doing it. And then I sat until like maybe it might 6:00 a.m And I got it working and just enough to record a video And I recorded that video where, “Hey. I’m editing in JSX while the page reloads. Like I can write expressions there and everything still works.” And I recorded this video and I tweeted it out and I think Christopher Chedeau retweeted it. And then like I had twenty followers at the time and like it went viral. And I was like, “Wow. This is something. Like I’m not a weird person who cares about this. People want a quick feedback loop.” And I think this was one of the most pleasant moments for me.
Tyler: Well, that is all I have for you, thank you so much. I think you’ve been, whether you want it or not, I think you have been an incredible ambassador for React both myself personally and also the community. Thank you.
Dan: Thank you(Image: Thomas Street Bistro via Facebook)
About two years ago, Adam Freeman of Thomas Street Bistro decided to sell out. Frustrated by the ongoing challenge of bringing new customers into his tiny Capitol Hill restaurant, he turned to daily deals to drum up new business. “I was the first to be on Groupon when they started in Seattle,” Freeman tells CHS. What has followed has been an absolute cavalcade of discount offers in nearly every shape and form for the restaurant at Summit Ave and Thomas.
“We have the most daily deals in the city,” Freeman said. “You start with Groupon. And then LIving Social came. ‘Why don’t you run?’ And then Tippr.” They just follow each other.” In all, CHS counted ten different Thomas Street deals in the last 18 months — some selling more than 1,000 of the coupons. Freeman says there were even more deals than that. But, now, something has gone wrong. The biggest daily deal dealer of them all has suddenly pulled the plug on Freeman’s bistro.
“Without your call, we wouldn’t have known,” Freeman said of a brief conversation on Monday about this customer service email passed along to CHS by reader — and Thomas Street Groupon holder — Daniel:
—————————- Original Message —————————-
Subject: An Important Message Regarding Your Groupon for Thomas Street Bistro
From: “Groupon”
Date: Mon, February 20, 2012 4:18 pm
————————————————————————– Thanks for purchasing the Groupon for Thomas Street Bistro. Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have had to cancel this deal. Werealize how frustrating that can be and we want to make it right as soonas possible. Our apologies for the inconvenience. If you haven’t used your Groupon, you are eligible for a refund. Toclaim your refund, sign into your Groupon account atwww.groupon.com/mygroupons. From here, click “Claim Refund” and select arefund either to the form of payment originally used for the purchase orto your Groupon account to be used for future purchases. If you purchased this Groupon as a gift or are having trouble claimingyour refund, please contact us at www.groupon.com/support and we’ll beglad to assist you. We appreciate your understanding and sincerely apologize for anyinconvenience this may have caused. Sincerely, Groupon Customer Support
Our call may have been the first. But Freeman said hundreds have followed from Groupon holders who want to know what is happening with his restaurant. “80% of our customers use their Groupons in the last two weeks [before expiration],” Freeman said. “We are going to honor them.” The decision, by the way, is made easier by the fact that Freeman says he has already been paid by Groupon and won’t have to give a penny back.
The restaurant owner said he has no idea why Groupon is refunding his business’s deals. He says he has no plans to close the bistro and that Groupon has not contacted him about the situation or any complaints about the service he offers at the restaurant.
We have an inquiry out to Groupon about the Thomas Street situation but have not yet heard back. This would also be a good time to mention that Thomas Street Bistro has also advertised on CHS in the past. UPDATE: A Groupon spokesperson tells CHS that the deal was removed because of customer complaints about service and quality at Thomas Street. She also said the company has made numerous efforts to contact the business about the situation including working with Freeman to improve the experience at the bistro but Groupon’s calls and messages were not returned. Here is a statement on the situation from Groupon:
Groupon contacted the merchant several times without response when it became apparent that Thomas Street Bistro wasn’t providing the level of service that we expect for our customers. With customer complaints rising we had no choice but to pull the deal and proactively contact purchasers for a refund if they haven’t redeemed.
Freeman readily admits his restaurant has been almost absurdly active with coupon and discount offers. “It hasn’t been the best time for Capitol Hill businesses,” Freeman said. “I’m very hidden there [on Summit Ave]. It gives awareness. And it’s kind of a reward to my regulars.”
One complicating factor could be Freeman’s involvement in the daily deal space that goes well beyond his restaurant business. In spring 2011, he partnered on the launch of a venture called Pricemobster:
Pricemobster is the brainchild of Seattle restaurateur Adam Freeman, owner of Thomas Street Bistro. After using a number of the online group-buying coupons to promote his restaurant, he became concerned about the high payout to the coupon companies and the low return for the merchants. In fact, he realized that while the business owners received a large influx of cash all at once, many were actually losing money and not gaining either customer loyalty or appreciation.
Pricemobster displays deal promotions for several local businesses including a few on Capitol Hill but none of the offers are currently available for purchase. One offer, by the way, touts a deal dated February 2nd for a coming soon “Thomas Street Crepery”:
Even with his involvement in Pricemobster, Freeman said the days of daily deals are done when it comes to Thomas Street.
Built up by expectations set by snappy advertising copy that disguises bread and butter as a course and dropped into a restaurant space and experience that can only be described as “quirky,” reviewers on sites like Yelp for Thomas Street are increasingly brutal. “There is some positive that came out of it,” Freeman said. “There are also a lot of negatives.”
“I think we achieved what we wanted,” Freeman said. “We achieved enough return business from those daily deals. We think what is best now is to go back to being a small neighborhood business.”
Whatever its reasons, Groupon appears to have helped Thomas Street move forward on its new goal.Image caption The Israeli bus was nearly empty when it was hit by the missile, medical sources said
Israeli tanks, helicopters and planes have struck Gaza after an anti-tank missile fired from the Palestinian territory hit a bus in southern Israel.
A teenaged boy on the bus was critically injured and the driver was also wounded.
Four people were killed and some 35 injured in the Israeli strikes, Gaza hospital officials said.
Later reports said Islamist movement Hamas had announced a ceasefire in an attempt to halt the violence.
Hamas officials and the Palestinian observer mission said the truce went into effect at 2300 local time (2000 GMT).
Israel meanwhile said it had successfully used a new missile-defence system for the first time.
Two missiles fired from Gaza in the direction of the city of Ashkelon were destroyed in mid-flight by an Israeli interceptor missile.
"Our Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepted two projectiles successfully," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
Compound bombed
The military wing of Hamas said it carried out the bus attack. It said this was a response to the killing of three Hamas members in Israeli strikes earlier this week.
Reports say 45 mortars were fired from Gaza into Israel.
Following the bus attack, an Israeli plane bombed a compound in northern Gaza belonging to Hamas. Targets in Gaza City and Rafah were also hit.
Helicopters also machine-gunned a target in Gaza for the first time since Israel's offensive more than two years ago, the Reuters news agency reports.
All senior Hamas figures are believed to have gone into hiding in expectation of further Israeli strikes.
At the scene Driving into Gaza City from the border, loud explosions could be heard. A huge plume of black smoke rose up to the north from an apparent Israeli air strike. Ambulances overtook us, speeding the injured to Shifa hospital. This looks like another potentially dangerous escalation, and a reminder that the Gaza-Israel conflict has not gone away. Militarily, Israel is far superior, a fact which is reflected in the casualty figures. Both Hamas and Israel have recently said they wanted a return to calm. But both are under pressure from their constituents to act. Israel, where casualties are rare, is under pressure from its border communities to punish militants in Gaza for any attacks. Hamas is under pressure from its militant wing and other armed groups in Gaza to respond forcefully. Both sides seem unable to see the other's perspective.
The bus attackers used an anti-tank missile, the Israeli army said - the first time such a weapon had been used against an Israeli civilian target.
The bus had been dropping off schoolchildren near the Nahal Oz kibbutz, and was carrying only one passenger when it was hit, Israeli medical sources said.
A 16-year-old boy suffered a serious head wound and was taken to hospital for surgery.
Call for intervention
Mr Netanyahu said Israel would take any action necessary to deter attacks from Gaza.
"We hope this situation will be contained but we will not shy away from taking all the necessary action, offensive and defensive, to protect our country and to protect our citizens," said Mr Netanyahu during a visit to Prague.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas urged Western powers to intervene, but also urged militants not to give Israel an excuse to hit Gaza.
Mr Abbas called on the West "to immediately intervene to stop this aggression", the official Wafa news agency reported.
The US State Department condemned the Palestinian militants' attack. Spokesman Mark Toner said there was "no justification of the targeting of innocent civilians."
Earlier on Thursday, Israel carried out air strikes against smuggling in the south of the Gaza Strip.
Last month saw some of the worst violence since Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in December 2008, says the BBC's Jon Donnison in Gaza.
In one week in March, at least 10 Palestinians - including several civilians and children - were killed by Israeli attacks.
Image caption Palestinian medics say more than 30 people were injured in the Israeli strikes
In the same period, militants in Gaza fired more than 80 rockets and mortar shells into southern Israel.
Hamas had pledged to try to restore a unilateral ceasefire that it said ended on 16 March when an Israeli air strike killed two of its militants in the Palestinian territory.
However, Israel said it had suffered "bouts of terror and rocket attacks".
Despite recent calls for calm, neither side seems to be able to stop firing, our correspondent says. Both say the other started it.
Israel says it holds Hamas responsible for all attacks coming out of Palestinian territory, even if it is other militant groups carrying them out.We make a lot of joint decisions on a daily basis. Whether choosing to buy a car or house with your spouse, making business decisions with your coworkers, or simply deciding where to have dinner with a friend, we constantly find ourselves having to make choices with others. But when choosing jointly, are we likely to make the same choices we would if we were alone? Our research suggests the answer may depend on the gender composition of the group.
Marketers have long known that, when given a set of choices, individuals tend to choose the middle ground, the compromise option. For instance, given a range of cars that differ on fuel efficiency and interior design, consumers tend to prefer the option that gives them a little bit of both attributes. While the car with the most fuel efficiency (but worst interior design) or the one with the best interior design (but the lowest mileage per gallon) might be hard to justify, the car that has average fuel efficiency and interior design seems reasonable and thus takes the lion’s share of choice. This is called the compromise effect, or the “goldilocks effect” or “extremeness aversion.” Because it is one of the most robust effects in the decision-making literature, it’s often used by marketers to shift peoples’ preferences in predictable ways.
We wanted to see whether this tendency to opt for the moderate option still holds true when people make joint decisions. Our research, recently published in the Journal of Consumer Research, suggests that the effect does not always hold up.
In our studies involving more than 1,200 participants, we paired some people in decision-making teams of two (these could be two males, a male and a female, or two females) and had others make decisions individually. We asked participants to make a series of choices, where they could select either extreme items in a set (for example, a restaurant that was very expensive but had a very short wait time, or was very inexpensive and had a very long wait time) or moderate “compromise” alternatives (both price and wait time fall between the two extremes). The partners in the decision-making duos had to come to a single joint decision, meaning that both of them would have to live with the outcome of their choice.
What we found surprised us. Across many different groupings of participants, stimuli, and procedures, the outcome was the same: Women are always more likely to prefer the middle option, whether alone or in a pair (either with another woman or with a man). However, pairs of men tend to choose extreme options, far more so than when men are deciding with other women or when men are deciding alone. For pairs of men, the compromise effect did not occur.
Consider how this might apply to other situations. If a father and a son are choosing a car together, they’ll likely go for the one providing the most fuel efficiency or the one offering the best interior design, instead of settling for a middle alternative that offers a little bit of both. If two men are deciding on corporate strategy together, they may be more likely to go all-in for one approach or take some cards off the table completely. If a woman is involved in the decision making, though, moderate paths are more likely.
Why does this happen? Here, we drew from recent work in social psychology. Psychological research has suggested that masculinity is considered to be precarious, requiring constant proof and validation in social interactions. Evolutionary theories suggest that the precarious nature of manhood is a result of evolved adaptations to an environment, in which men had to compete with other men for both resources and partners. Our work suggests that present-day vestiges of this pattern emerge in joint decisions: Men making decisions together feel driven to take actions that are maximally different from feminine norms, which prioritize moderation, and maximally similar to masculine norms, which prioritize extremity. So when men make decisions together, they signal their masculinity by choosing things that are extreme, which attenuates the compromise effect in male decision-making pairs.
Historically, femininity hasn’t been found to be as precarious. That may be why, without the gender-signaling needs of men, the compromise effect emerges in the decisions of two female partners — and why, in contrast to men, women act the same together as they would alone. Furthermore, because a female presence makes the masculinity of men in male-female pairs obvious, in these pairings we observe compromise behavior consistent with that of individual decision makers and female-female pairs.
Fortunately, men who want to reach moderation do have options. We found that if male pairs are given the opportunity to signal their masculinity prior to the decision making (for example, by jointly choosing a stereotypically male magazine as a reward for their study participation), their tendency to avoid compromise alternatives dissolves. Something as simple as this prompted our male decision-making pairs to show preferences for compromise options that were similar to female pairs’.
Our work has significant practical implications for marketers, managers, and consumers. Since the compromise effect is usually used by marketers for assortment planning, product positioning, and to shift consumers’ choices in predictable ways, marketers need to understand whether their target audience is likely to make individual or joint decisions about the product or service they offer, and they need to consider the gender composition of decision-making pairs.
So if a company wants to push sales toward a particular option, and they expect their target customers to primarily be men making decisions together, then it’s better to make the product or service an extreme option rather than a more moderate one. For instance, if two men are choosing a movie to see together, they are likely to choose an extreme option (e.g., pure comedy or pure adventure); thus, positioning the movie as an extreme option should be very effective in this case. By contrast, pairs of women may choose a movie that falls between genres, having both comedy and adventure elements. Further, if a largely female audience is expected, the theater can use the compromise effect to increase revenues. For example, if the theater eliminated the small size of popcorn and beverages and included an extra large option, it would make the large item the middle choice, and perhaps encourage more women to purchase it.
Managers entrusted with building successful teams in the workplace might also benefit from our findings. If firms wish to foster more extreme decisions, creating male-male decision-making teams may promote their objective to a greater extent than relying on individual decisions. For example, an individual fund manager might create a more moderate mix of risk and reward in his portfolio, but if male fund managers work in pairs, they may be likely to create more-extreme portfolios, with high risk and high return. Consequently, in order to make sure that moderate options are considered, managers could (it should go without saying) include more women in the decision making or keep employee decisions private, so that males are not punished for suggesting actions that involve compromise.
Our findings also suggest that men and women may have very different approaches to negotiation. Consider salary negotiations as a type of joint decision — two people have to agree on one outcome. Men negotiating with one another would be more likely to start at extreme high and low numbers, and struggle to work their way to a compromise. Women, by contrast, may try to begin with a number they feel is reasonable — but in fact may leave money on the table if they don’t consider opening with a more extreme offer. In these cases, both men and women need to be aware of their tendencies, and make sure they’re really thinking about the reasoning behind their behavior rather than just defaulting to the moderate or extreme position that feels most comfortable for them, given their negotiating partner.The 2014-2015 season has definitely been a stressful one for the Arizona Coyotes. From a slow start to the season to an active trade deadline, fans are holding out for a promising future to come.
Receiving the third overall selection in the upcoming 2015 NHL Draft certainly did not help calm the minds of Coyotes Nation either with the much anticipated skill of Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel sitting at one and two. Despite all the adversity directed towards this team, fans can look forward to something huge; the health of some of their core players.
January was a rough month for the Arizona Coyotes as they went 3-7-2 and lost a few of their key players. Both Mikkel Boedker and Martin Hanzal suffered season-ending injuries that put a damper on an already dim season.
Coincidentally, these were the two players that recorded the only hat tricks of the season with Boedker on October 15th against the Oilers and Hanzal on November 14th against the Canucks. It definitely hurt the Coyotes that these two key members were out for an extended period of time.
Coyotes fans can rest easy in knowing that two offensive threats will be ready in October.
Mikkel Boedker is one of the most anticipated skaters on the Coyotes roster. He is a young, skilled sniper with something to prove every time he steps out on to the ice. At the ripe age of 25, Mikkel has a long and promising career ahead of him with the Coyotes organization.
The beginning of the 2014-2015 season looked to be a breakout year for the young Dane after a 51 point effort in the prior season. Mikkel had his fair share of ups and downs with a struggling Coyotes team but managed a 28 point effort through 45 games before tragedy hit. It was unknown to him that the game on January 18th against the Winnipeg Jets would be the end of the season for him.
What started as a day-to-day injury was soon revealed as something much more serious for Mikkel Boedker. After further analysis it was revealed that he must undergo spleen surgery and ultimately miss the remainder of the season. With a ruptured spleen there was no way he would return to the ice and some people were even skeptical about his return for training camp in the fall.
Those worries can be brushed aside as #89 is feeling much better than he did early this year. Boedker had this to say earlier this week in his blog:
The addition of Boedker for the upcoming season is huge for the Arizona Coyotes program as they lacked the raw scoring power that he possesses. It would not be surprising if Boedker puts up a 50+ point season next year.
Martin Hanzal’s size and physicality is something that the fans did not see enough of this season. Standing at 6’5″, the center from the Czech Republic could obstruct a goaltender’s view of the play and deliver bone crushing hits to eliminate the opposition from the puck. The Arizona Coyotes rely heavily on Hanzal as they work the blue line in efforts to score. It was no surprise that after his departure, goal scoring began to decrease across the whole roster.
It was made public record on January 30th, after a game against the Toronto Maple Leafs, that Hanzal suffered a back injury. The severity of of the injury was the problem as he needed surgery to correct a herniated disk. This would be the second straight season where Hanzal would be sidelined with a back injury.
By taking much needed time off the ice to correct his season ending injury, Martin Hanzal is going to be ready for the 2015-2016 season. Hanzal scored 24 points in 37 games this year and he is ultimately looking to expand on that moving forward.
#11 has has the right mindset going into this summer with small workouts to get back into the shape everyone is used to seeing. He had this to say about his plans this summer:
Hanzal’s return is something that every Arizona Coyotes fan will be looking forward to see.Ekuna Region Milky Way / The Phoenix Massing / Salahiel Planet View Orbital Distance 1.6 AU Orbital Period 2.3 Earth Years Keplerian Ratio 0.774 Radius 10,206 km Day Length 36.4 Earth Hours Atm. Pressure 1.4 atm Surface Temp −37 °C (equator mean temperature 15 °C) Surface Gravity 4.1 g Mass 10.42 Earth Masses
Location: Milky Way / The Phoenix Massing / Salahiel System / First planet
Colony Species Elcor Capital Bel Shadii (elcor: Durawunafon) Colony Founded 2103 Population 221,256,200
Description Edit
First discovered by the quarians at the turn of the century, Ekuna is habitable, but a second-tier choice for most species. Circling an orange sun, Ekuna averages below freezing temperatures. This led development firms to colonize at the planet's equator, where the climate is tolerable for agriculture.
The quarians, seeking a homeworld of their own, petitioned the Citadel Council for the right to take over Ekuna, but they had already settled a few hundred thousand quarians on the planet before approaching the Council. Seeing this occupation as an illegal act, the Council turned a deaf ear to quarian pleas and gave the world to the elcor, who could withstand the high gravity of the world far better. The quarians squatting on the planet were given one galactic standard month to leave, at which point their colonies would be bombarded. The junk left behind by the fleeing quarians clogs up portions of the landscape to this day.
Non-elcor visitors to Ekuna are advised to use personal or vehicular mass effect fields to lighten the pressure, as the surface gravity will otherwise cause health and mechanical problems.
Mineral Deposits Edit
Initial Scanner Result: RichLast updated on: October 28, 2011 14:42 IST
A report by the National Crime Record Bureau shows that in the year 2010, 168 men ended their lives everyday. Vicky Nanjappa reports.
If one were to go by the report released by the National Crime Records Bureau, it seems that in the year 2010, men in India were the weaker sex. In other words, more husbands committed suicide than wives.
Statistics reveal that last year 61,453 married men committed suicide in India while the number of married women who committed suicide was almost half, 31,754. The statistics was only slightly better for 2009. That year, NCRB statistics show, 58,192 husbands killed themselves as compared to 31,300 wives.
The NCRB is a wing of the ministry of home affairs. Going by its report for the last two years, the suicide rate among men has gone up by 5.6 per cent while that among women has risen by 1.4 per cent.
An analysis of the suicide data shows that every 8.5 minutes a man commits suicide somewhere in India. In other words, in 2010, 168 men killed themselves every day.
The rate of death for the male is higher in other areas like accidental deaths as well, the NCRB data shows. In 2010 the overall death rate among men was higher than that for women. In the age group below 14 years, 1640 died either due to suicide or accidents, with the corresponding figure for girls being 1490.
In the 15-29 age group, 26,387 men died from suicide and accidents compared to 21,238 women.
However, it is in the 30-44 age group where the statistics turns grim for men: 30,444 victims against 14,402 women.
In the 45-59 age group too the statistics is similar, 20,768 men against 7,121 women.
Virag Dhulia, a men's activist from Bengaluru who runs several'save the male' campaigns, explains that despite the efforts of groups like his, the message is falling on deaf ears, and blames what he calls "unfair laws targetting men" for this statistic.
"The whole issue is because men are subject to inhuman and unconstituional laws such as Section 498 A of the Indian Penal Code wherein an uninvestigated complaint by a wife against her husband and his family can land the entire family in jail or the Domestic Violence Act, wherein the husband can even lose his hard-earned property owing to a simple complaint of domestic violence, even without a fair trial," he says.
"Under Section 304B, the husband's entire family can be put behind bars without trial or investigation if the wife dies an unnatural death within seven years of marriage," Dhulia adds. "Then there is Section 125 of the CrPC under which the husband is treated as a free ATM to pay maintenance to his wife irrespective of fault."A brief guide to where to find the cool stuff during a bike race. Obviously, you’ll see the break, you’ll see the guys leading the chase, and you’ll see the finish, but I’ve always found the real meat of the sport to be happening just behind the focus of the camera.
Related posts: How The Race Was Won – UCI Women's World Road Race 2013 [iPad/iPhone/m4v if the embed doesn’t work] So in a curious reversal of the normal state of affairs, I was able to get footage to Saturday’s Women’s RR before I could acquire the the Men’s Event from Sunday—which, in case you think I’m just sitting around not making you videos, I... How The Race Was Won – |
still likely to get damaged. But it certainly is a whole lot better than leaving it on a table top or, worse, leaning against the pub or bar wall. There are also going to be some instruments that wont work, such as the RISA Uke Solid but that is nit picking.All in all, a clever item that is small enough to go in the gig bag and could avoid tears on jam nights. In the UK you can find it at the Southern Ukulele Store amongst other places for just under £10. Bargain! Also available on Amazon here via Omega Music.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Feb. 23, 2015, 9:36 AM GMT / Updated Feb. 23, 2015, 1:40 PM GMT
Four people were killed in a late-night shooting in Texas, including a suspected gunman and his wife, and one person was seriously injured, police said early Monday. Preliminary investigations showed a 30-year-old man shot three people — a 29-year-old woman, a 41-year-old-woman, and a 40-year-old man — at a house in Killeen, police said in a statement.
The Killeen Police Department said the suspect then forced his 28-year-old wife back to their home, several doors down on Godman Street, where officers found them dead from gunshot wounds. Police told NBC affiliate KCEN that the man had barricaded himself inside the house and died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Police responded to reports of a disturbance just before 10:30 p.m Sunday (11:30 p.m. ET). They found three gunshot victims at an house on the street and were told the suspect had fled to his home with his wife. After hearing shots from inside the suspect’s home, the force’s Tactical Response Unit made several attempts to speak with the man but received no response. Just before 12:30 a.m. (1:30 a.m. ET) the tactical team entered the building and found the pair dead. A 41-year-old woman was found alive and in a serious condition at the first address and was transported to hospital.
— Shamar Walters and Alexander Smith"Imagine your government as your iPhone," said Lamar Alexander, a Republican Senator from Tennessee, flailing, trying to get anyone under 40 to listen.
Alexander asked us all to imagine this in the GOP's weekly address on Saturday, then immediately cited the need to repeal a bill — the wonderful Dodd-Frank Act, which still feels like an ethereal, beautiful apparition — that is one of the only pieces of paper that stands in the way of the predatory lending practices that enabled friends of the government to post record profits while the American economy collapsed into recession and left tens of thousands homeless because of intentionally vague fine print.
Recently, elected officials read a study about the need to talk to the future, so they found out what the youth own. But the youth do not want to be defined by what they own, because they cannot own much at all. They want to be defined by what they are.
For the last time, this is not about iPhones. This is not about stuff. This is about a generation's inability to get stuff, despite their ability to access more information than ever and, in turn, be smarter than ever, faster than ever before.
This is about a generation that was sold a bill of goods at gunpoint, then they were asked, "Why can't you pay for any of this stuff?"
They never wanted the stuff. They never wanted the loans. They never wanted the cost of college to go up 500 percent since 1985. They never wanted wages to increase 6 percent since 1980. They never wanted to see CEO wages rise 725 percent in the same time period. They never wanted to start earning a median wage at 30, instead of 26, like it was in 1980. They never wanted to work more than any other nation — 408 hours more per person every year than the Dutch, 374 more than the Germans, 59 hours more than the Japanese. They never wanted to work that much and that hard only to be told they weren't working hard enough.
They never wanted to go through this only to be talked down to, only to be told, "Hey, you guys like iPhones? We're just like iPhones!" when, really, the people telling them that — a bought Congress — are buying and selling them, just like the stuff they think Millennials are obsessed with.
They do not care about the stuff. They cannot afford the stuff. And when marketing firms and speechwriters and lobbyists see them hiding on their iPhones, doing things they'd rather caricature than understand, they do not understand that it's not the identity Millennials want. It's the only identity Millennials can afford.Florida Sen. Marco Rubio says his opponent Donald Trump is wrong to suggest President George W. Bush bears responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, arguing that the majority of the failures that led to the deadly attacks should be attributed to President Bill Clinton's administration instead.
"It's just not true, it's wrong. What he said is just not true," Rubio told NewsMaxTV The Hard Line with Ed Berliner on Wednesday about Trump.
"The truth is that President George W. Bush inherited all sorts of things from the Clinton administration, including intelligence agencies and others who weren't doing a very good job that were not sharing information across agencies. Including a government that under President Clinton had not taken seriously al-Qaeda and the threat that they posed," Rubio continued, citing the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, the first World Trade Center bombing, and other terrorist attacks.
For the past week, Trump has discussed the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, specifically noting Bush was president during the attacks and had responsibility for them. Trump went as far saying the Bush administration was warned by the CIA director the attack was coming and did nothing.
Rubio noted Bush had been in office for less than a year when the attacks happened.
"As a result, President Bush was only in office nine months when this happened, but that plot to conduct 9/11 and the steps that it took to bring it about — those began well before he was even sworn into office," Rubio said. "It happened under the watch of President Clinton, in fact, the 9/11 Commission says that. If you look, all of their recommendations, many of them were about reversing mistakes that were made during the Clinton presidency."
"He doesn't have a fundamental understanding of what caused 9/11," Rubio said of Trump.Click to viewYou know, I really love it when (sorta) average guys out-innovate mega-corporate profit machines, like that homemade MRI machine. But this is more amazing: John Kanzius has no background in cancer research but might have invented a real cure. He was diagnosed with leukemia, and struck by the idea that radio waves could kill cancer cells. So he built a prototype machine using pie pans and conducted tests on hot dogs injected with copper sulfate—the radio waves only heat up metal spots, for tactical nuking without nasty side effects. It's now being tested at the University of Pittsburgh and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where the lead doc says that it "may allow us to treat just about any kind of cancer you can imagine."
So how to get metal bits to cancer cells? This is where the big corporate research comes in: nanotechnology. Thousands of nano-particles composed of metal bits can fit in a cancer cell. So far, they've conducted successful cancer extermination trials using the Kanzius machine and metal nano-particles at both M.D. Anderson and Pittsburgh. The catch is that it's only been tested on solid tumors—hitting cancer that's spread around the body is what they're working toward, and if they can't hunt down the individual cancer cells with the nano-particles, this will only have limited applications.
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Human trials are also still four years away, which unfortunately might not be in time for the machine's inventor to cure himself. [CBS via Medgadget]
P.S. On a lighter note, if you really liked the CGI in the video, the guys at Hybrid Medical Animation emailed us to let you know it was all them, baby.Independent parliamentary budget office reveals impact of measures yet to pass parliament but already factored into the bottom line
Budget headache worsens as forecasts to blow out by $9.6bn within four years
The Turnbull government’s budget forecasts will blow out by $9.6bn over the next four years, or $44.7bn within a decade, if it fails to clinch parliamentary approval for stalled savings measures, new figures show.
A report by the independent parliamentary budget office (PBO) reveals the cumulative impact of measures that are yet to pass parliament but are already factored into the budget bottom line.
The shortfall is much smaller than a previous estimate in September last year but remains substantial.
Wednesday’s report emboldened the government’s political opponents, who argued it showed the flimsy state of the deficit forecasts and also proved many Tony Abbott-era cuts remained on the agenda.
The figures also illustrate the Coalition’s continuing difficulties in the Senate, as the government considers changes to electoral laws to counter the impact of micro-parties before the next election. The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said last week the government was trying to make “prudent” savings but “one of our challenges is that so many of them are being blocked in the Senate”.
Myefo: budget banks on 'unrealistic' $13.9bn savings blocked by Senate Read more
Scott Morrison’s budget update in December predicted an underlying cash deficit of $37.4bn this financial year, adding up to deficits of $108.3bn over the four-year cycle. But the PBO report indicates the deficit figures would be $9.6bn worse over four years if the treasurer’s mid-year economic and fiscal outlook had not assumed the passage of a raft of contentious savings measures.
The PBO’s list of outstanding measures included the Coalition’s higher education overhaul, its family payment cuts, its proposed increase in copayments for the pharmaceutical benefits scheme and the abolition of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. It also included one Julia Gillard-era measure: the university efficiency dividend that Labor now opposes.
The Greens MP Adam Bandt said the government should devise “a plan B that had a chance of passing the Senate, instead of sticking with unfair measures that will grow the gap between rich and poor”.
“The PBO report released today shows that the treasurer’s pigheadedness will blow out the deficit by almost $45bn,” he said.
“Instead of continuing Tony Abbott’s attacks on the young, the old, the sick and the poor that will increase inequality in this country, Scott Morrison should end the billions of dollars a year spent on unfair tax breaks that benefit the very wealthy.”
Labor issued a series of media releases accusing the government of maintaining “its attacks on renewable energy”, pushing ahead with the “Americanisation of Australian universities” and clinging to “billions of dollars in further health cuts”.
Budget deficit narrowing is manna from heaven for Scott Morrison | Stephen Koukoulas Read more
The opposition’s families spokeswoman, Jenny Macklin, said the report also showed the government’s policy to stop so-called “double dipping” in paid parental leave would shave $3.7bn from the system over a decade.
The finance minister, Mathias Cormann, in turn accused Labor of “standing in our way at every turn stopping the necessary fixing of many of the budget problems they left behind” and compounding the problem with new “multibillion-dollar spending promises”
“As a country we are still working to digest Labor’s last spending binge during their last period in office,” Cormann said.
The PBO routinely updates its estimates of unlegislated budget items but this time it included the underlying cash balance – the measure generally cited in public debates about deficit and surplus.
When considered on the same basis as previous PBO reports – fiscal balance – the unlegislated measures now amount to $9.2bn over four years or $36.5bn over the decade to 2025-26.
This reflects a turnaround from the previous such report, published in September 2015, when the fiscal balance shortfall was assessed to be about $18bn over four years or $74bn over a decade.1 1. The Sleeper Cave House
Tucked into a 17,000-square-foot hole left by a sandstone mine in Festus, Missouri is the spacious, beautiful home of William "Curt" Sleeper, his wife Deborah and their three kids. The Sleepers almost lost their unique three-bedroom house to foreclosure, but they recently received backing from a private investor after media exposure.
"We feel that our home is eco-friendly," Curt told The Daily Green. He explained that he needs to run no heating or cooling, since the natural insulation of the cave walls keep the inside air 65 to 70 degrees year round. The Sleepers constructed the façade of their dwelling out of 300 sliding glass doors purchased from a local resale shop. "I stripped the aluminum and resold it to the local recycle center," Curt adds. "We pull more than 100 gallons of water per day from the air with our dehumidifiers and then pump that outside to water our gardens and feed chickens."The state known as the “Crossroads of America” is among the nation’s top places for bridges that need some attention.
Thousands of Hoosier bridges are being questioned for their safety.
A just-released report says eight percent of Indiana bridges are structurally deficient. The annual report from the American Road & Transportation Builders Association used data compiled by the federal Department of Transportation.
Indiana is listed as the 13th state for the total number of deficient bridges.
According to the report, seven percent of St. Joseph County bridges and 10 percent of La Porte County bridges are called structurally deficient. Experts say this does not mean the bridge is unsafe.
“The term structurally deficient is misleading,” says Doug Moats, spokesperson with INDOT Northwest District.
The term means the specific bridge isn't up to today's standard -- whether that's a guardrail missing or a needed upgrade to pavement. Indiana Department of Transportation says bridges that get this classification must be monitored, inspected and maintained a little more closely.
INDOT says bridges are usually inspected every year.
“We have bridge inspectors that go out and test the load bearing weight of the bridge,” Moats says. “All of our bridges are deemed are actually classified as being safe. If any of our bridges were unsafe we would close them immediately. We wouldn't allow any public to drive on those bridges.”
Most of the bridges on the list were in Marion and Lake counties. They are some of the most-traveled bridges in the state.
See the full report here: http://www.artba.org/deficient-bridge-report-home/In 2014, then-Washington Post columnist and blogger Ezra Klein threatened to leave if Jeff Bezos & Co. didn’t give him millions of dollars to create a new website.
They passed. He left.
Klein went on to found Vox — along with fellow liberals Melissa Bell and Matt Yglesias.
Enter, President Donald J. Trump. While Trump continues to rail against “the dishonest media” and “fake news” on a seemingly daily basis, liberals in the media continue to gleefully skewer him for it. Now, Klein’s Vox says it’s the Democrats who are falling for fake news.
Check out the opening paragraph from a Friday Vox post:
President Donald Trump is about to resign as a result of the Russia scandal. Bernie Sanders and Sean Hannity are Russian agents. The Russians have paid off House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz to the tune of $10 million, using Trump as a go-between. Paul Ryan is a traitor for refusing to investigate Trump’s Russia ties. Libertarian heroine Ayn Rand was a secret Russian agent charged with discrediting the American conservative movement.
As Vox writer Zack Beauchamp puts it, “These are all claims you can find made on a new and growing sector of the internet that functions as a fake news bubble for liberals.” Ironically, he calls it the “Russiasphere.”
Beauchamp points to Louise Mensch, “former right-wing British parliamentarian and romance novelist,” who has more than a quarter of a million Twitter followers, as a source of “fake news” consumed by liberals.
Beauchamp worries that “political misinformation” and “unfounded speculation and paranoia … risk pushing liberals into the same black hole of conspiracy-mongering and fact-free insinuation that conservatives fell into during the Obama years.”
One wonders if Ezra Klein, Zack Beauchamp, and Vox had the same concerns, for example, over the 2012 attack ad featuring a Paul Ryan look-alike pushing a wheelchair-bound granny off a cliff.
To Beauchamp’s credit, he does make a valid point: “Liberals fall for lies for the same reason conservatives do: partisanship.” Well said. And honest.The furor might have died down after a couple of hours, but instead reached a new intensity after Marc Jacobs took to Instagram to address the criticism. Responding to two commenters using the handle @themarcjacobs, he wrote below a photo on his brand’s page: “All who cry ‘cultural appropriation’ or whatever nonsense about any race or skin color wearing their hair in any particular style or manner — funny how you don’t criticize women of color for straightening their hair. I respect and am inspired by people and how they look. I don’t see color or race — I see people.”
His response set off a slew of fresh condemnations on social media.
Capturing a sentiment expressed widely on the Instagram thread below Mr. Jacobs’s comment, one user wrote: “black women who straighten their hair were forced to conform to those standards. A form of assimilation. I’m from Canada but in America if your hair is unkept, in styles such as dreads, Afros, cornrows, black women lose jobs and opportunities, and they also get ridiculed like Zendaya.” The user, @kiidiosa, was referring to comments the E! News host Giuliana Rancic made about the singer Zendaya’s locs at the Oscars in 2015.
The same user continued: “You don’t see color, huh? How convenient for you. Cuz black women are reminded abt their hair and skin everyday. But your privilege has allowed you that option. I loved you, also didn’t take offense to the dreads, but your comment was redundant and ignorant. Shame.”
This wasn’t the first time a fashion designer has come under fire for cultural appropriation. Last year, Valentino was criticized for sending models down the runway with their hair in cornrow buns, and DSquared2 faced outrage over a collection that the brand described as “an ode to America’s native tribes meets the noble spirit of Old Europe.”Born in London, Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams was the wife of the sixth President, John Quincy Adams (1825-1829).
Louisa Catherine Adams, the first of America’s First Ladies to be born outside of the United States, did not come to this country until four years after she had married John Quincy Adams. Political enemies sometimes called her English. She was born in London to an English mother, Catherine Nuth Johnson, but her father was American–Joshua Johnson, of Maryland–and he served as United States consul after 1790.
A career diplomat at 27, accredited to the Netherlands, John Quincy developed his interest in charming 19-year-old Louisa when they met in London in 1794. Three years later they were married, and went to Berlin in course of duty. At the Prussian court she displayed the style and grace of a diplomat’s lady; the ways of a Yankee farm community seemed strange indeed in 1801 when she first reached the country of which she was a citizen. Then began years divided among the family home in Quincy, Massachusetts, their house in Boston, and a political home in Washington, D.C. When the Johnsons had settled in the capital, Louisa felt more at home there than she ever did in New England.
She left her two older sons in Massachusetts for education in 1809 when she took two-year-old Charles Francis to Russia, where Adams served as Minister. Despite the glamour of the tsar’s court, she had to struggle with cold winters, strange customs, limited funds, and poor health; an infant daughter born in 1811 died the next year. Peace negotiations called Adams to Ghent in 1814 and then to London. To join him, Louisa had to make a forty-day journey across war-ravaged Europe by coach in winter; roving bands of stragglers and highwaymen filled her with “unspeakable terrors” for her son. Happily, the next two years gave her an interlude of family life in the country of her birth.
Appointment of John Quincy as Monroe’s Secretary of State brought the Adamses to Washington in 1817, and Louisa’s drawing room became a center for the diplomatic corps and other notables. Good music enhanced her Tuesday evenings at home, and theater parties contributed to her reputation as an outstanding hostess.
But the pleasure of moving to the White House in 1825 was dimmed by the bitter politics of the election and by her own poor health. She suffered from deep depression. Though she continued her weekly “drawing rooms,” she preferred quiet evenings–reading, composing music and verse, playing her harp. The necessary entertainments were always elegant, however; and her cordial hospitality made the last official reception a gracious occasion although her husband had lost his bid for re-election and partisan feeling still ran high.
Louisa thought she was retiring to Massachusetts permanently, but in 1831 her husband began 17 years of notable service in the House of Representatives. The Adamses could look back on a secure happiness as well as many trials when they celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary at Quincy in 1847. He was fatally stricken at the Capitol the following year; she died in Washington in 1852, and today lies buried at his side in the family church at Quincy.
The biographies of the First Ladies on WhiteHouse.gov are from “The First Ladies of the United States of America,” by Allida Black. Copyright 2009 by the White House Historical Association.
Learn more about Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams’s spouse, John Quincy Adams.Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit 2018
Turning Point USA’s 4th annual Student Action Summit will be held December 19-22nd, 2018 in West Palm Beach, FL. 5,000 student activists between the ages of 15 and 25 will be invited to attend. Students who attend this retreat will hear from guest speakers, receive first-class activism and leadership training, and participate in a series of networking events with political leaders and top-tier activist organizations. Be part of the largest gathering of young, conservative students!
For a tentative full view of our schedule, please click here.
Student Tickets
At the bottom of this page is the student attendee application form. Upon receiving an invitation to the Summit, attendees will be able to purchase a $30 admission ticket with a heavily subsidized purchase of a hotel room. This includes three (3) nights of on-site lodging and admission to all general sessions and breakout sessions at the conference. Attendees are responsible for covering the cost of travel to/from West Palm Beach, FL and most meals during the conference. TPUSA will have several promotional events to advertise for our 2019 events. To purchase a ticket to one of the lunches, please click here.
Adult Tickets
If you are an adult, non-student, or parent wishing to attend our Student Action Summit, tickets are limited but we would love to have you! To purchase adult tickets follow the link provided here! All students please apply by filling out the application below. * Adult tickets only cover the cost of admission to the conference. TPUSA does not provide lodging or free meals with this ticket.*
VIP Adult Tickets
If you are an adult, non-student, or parent wishing to attend our Student Action Summit as a VIP, tickets are limited but we would love to have you! To purchase adult VIP tickets follow the link provided here! VIPs get special access to our SAS VIP Lounge and activities.
All students please apply by filling out the application below. We also have a limited number of student VIP tickets which are available to purchase upon acceptance.
Confirmed Speakers for SAS 2018ADVERTISEMENTS
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Right in the midst of two hacker fiascos putting The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) firmly in the ‘more holes than a golf course’ camp, a research paper commissioned by their research arm was published touting that Blockchain was mythical when it came to getting rid of third parties in trades.
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Bad timing or what? This of course fell right in the middle of an investigation to solve the $81 million heist from the central bank of Bangladesh in February, where attackers were able to ‘compel’ the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to move money to accounts in the Philippines where it disappeared and a second attack which involved a commercial bank where SWIFT is holding out how much was nicked. The report is probably the most critical paper published on Blockchain – but they have hunted down every Blockchain critic on the planet and obvious framed the questions to cast doubt on Blockchain as a solution.
That’s not really surprising as a decentralised Blockchain solution kind of rids the need for their ‘middleman’ services as a ‘trust agent’ for financial transactions.
From the report:
The idea is that two or more parties would be able to use blockchain technology to carry out a trade and this could all be done without the need for any other interference. But the SWIFT Institute said that a central third party role would still exist, albeit more narrowly, as a mean of confirming identity and existence of an asset, as well as dispute resolution and enforcing legal obligations.
In a piece on the SWIFT report at CNBC, commenter The Real Stig nailed it.
“The viability of our business is under severe threat from this new technology. Please ignore this technology and join us us in hoping it will just go away.”
In a recent article headlined, “Swift Is Hacked Again. The Bitcoin/Blockchain Fat Lady Sings,” Seeking Alpha financial writer Kurt Dew unloaded:
“It is time to adopt some kind of distributed ledger.” The SWIFT payment system failed again this week. The tone of Swift’s announcement intimated the end of life on the planet earth as we know it. Swift’s description of the system’s attackers was apocalyptic, and did nothing to minimize the skills of the attackers, adding that the funds seized might be, of course, reinvested to give the hackers a kind of turboboost of evil. My sources tell me the culprit is Brainiac from the planet Zod. Of course there is nothing funny about this situation, even if Swift’s “chicken little” corporate reaction was pretty funny. The real lesson of this event is deadly earnest and, I believe, fully anticipated by most specialists in the security of our financial system. This event, though, was the Fat Lady’s Song. The banks, exchanges, clearers like Swift, DDTC, and so on, are going to have to share something with the public that insiders already know. The party is over for the old, permissioned, firewall based, electronic fortress, concept of trust-in-payments systems. And the alternative is very far from obvious.
NewsBTC also got into the action.
“…this is another prime example of why the legacy system – and its archaic underpinning technology – need to be replaced with a more modern solution sooner rather than later. Using firewalls used to be an excellent way to protect financial systems, but hackers have become a lot smarter throughout the years. This leaves security experts well behind the curve of technological innovation, which hackers will gladly take advantage of.”The German government is moving to tighten rules on its foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), following a series of revelations that it was acting independently of any government oversight, spying on allies, international organizations and helping the US National Security Agency (NSA) without it ever being appropriately monitored by any parliamentary watchdog.
In a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Angela Merkel's administration agreed to a new draft bill that would see legal guidelines imposed on spying on European Union citizens, as well as an external committee to oversee the agency.
But the bill is actually a diluted version of what had been originally planned and recommended by the parliamentary committee, building in a number of exceptions to allow the BND to spy on targets within the EU.
The BND will still be allowed to spy on EU institutions, as long as they collect information that will help "counter dangers for domestic and foreign security," and protect "the ability to act of the Federal Republic of Germany."
Schindler lost his job because he didn't know what was on the list
Core reforms
But the reforms include a new external "judges' committee" - made up of two judges and a federal prosecutor - who will have the power to check at any time the BND's so-called "selectors" (search terms used to scan data).
Not only that, the chancellery will from now on have to approve applications to spy on international communications networks - something that before could be approved at a much lower level within the BND.
While industrial espionage is forbidden per se (something that was already in law, "uncovering procedures of significance to economic policy may be necessary."
As for cooperation with foreign intelligence services, it will be allowed under certain circumstances - in other words, counter-terrorism, supporting the German military, or information that may affect the safety of German nationals abroad.
A slow-burning scandal
In 2013, fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed to the German public that the BND had effectively been in the service of the NSA - helpfully searching its own networks to supply information to the agency, as well as spying on a number of European diplomats and foreign governments, including then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
This somewhat undermining Merkel's angry "friends don't spy on each other" remark, made after Snowden's documents also revealed that the NSA had been tapping her cell phone.
That also seems to have come as news to Gerhard Schindler, the BND president who was sacked in the wake of the revelations this year because after a long parliamentary investigation, it appeared that he did not know what many of his spies were doing.
Though it soon became clear that the problem may have been there before. As Hans Leyendecker told DW in April: "Looking back, it's become clear that this has often been the case at the BND. You could say that the BND, which is turning 60 this year, has always tended to have a life of its own, no matter who was president."
Objections
All four parties in Germany's Bundestag agreed that the BND needed to be regulated better (as the parliamentary committees discovered, even BND chiefs were not always aware of who was being spied on). The government parties declared themselves very pleased with the reforms.
The Bundestag committee was frustrated by the BND's secrecy
"We welcome the fact that a clearer legal basis for the so-called foreign telecommunication surveillance of the BND has been created," said Stephan Mayer, interior policy spokesman for Merkel's Christian Democratic Union. "The definition of unambiguous legal conditions picks up constructively on the criticism of the legal foundations currently used."
But all this is not nearly enough for Germany's community of internet activists, who say the reform does not meaningfully curtail the power of the BND at all. "The grand coalition hasn't even sharpened its knives," the network policy "Netzpolitik.org" wrote. "The secret service supervisors will in future still be dominated by what the services want to tell them - whenever it seems suitable to them... at its core, the motto is 'keep going!' "
"Netzpolitik.org" argues that far from limiting the powers of the BND, the new law would actually expand them, because up till now it has only been allowed to track and eavesdrop single cable or wireless connections. In fact, the new law regulates the surveillance of whole telecommunications networks. "That should increase the extent of surveillance significantly," one constitutional jurist was quoted as saying.
Not only that, the activists argued, the draft bill effectively expands the number of reasons why the intelligence agency can practice surveillance to well beyond the typical "international terrorism" threat - to include all kinds of international crime. In short, the BND will be able to sift internet providers to counter any threats at all, both domestic and foreign, to protect Germany's "capabilities," and to gain any information of "foreign or security policy significance."I'm rather certain this is not flat beer. pic.twitter.com/UCEjhDoi0A — Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) April 6, 2015
Renovations to Wrigley Field will be amazing, but "will" is the operative term here. Right now there are a few... issues. It's resulting in some dodgy situations.
Yes, the lines for the bathrooms at Wrigley Field are unusually, problematically long. Going to be a big issue if they don't fix it ASAP. — Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) April 6, 2015
This could just be a coincidence. Perhaps concessions workers are just bleeding a keg dry and had nowhere else to put flat beer. We can hope, right?
@Cubs this is how bad the bathroom situation is @ Wrigley.... pic.twitter.com/MopU6fTBV3 — Cap Anson (@cubbies2014) April 6, 2015
Oh no. How bad could the bathroom problem really be?
#Cubs have a bathroom issue. Men's restroom line stretches 4 sections on both sides of upper deck. #WrigleyField pic.twitter.com/hK2F1IQWfQ — Jeremy Shermak (@JeremyShermak) April 6, 2015
This is really bad. Fans weren't happy.
@Cubs I'm all for renovating but I've now missed two innings trying to get into the bathroom. Get you act together — James Hillebrand (@JamesKU1) April 6, 2015
@Cubs Really Theo????? 1hour wait for the men's bathroom??? Pls refund my money and give us a break and quit!! — Bill Kmiecik (@BillKmiecik) April 6, 2015
Cubs are sending people to neighboring businesses to use the bathroom with passes. Line wraps the concourse. — Patrick Monaghan (@pkmonaghan) April 6, 2015
Yeeeeeeesh! The moral of this story: If you plan on heading to Wrigley soon, bring a diaper.0
It’s been about two weeks since we got that very first shot of Jessica Chastain in Crimson Peak and now it’s time to get a look at her co-stars, Tom Hiddleston and Mia Wasikowska. According to the description that accompanied the images, Wasikowska leads as a young woman who falls for Hiddleston’s character. He takes her back to his home and that’s where she encounters his jealous sister (Chastain) and uncovers “more than a few skeletons in the closet.”
Hit the jump to check out those new Crimson Peak images as well as some additional details on the plot of the film. Crimson Peak opens in regular theaters and IMAX on October 16th, and also stars Charlie Hunnam.
We do have an official synopsis for the film, but this one from Empire Magazine (via Torrilla) offers a few more details:
“A young woman (Wasikowska) is swept off by her feet by a charismatic suitor (Hiddleston) and taken back to his ancestral home. There she finds more than she bargained for, including a jealous sister (Chastain) and more than a few skeletons in the closet.”
I never thought I’d say this, but Hiddleston actually isn’t the most eye-catching thing in the images below. Just look at that house! I happened to have been on set as well when Steve got to check it out and the place was downright incredible, but it’s actually even more striking with the fire burning and the appropriate coloring. The house really does come alive in these shots, so perhaps Guillermo del Toro really can pull this whole breathing and bleeding thing off.
Tom Hiddleston as Sir Thomas Sharpe. #CrimsonPeak pic.twitter.com/rJXDvUKwT1 — Tom Hiddleston Page (@Loki_Page) December 23, 2014
ICYMI: Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain & Mia Wasikowska. #CrimsonPeak (Entertaiment Weekly – Total Film) pic.twitter.com/rJqUW8HqQJ — Tom Hiddleston Page (@Loki_Page) December 20, 2014
Here’s the official synopsis for Crimson Peak:The video will start in 8 Cancel
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Cristiano Ronaldo has revealed he "had a vision" that he would score the goal to win Real Madrid their eleventh Champions League.
The Bernabeu club claimed La Undecima when the Portugual captain slammed home from 12 yards to take advantage of Juanfran's missed penalty.
And when questioned on the pitch, moments after the manic celebrations had temporarily died down, he told Spanish television that he'd seen the moment coming.
"I had a vision," he said.
"I knew that I would score the winning goal... I told Zizou that and to let me take the fifth and that's how it turned out.
Madrid 1-1 Atleti (Pens: 5-3):
(Image: Getty)
"My third Champions League," he added.
Ronaldo was quiet throughout the 120 minutes of nervy, engrossing football.
The 31-year-old arguably should have scored the winner in the first half of extra time, but fluffed a header when unmarked.International Cephalopod Awareness Days (ICAD) are upon us. From October 8-12 (of any year), spend some time celebrating “the most intelligent invertebrates in the world”: octopus, cuttlefish, squid and more. Here’s a great place to celebrate the squid tomorrow (or really, most any day). Also, check out the official website for ICAD.
October 8 – Octopus Day, for all the eight-armed species October 9 – Nautilus Night, a time for all the lesser-known extant cephalopods October 10 – Squid Day/Cuttlefish Day, or Squidturday, covering the tentacular species October 11 – Myths and Legends Day, for all the fantastical cephalopods of movies, literature and legend. Release the Kraken! October 12 – Fossil Day (to coincide with National Fossil Day), for all the |
lower bound” of zero is a new phenomenon.
To most people, negative interest rates and negative yields sound illogical, if not impossible. Applied to the banking sector, negative rates mean that the depositor has to pay the bank to hold his/her cash. If deposit rates were -1%, for example, for every $1000 deposited in a bank account, the holder would have around $990 at the end of the year. Similarly, when a bond offers a negative yield, the buyer of the bond does not get the total invested amount returned to him/her at maturity. In Germany, a one-year government bond currently yields roughly -0.5%; buy this bond and you get less euros at maturity than what you put in. On face value, these negative rates do not sound like a good deal, yet a multitude of investors pile into negative yield debt across many countries such as Germany, Denmark, and Japan. Banks in these nine countries have to pay central banks to hold their cash balances.
Source: Bloomberg
Why this apparent crazy behavior? Subzero rates attract investors under a few circumstances. First, when investors are risk averse and scared of losing money in risky assets, they flock to the “riskless” investments such as cash and government bonds. They are willing to accept low / near zero returns because low is preferred to an actual loss. At small negative interest rates, these risk-averse people will cling to a low, certain loss rather than a potentially higher uncertain loss. It may take deeply negative interest rates to make them pull their cash out of banks or government bonds.
Second, in a deflationary world, negative deposit rates or bond yields can still yield positive real returns. For example, if inflation is -2% and deposit rates are -1%, the investor still makes a “real” return of 1%. With this level of deflation, prices of goods fall through time (they become cheaper by 2% a year in this example) yet the investor only loses 1% on his bank deposit. This means he still has a 1% increase in his real purchasing power even with negative rates.
Central banks such as the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan have brought interest rates negative as part of their plan to stimulate growth. By penalizing banks for keeping cash on deposit, they hope to encourage them to lend more to customers and thereby encourage investments and expand the economy. In order for the plan to be effective, people and companies have to want to take out the additional loans. It’s too early to tell if it is working.
One fear that experts have regarding negative deposit rates is that customers could try to pull their cash out of “costly” banks and store it under the “free” mattress. While possible for small accounts, wealthier clients and corporate customers would need a very large mattress! So far we haven’t observed a significant withdrawal from bank accounts within the nine negative rate countries, as banks have not passed their negative rates onto individual customers. However, some large corporate clients are getting charged for big balances; as such negative rates will continue to induce these companies to make new investments, or merely use cash to buy back outstanding stock or debt, or even buy other companies. Overall, most analysts agree that negative rates will hurt the banks’ profits before it hurts the banks’ customers.
Still the concept of subzero rates is looming in U.S. financial circles. Last week the Chairwoman of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen told Congress that she was open to bringing U.S. rates negative if the economy warranted it. Technocrats in the U.S. and a host of other countries are readying regulations and infrastructure in order to prepare for the possibility. However, while the stock and commodities markets have been volatile and painful of late, the U.S. economy is just not that bad off. The underlying labor market has shown continued strength and consumption has been resilient. Consequently, the U.S. is far from needing another big round of monetary policy easing, especially in the form of negative interest rates.
Hopefully our economy won’t need a drastic move to negative rates in the coming years, as there is not much consensus among experts that this kind of monetary policy does more help than harm. In the years since 2008, markets have generally applauded aggressive moves in easing monetary policy as powerful stimulus to kick-start economies. However, in the weeks since Japan went to negative rates, markets are expressing the view that monetary policy doesn’t seem to pack the punch it used to. It is time for the fiscal policymakers to get some tough reforms done.Craigslist has finally made changes to its website early Saturday morning, censoring its “adult services” section in the United States.
Craigslist has been under fire for years for facilitating prostitution via its “adult services” section. Last week the attorney generals from 17 states collectively made a call to action for Craigslist to once and for all remove this portion of the site.
The question remains, however, if the efforts to halt the advertising of prostitution on Craigslist will have any real effect on slowing down of the use of the internet to solicit prostitution or if the practice will just shift would be prostitutes to other sites. Backpage.com and other similar sites have received much less of the bad press but provide a similar platform for the solicitation of prostitution.
A CNN investigation of Craiglist’s “adult services” section, tallied more than 7,000 ads in a single day country wide. While Craigslist may indeed be the biggest site facilitating prostitution, it certainly is not alone.
It’s also worth noting that the 2009 “Craigslist Killing” of Julissa Brisman was purportedly the result of an ad posted on Craigslist offering massage services. Craigslist today has only blocked its most obvious and blatant source of prostitution advertising. Its other pages, such as “casual encounters”, may now become a more veiled version of its now censored “adult services.”
Do you think the Feds have a responsibility to monitor and control Craigslist?Only a few years ago, Opera Max was the rising star in the browser maker’s portfolio. The service offered a system-wide data-saving proxy that funnelled all app data through Opera’s servers to compress images and videos. Now, however, Max is heading for the deadpool. The company, which is now owned by a consortium of Chinese firms, today announced that it will shut down Max.
“Opera has now decided to discontinue Opera Max. The product had a substantially different value proposition than our browser products, and represented a different focus for Opera,” the company writes in its announcement. “We, therefore, focus on our browsers and other upcoming services.”
Opera did not provide any further reasoning for this move, though we’ve reached out to the company for a more detailed comment.
With more than 500,000 installs, Max was a popular service — and it gave Opera quite a bit of insight into how people used their phones (though given that its advertising arm wasn’t part of the sale, the company may not be interested in this data anymore).
It’ll be interesting to see what this means for a service like Opera VPN, though. While both Opera Max and VPN offered somewhat similar functionality, their emphasis was quite different and if the company decided that Max isn’t at the core of its strategy anymore, then Opera VPN could be heading to an untimely end, too.
Max has now been delisted from the Google Play store; while users who have already installed the app will be able to use it for a while longer, the servers that power it will likely go offline in the near future.A father of three choked to death as he tried to eat a McDonald's cheeseburger in one bite, a coroner's inquest has ruled.
Darren Bray, 29, passed out after rolling the burger into a ball and stuffing it in his mouth, a Welsh inquest heard, the BBC reported.
Read: Charlie Sheen's Ex-Fiancee: He Choked Me Like a Rag Doll
Though Bray had been drinking, it was not enough to affect his judgment, authorities said.
"I could see him trying to cough it up and he was making horrible, coughing noises," friend Sam Bisgrove said. "I tried to hit his back to help him clear his airway."
Paramedics performed CPR and used a suction device to remove the food, but Barry died on the scene. He had been visiting a friend.
Read: Stepmother is Sentenced to Death After Cooking Anti-Freeze into Children's Food, Choking Them
A small piece of the burger remained stuck in his throat and "he would not have been able to breathe... with that in his airway," Dr. Rhiannon Trefor told the hearing.
Before shoving the cheeseburger into his mouth, Barry told his friend, "Watch this."
Watch: See Man Jump Over Bar to Save Customer Choking On BurgerParamount Pictures / Skydance Productions
Less than two weeks ago, a user of the social-news website Reddit made the kind of last-ditch request the site has become known for supporting: his friend, he wrote, had weeks to live, and among his last wishes was the hope that he might be able to see the upcoming movie Star Trek into Darkness, which is not due in theaters until May 17. That was probably impossible, he acknowledged, but even the chance to see the extended trailer would be welcome.
Reddit and other social-media sites picked up the story. Within days, there was an update. The same user posted news from the wife of the dying man — who has been identified by the Hollywood Reporter as Daniel Craft, director of the New York Asian Film Festival: Craft would get his wish. CNET reports that Star Trek director J.J. Abrams saw the story via Twitter and called Craft’s wife, Paige, arranging for a producer to bring a rough cut of the film to the Crafts’ home in New York.
(MORE: 20 Movies We’re Looking Forward to in 2013 (and 5 We’re Definitely Not))
But the success of the effort to get the movie to Craft in time was, unfortunately, only a bright moment in a sad story: in a follow-up Reddit post, one of Craft’s friends wrote that, shortly after seeing the movie — an effort in preparation for which he had spent a whole day resting — Craft went back to bed for the last time. Over the weekend, the New York Asian Film Festival’s Facebook page shared the sad news that Craft died on the night of Jan. 4. His last words were, reportedly, “I’m going … into the future.”
According to Deadline.com, at a Jan. 6 panel about his show Revolution, J.J. Abrams said that Star Trek’s inclusion in Craft’s last wishes was “unbelievably touching.” And the feeling was mutual: back on Reddit, Craft’s wife shared the message that they “enjoyed [the movie] IMMENSELY as a film and as a gesture.” Rather than seeing the incident as a cancer story, she said, she hopes the exchange will be seen as an example of the broader power of giving:
This is a story of us giving something to him, the ‘internet’ community giving something to him and ultimately being a heartwarming gift to our friends, family and so many others… it was a wonderful thing to see with Daniel and a wonderful thing to see Daniel enjoy – Making someone as ill as he is smile for any length of time really makes a difference.
(MORE: Star Trek into Darkness: Is Benedict Cumberbatch Playing Khan?)First meeting between PM Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump is aimed at building a personal rapport
Highlights PM Modi, on first US visit after Trump took office, to meet him today Trump has received detailed briefings on India ahead of meet He has also picked up Hindi words to greet PM Modi, says key supporter
Officials in India and the United States have worked hard and long to make Prime Minister Narendra Modi's first visit to the White House during the Trump presidency a success. Ahead of their first meeting on Monday afternoon, US President Donald J Trump has received detailed briefings on India and relations between the two countries including the growing defence cooperation.He has also picked up a smattering of Hindi that he is expected to show off during his meeting with PM Modi, and later."Donald Trump is learning Hindi words for the meeting with Prime Minister Modi... He will say Trump Sarkar welcomes Modi Sarkar," said Chicago industrialist Shalabh "Shalli" Kumar, who was considered the chief architect of the presidential candidate outreach to the Indian-American community last year.It was during this fiercely-contested election campaign that the billionaire candidate had adapted PM Modi's catchy election slogan for the 2014, "Ab ki baar Modi Sarkaar" (This time, a Modi government) to "Ab ki baar Trump Sarkar" in a 30-second commercial to reach out to Indian Americans At his White House interaction, President Trump is expected to go further."That is just the start of a great relationship," said Mr Kumar, pointing out that Mr Trump had been briefed adequately about the Indian PM. "He has through me, as well on his own, enough people (to brief him)... he knows Prime Minister Modi really well," he said. The White House chief strategist Steve Bannan has "studied Modi" and "they already know where Modi stands, where he wants to take India," Mr Kumar said.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Mike Sergeant says the body was found in woodland in Boston Manor Park, near Hanwell
Police searching for Arnis Zalkalns, suspected of killing teenager Alice Gross, have said early indications suggest a body found in London is his.
The "badly decomposed" body was found in woodland in Boston Manor Park, near Hanwell, on Saturday.
No formal identification has taken place. Alice's family has been told.
The 14-year-old was last seen on 28 August after leaving her home in Hanwell. Her body was found in west London's River Brent on Tuesday.
Mr Zalkalns was filmed cycling along the Grand Union Canal 15 minutes after Alice had walked along it on 28 August.
A Metropolitan Police statement said: "Although no formal identification has been made early indications suggest the body may be that of Arnis Zalkalns.
"We have updated his partner and a family liaison officer is supporting her."
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The body was found in Boston Manor Park in West London
It added: "Although Arnis Zalkalns had been identified as a suspect in the Alice Gross murder investigation, enquiries continue to establish the full circumstances surrounding this crime.
"Officers are still searching for evidence, and once again appeal to the public for any information that could assist them."
He has been missing from his Ealing home since 3 September.
The 41-year-old Latvian is a building labourer with a murder conviction.
Image copyright Met Handout Image caption Alice Gross was last seen walking along the Grand Union Canal on 28 August
He served seven years in prison in his native country for bludgeoning and stabbing his wife Rudite to death.
When police found Alice's body on Tuesday they said significant efforts had been made to conceal it.
'Horrific case'
Prime Minister David Cameron has said he will examine "all the circumstances of the case" surrounding the murder of Alice.
He described it as a "horrific case", and said: "Anyone with a daughter will have just felt sickened by what has happened and what that poor family has had to go through."
Mr Cameron's words came after it was revealed that further tests will be carried out on Alice's body after a post-mortem examination proved inconclusive.
Image copyright Met Image caption Police officers from several forces took part in the search for the teenager
The post-mortem at Uxbridge mortuary took two days due to the "complex nature" of the investigation, Scotland Yard said.
Following the discovery of Alice's body, her parents Rosalind Hodgkiss and Jose Gross said: "Why anyone would want to hurt her is something that we are struggling to come to terms with.
"Alice was a loving and much loved daughter and sister, a quirky live spark of a girl, beautiful inside and out."
The teenager's disappearance prompted an outpouring of support in her local community of Hanwell, west London, where yellow ribbons and bows still adorn the streets.
Mr Zalkalns, a general labourer, who worked at a building site in Isleworth, west London, is believed to have come to the UK in 2007, but authorities here are thought to have had no record of his murder conviction.TORONTO – Citing their devotion to meaningful artistic endeavours, throngs of thoughtful art enthusiasts, who, sources say, are completely in control of their faculties, will be getting the most out of this year’s Nuit Blanche experience by avoiding the all-night festivities entirely.
“I remember last year, the first time I went to Nuit Blanche,” said Art Gallery of Ontario member Gilda Hershing, 48, recalling how she vowed never to return after stepping in vomit twice at one of several dozen installations scattered across the city, from which sloshed partiers are completely unable derive any aesthetic appreciation. “I’m excited for tonight! I’ll probably have some tea and take a bath while finishing the book on Monet I’m reading so I can pick up that new Van Gogh biography from the library tomorrow.”
“I think that will be much more enjoyable for me as an art lover,” she added.
Nuit Blanche started in Toronto in 2006, after importing the idea from France, a culture that – experts say – has evolved the ability to appreciate art and wine at the same time. Later, Nuit Blanche became Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, but the organization changed back to Nuit Blanche in 2015.
“There’s a reason why we no longer sponsor Nuit Blanche,” said Scotiabank representative Douglas McHutchinson. “We’d rather devote our resources toward something more synonymous with temperate, creative entertainment, like the naming rights to stadium where the Toronto Maple Leafs play.”
“I would gladly devote the other 364 days of my year to appreciating stimulating and challenging art,” said Jonathan Merrick, 28, who studied at the Royal College of Art in the UK. “You know, as opposed to gawking at a bunch of tarps strung up by OCAD drop-outs meant to symbolize “urban whimsy” or some such nonsense.”
At press time, several witnesses report a man, barely able to stand, exclaim that he “doesn’t get [the art exhibit that’s in front of him.]”Less than a mile from Cape Town’s picturesque waterfront shops and cafes, dozens of fishermen work on docked vessels on the other side of the port, unseen by tourists strolling down the boardwalk. This is one of Africa’s largest ports, on a major sea route between east and west. Here, many boats come and go – to pick up crew members, call in for repairs or fuel up.
Many of the fishermen on these boats, who are mainly from south-east Asia, are victims of abuse and forced labour. They are desperate to escape the cycle of exploitation before they’re taken back out to the high seas.
EU accused of exporting problem of overfishing with Mauritania deal Read more
Alex* is one of them. After more than a year at sea, he has earned only a few hundred dollars to send to his family. He says the captain promises to pay him when he returns home – something his crewmates have been told too.
The 32-year-old Filipino and his colleagues are rolling up fishing line on deck, when a man approaches their vessel. Dane Duplessis shouts to them as he climbs up the ladder to board. Duplessis, a young chaplain with the charity Biblia, a South African Christian NGO, is inspecting boats in an effort to find victims of slave labour.
After some coaxing, the half-dozen Filipino fishermen manage through broken English to convey that they haven’t been paid in months.
“We hear that a lot,” says Duplessis, who discovers cases of unpaid work and forced labour every month. “Once you go on to one of these vessels, it’s like stepping into a squatter camp. I can tell you this vessel was made in the 80s – it’s rusted, and it smells bad. That’s why I took a concern in these guys and in their lives.”
Alex and his crewmates’ passports are locked up with the captain, so the fishermen can’t go far. “They haven’t seen their contracts,” says Duplessis, adding that it sounds like a case of trafficking.
Benjamin*, 24, a farmer back in the Philippines, says he’s owed months of wages for his time on a Taiwanese-flagged vessel, aboard which he and his crewmates endured beatings for not working hard enough. “Our captain is no good, sir,” he says. “Every day he’s punching and kicking one of us.”
The vessel fished mainly for tuna and squid in the Pacific Ocean before sailing to Cape Town in January, and docking after more than five months at sea.
Several crew members had heard about the Mission to Seafarers in Cape Town, where seamen can buy food and phone credit, and unwind – and went there to seek help. Duplessis works at the Mission alongside Cassiem Augustus, an inspector with the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF). Together, Duplessis and Augustus planned the escape of more than 25 crew.
The men returned to get their belongings, and Duplessis picked them up in a large van. Over the angry objections of senior officers, he brought them to a safe house. Augustus negotiated with the shipowner’s agency and arranged for the men to be flown home at the company’s expense.
Cameroon fishing industry and tourism battered by extreme weather Read more
Now Benjamin is back home in the Philippines with his family, but he doesn’t expect to ever get the money he’s owed. Duplessis and Augustus have managed to resolve hundreds of cases over the years, freeing victims of forced labour or obtaining unpaid wages. But while they can put pressure on companies with offices in South Africa, they have little influence over the recruitment agencies in charge of paying fishermen in their home countries.
For many fishermen in south-east Asia, the promises of big wages hide an ugly reality: months at sea with little food and drinking water, working 16- to 24-hour days, for salaries that are frequently unpaid.
Benjamin says the Filipino consulate has done little to help. Few are as active as the Indonesian consulate general in Cape Town, which has sounded the alarm, informing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that it continues to receive reports of human rights complaints by Indonesian fishermen every month.
“It’s common to get complaints on Chinese and Taiwanese vessels,” says Muhammad Sadri, at the Indonesian consulate. “Many of the fishermen ask to go home because of the conditions on board, but the contracts put them in a weak position, because they must fulfil their obligations for 24 months, and for the first six or eight months almost all of their salary will be deducted.”
Cases uncovered by the ITF in Cape Town echo the findings of a recent Greenpeace report on Taiwan’s overseas fishing industry, which, it says, appears “beset by issues of human trafficking”. The report is based on interviews with more than 100 fishers in Taiwan and abroad, and the authors report non-payment or under-payment of wages, physical abuse and a lack of food and drink.
Revealed: how the Thai fishing industry trafficks, imprisons and enslaves Read more
The year-long investigation describes a system in which Taiwanese fishing companies, desperate for cheap labour, hire foreign fishers from neighbouring countries and subject them to slave-like conditions.
ITF researchers believe most labour abuses occur in south-east Asia, where the majority of the world’s fishing activities take place but ports there provide little intelligence, they say, and few cases come to light. Cape Town, however, provides a rare window into the lives of migrant workers at sea, even if the team is tiny and support minimal.
“I don’t have the help that I need,” says Augustus. “We get a lot of reports of these abuses – trafficking, inhumane conditions [on Chinese and Taiwanese ships], where people don’t eat properly; there’s no proper health or medicine.”
A spokesman for South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs would not respond to repeated requests for information, saying only that it inspects “every single ship that comes to port” – an account disputed by maritime attorney Alan Goldberg. “I’ve been working at the port for close to 20 years and to my knowledge the Department of Home Affairs has never conducted daily checks – it’s only when there’s a problem,” he says. Like Augustus, Goldberg says South African officials need better training.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dane Duplessis (right) and Cassiem Augustus (far right) advise a fisherman in Cape Town’s port. Photograph: Kyle G Brown
There have been complaints by rights campaigners that South African authorities treat victims of trafficking like criminals. In late 2013, more than 70 Indonesian fishermen were living in squalid conditions on several vessels at the port, relying on food provided by local people. They were picked up by officials and detained for more than two months before being sent back to Indonesia – a case cited by the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons report.
Recruitment agencies in Indonesia have since warned some of the men that they owe money for breaking their contracts. Others have been threatened, and told not to go ahead with human trafficking allegations now being investigated by Indonesian police. “We can say from here, ‘You’re covered, you’re safe’,” Augustus says. “But the agencies know where they live. They know because they recruit them from their homes, often in small villages – and once the men get home, the clock starts ticking, there’s not much we can do.”
Back at Cape Town’s labyrinthine harbour, Duplessis has resumed his patrols. “It just seems as though they’re being treated as less than human,” he says. “That’s why 90% of my work is focused on fishermen, trying to gain their trust so we can help them out of this.”
*Names have been changedAP Knowing if a particular summer will be hot or not can mean millions to certain companies.
After last year's wonderfully mild April, Germans expected to face a sizzling-hot summer. But German food retailer REWE bet money it knew better.
Already in April, REWE, which operates a number of well-known German retail chains, unloaded onto the market a product that wasn't exactly part of its ordinary range: around three gigawatt hours of electricity, or enough to meet the annual energy needs of about 700 households. To put it another way, REWE sold its options to buy the energy packet, which it was entitled to exercise in June and July. At the time, many electricity dealers thought it was a strange move.
Electricity -- like pork bellies, telephone minutes and other commodities -- is traded on exchanges. REWE has a subsidiary called EHA set up specifically for this purpose, and REWE buys electricity for its own needs through EHA. As a company that uses about as much electricity as the large German city of Hanover, which has half a million inhabitants, it sometime buys the commodity years in advance. Large amounts of electricity are needed to power REWE's refrigeration rooms, where perishable products are stored, as well as its freezers and refrigerated shelving in supermarkets.
Every summer, the demand for electricity to keep food fresh rises, especially during hot weather. When that happens, prices go up on the exchanges. Astute users stock up on electricity when the prices are low; buying electricity when summer temperatures are already high can get very costly.
So, given all of that, why on earth was REWE unloading its electricity options in the warmest April on record?
The Supercomputer Trump Card
The rest is now history. Summer 2007 was unusually cold, and electricity prices dropped as a result. REWE, for its part, raked in a tidy additional profit. As EHA spokesman Arnd Kiesselbach puts it: "We sold our surplus when people were still willing to pay good money for it."
The scouting for the crafty deal took place in the British city of Reading, where a supercomputer constantly runs weather simulations months in advance. According to the computer's calculations, even by as early as April, things weren't looking too good for summer 2007.
The computer is part of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). For the last few years, researchers there have been trying to do something that the weather's inherently random nature would normally preclude: forecast entire seasons. The results have become so reliable that Germany's National Meteorological Service (DWD), a member organization of ECMWF, now officially offers them for sale. For 150 ($231), companies can now purchase the center's six-month forecast.
DER SPIEGEL Graphic: Weather predictions for summer 2008
For example, according to the center, this summer will be a little warmer than usual in Germany, although rain levels will remain about average. The reports from Reading are oracle-like in their simplicity, merely pointing out broad tendencies -- warmer, colder, wetter or dryer than average -- and for good reason. More information cannot be gleaned this far in advance. The forecasts only reveal the extent to which actual values could diverge from the averages of many years.
The computer still makes significant mistakes, and the information it provides is too vague for purposes like planning vacations. But the data can be of use to business, and the DWD is already advising power companies and municipal utilities. If they know, for example, that the upcoming winter is likely to be colder than usual, these companies can stockpile natural gas reserves for their power plants early on.
The number of economic sectors sensitive to the weather is surprisingly large, from ice cream makers to the textile industry. In the latter case, knowing whether summer temperatures are more likely to create a need for bikinis or windbreakers can be critical.
The DWD's list of customers even includes a manufacturer of mosquito repellant, because mosquitoes are also subject to the weather. The dominant mosquito strains in cool, wet summers are different from those in warm summers, and combating each strain requires a slightly different cocktail of chemicals.
Cloning Chaos
The DWD receives its forecasts from Reading, where the supercomputer is fast enough to digest millions of pieces of observation data. The weather model the computer uses is similar to the one employed for daily forecasts. But a single model would eventually become useless and would only spit out nonsense after a week or two. The meteorologists use a trick to overcome this hurdle: They clone their model and then run simultaneous simulations with multiple clones.
The cast of clones currently consists of 41 members, and each one begins with the weather data for the present. However, because current conditions can never be captured perfectly, each model receives slightly modified initial values. Then the computer simulates an imaginary worldwide weather process. Pressure zones move around the globe hour by hour, snow falls and melts again, and monsoon clouds gather over India at the customary time -- everything is simulated almost exactly as it would be on the real planet.
Of course, the models only coincide at the beginning. They are often noticeably different by the third day, and after three weeks each model is computing away in its own, unique world. In Model 5, all of Germany may be inundated with nonstop rain in June, while Model 12 is predicting the hottest June in years. Meanwhile, Model 23 may have concocted a moody low pressure zone over the British Isles.
Things just get more and more complicated. The meteorologists could watch the models and lose themselves in an endless array of possibilities, but no one is interested in that. "We don't even look at individual calculations," says meteorologist Renate Hagedorn, who works on seasonal prognoses for the DWD in Reading.Their exploration of the world resulted in players stumbling across mini-challenges and alternate gameplay opportunities that meshed seamlessly with the core experience. The Oil Fields had leaking pipelines that spewed flaming gas, preventing the players from accessing some areas. When the leaky pipe opening was shot at it would explode, and the continuous stream of flame would become an intermittent burst, turning the environmental hazard into a timing puzzle. If players successfully navigated this puzzle they’d be rewarded with the contents of the area beyond - often a couple of power-ups and a repair bonus. If they failed, they'd catch fire, suffering some serious damage over time.
While the majority of destroyable structures were very small - barely larger than the vehicles themselves - a handful of larger parts of infrastructure could be blown up as well, resulting in players deciding on their own objectives within the game world. The large storage tanks in the Oil Field stage were a great example of this. These stout yet wide structures were only accessible to players who could carefully drive up the tank’s narrow, spiraling, and exposed walkway. On top there was a special weapon box, which would grant players access to their character’s most powerful personal weapon. Extra challenge and excitement was added by the volatile nature of the tank - if it took enough damage it would explode, dealing damage and denying players the use of the items on top. If one or both players knew this secret, the tension of the situation would ramp up significantly, with one player trying to hurry to the top before the other managed to stop them.Buy Photo Conservative commentator Todd Starnes moderates a panel on protecting religious liberties during the National Religious Broadcasters' annual media convention Thursday at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center. (Photo: Holly Meyer / The Tennessean)Buy Photo
Conservative commentator Todd Starnes believes the country is in the midst of a war on religious liberty and urged Christian media to help fight it by sharing the stories of those caught in the cross hairs.
Starnes, the host of "Fox News and Commentary," led by example Thursday by moderating a panel of business owners who landed in legal trouble after refusing service to customers based on their beliefs. The impassioned discussion took place at the National Religious Broadcasters' annual convention, which drew thousands of Christian media and ministry professionals this week to Nashville.
"Engage the culture and stay informed and educate your listeners and viewers, the people that are also reading your work on digital platforms. It is just incredibly important," Starnes said. "One day it might be somebody in your church. It might be somebody in your neighborhood. It might be somebody whose kid plays on your little league team. It might be you."
The crowd that gathered in a ballroom at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center listened to a T-shirt maker, a florist and a pharmacy owner recount their experiences. All three are clients of the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal organization that specializes in these types of cases. The organization sponsored the session at the convention.
Kristen Waggoner, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, sat on Thursday's panel, providing context for the cases.
"There isn't a day that goes by at Alliance Defending Freedom where we don't get many calls that have to do with someone who is being forced to choose between their conscience and their business or their profession, their vocation, their license," Waggoner said.
Kentucky T-shirt shop owner Blaine Adamson would not create gay pride shirts, and Washington state florist Barronelle Stutzman refused to provide flowers for a longtime client's marriage to a same-sex partner.
"God hasn't changed, and I guess that's really my perspective. He calls us in his word. He promises one thing, not that we like to talk about it, but we'll suffer for his namesake," Adamson said. "The word hasn't changed so I can't change on my position."
A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that a majority of white evangelical Protestants supported allowing small-business owners to deny services to gay and lesbian customers for religious reasons. The majority of Mormons also favored that stance, while most of the religious traditions surveyed did not.
The cases aren't unique to marriage. Greg Stormans, who owns Ralph's Thriftway in Washington state, is embroiled in about a decade-long legal fight for refusing to stock emergency contraception for religious reasons.
"There's a lot of courts out there. There's a court of public opinion. There's the U.S. District Court. The 9th Circuit Court. They've all weighed in. Maybe the Supreme Court will weigh in," Stormans said. "But God's court and God as a judge is the one where we really want to win our case in, and we know if we just keep doing what he's asking us to do and follow that path, he will bless us with the work that we're doing."
Reach Holly Meyer at 615-259-8241 and on Twitter @HollyAMeyer.
Read or Share this story: http://tnne.ws/20YgHZtSouth Australia enlists Minecraft for youth consultation Education The South Australian State Government is asking kids to design changes to the state’s national parks using the video game Minecraft. Republish Notify me
Upper primary school students will use the internationally acclaimed “sandbox” video game to design their ideal national park from scratch, or to design changes to an existing park.
The winning designs will help guide national park upgrades worth around $10 million.
Minecraft allows players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a pixelated three-dimensional world.
The competition is open to students in years four, five, six and seven in Adelaide and the Adelaide Hills.
“The parks they design as part of this competition might include trails for bushwalking, mountain biking or horse riding, barbecue and picnic areas, public toilets, wheelchair accessible areas, campgrounds, scenic lookouts, adventure playgrounds, interpretive trails, places to launch canoes – or something completely different,” said Sustainability, Environment and Conservation Minister Ian Hunter.
“Whatever they create on the screen needs to be able to be translated into the real world.
“We’d like to see trails and other built features that are creative, practical, usable and sustainable, that complement the natural environment and the plants and animals living in it.”
The winning class will win a government-funded excursion to the Belair National Park.
“They’ll spend the day with a ranger, walking and cycling, playing tennis, enjoying the adventure playground, learning about nature, exploring and having fun, which is something our parks are fantastic for,” said Hunter.
People involved in community, education and tourism organisations will be asked to sift through the entries and deliver their recommendations to the government.
Environment department community consultation officer Georgia Gowing, who came up with the idea, said kids were unlikely to respond to normal consultation methods and that something innovative was required to involve them in the process.
“We’re looking for new ways to get people to talk to us,” she said.
“We’ve got an online survey for the adults, but for the kids, we thought we’d have a go at doing something a bit innovative.
“We want to know what children want from national parks. Do they want more mountain bike trails? Do they want rock-climbing walls? Do they want natural play areas?”
“It’s a really good thing to get kids using (video games) as a positive.
“They do this stuff on a screen and then they get out into a real national park.”
She said the government would be taking all practical suggestions seriously.
“We’re not going to |
emergence. The FDA Board of Inquiry advised against the sweetener on September 30, 1980. On January21, 1981 - the day after Reagan's inauguration - Searle submitted "ten new studies."
Dr. Monte was skeptical. "It is impossib1e that they could have conducted those studies in four months," he said. "Obviously they'd previously done those studies but hadn't officially submitted them, although much of the information in those studies was informally presented to the board of inquiry." With the "new tests" in hand, Hayes acted as though critical, overriding evidence had proven the safety of aspartame. 82
James Turner, representing thc Community Nutrition Institute in Washington, D.C., said that Arthur Hull Hayes, to arrive at his decision that aspartame is safe, firewalked a path "through a mass of scientific mismanagement, improper procedures, wrong conclusions and general scientific inexactness." Two FDA officials declared in 1985 that Hayes was determined to clear all obstacles to NutraSweet approval.
One FDA bureaucrat reported that "people at the top" were closed to questions concerning the quality of the tests submitted by Searle. 83
In July, 1984 a broad investigation of NutraSweet's adverse effects was conducted by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control. Federal health officials said at the outset that they believed no harm would emerge from the data to indict aspartame. Robert McQuate, Ph.D., science director of the National Soft Drink Association, predicted with mystical confidence that the study would "provide further evidence that aspartame is a safe ingredient." 84
Dr. McQuate didn't fret the goring of his biochemical ox. In November the CDC announced that no "serious, widespread" side effects had been found. 85 It was "unlikely," said CDC officials, that "complainers" could establish a link between NutraSweet and their maladies - the same bromide once tossed to victims of radiation experiments.
The reported side-effects of aspartame fell into two distinct categories: central nervous system (65%) and gastrointestinal disorders(24%). 86 Yet the CDC claimed erroneously that no consistent reaction pattern had been found. 87 Robert Shapiro, then president of Nutrasweet, used the occasion to enthuse that the survey "clearly established the safety" of the sugar substitute. 88
Nevertheless, the CDC recommended a new set of studies because aspartame users continued to complain of ill effects.
Based on the ersatz assurances of the CDC report, PepsiCo announced that it would drop saccharine and begin sweetening its diet drinks entirely with aspartame. The decision would have been approved by Wayne Calloway, then CEO of PepsiCo and director of the multinationals Citicorp, General Electric and Exxon.
In 1983 soda bottlers, organized around Pepsi had petitioned the FDA for a delay in approval of NutraSweet for soft drinks until further evaluation verified its safety - interpreted by market analysts as a ploy to drive down the price of the sweetener.
They soon abandoned the effort to block approval (and all health concerns they might have had). "We believe saccharine is safe," Pepsi USA President Roger Enrico lied, but "we wanted the taste improvement." PepsiCo, already drawing on a tenth of Searle's 7.5 million pound annual production of aspartame, signed an agreement with G.D. Searle to boost purchases 500 percent. 89
(Like other corporate pushers of aspartame, Pepsi has long maintained ties to the intelligence community. One product of the relationship was a Pepsi plant in Vientiane, Laos with a laboratory outfitted for heroin production. Alfred McCoy, in 'The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia' documents the efforts of Richard Nixon to promote the plant's construction in 1965, and the CIA's continuing subsidization of the plant. McCoy complained to Pepsi officials that the facilities were but a cover for the importation and refinement of morphine, but it continued to operate unhindered.)
Yet another report was filed by Reagan's General Accounting Office in July 1987, this one on the FDA's handling of aspartame. The GAO concluded that the agency had followed proper procedures and conducted valid studies. But the report noted that the FDA had followed guidelines for food - not drug - testing, despite the recommendation of the agency's own biologists favoring 'drug' tests, which are considerably more stringent. This recommendation was overruled by FDA officials. 90
Another blemish in the study was bared by Dr. Louis Elsas, director of medical genetics at Emory University in Atlanta. "They never asked the right questions about what it does to brain function in humans," he told the 'Washington Post'. Half of the scientists polled expressed reservations about the safety of NutraSweet. One-fifth reported "major concerns." Monsanto quibbled in a press release that these critics had themselves never conducted aspartame research. A score of independent scientists have. They found side effects.
Senator Metzenbaum berated Searle's flawed and fabricated tests at the August 1, 1985 Senate hearings. "The FDA," he said, "is content to have the manufacturer of aspartame, G.D. Searle, conduct these studies. How 'absurd'."
He also faulted the AMA:
The 'Journal of the American Medical Association' recently published a report on aspartame which, with some significant disclaimers, stated it was safe for most people. I wish that this report could ease my concerns. It does not. It merely restates the FDA position which relies solely on the tests conducted by G.D. Searle. As I have indicated these tests are under a cloud. In addition, the concerns raised recently by the scientists... were not even included in the report.
91
Deficiencies in testing were aggravated by a lack of laboratory training at Searle. One of the pivotal safety studies involved fetal damage, but the FDA task force found that the medical researcher in charge was "inexperienced in conducting studies of this nature and yet given full responsibility."
They were appalled to discover that his sole credential was a field study of the cottontail rabbit for the Illinois Wildlife Service, yet at Searle he'd been assigned to laboratory training and supervision. When asked about his 'curriculum vitae' in fetal research, he replied that he'd once attended a seminar on the subject, and the company had provided him with a stack of reference works. 92 (Yet J.D. Searle, in its 1981 Annual Report, billed itself as "a research based pharmaceutical company.")
Corporate control of NutraSweet testing continues at Monsanto, torturing the ethics of academic medicine. In August 1987 the University of Illinois, a recipient of Monsanto's largess, issued a study exonerating aspartame of causing seizures in laboratory animals. Dave Hattan, a safety regulator for the FDA, responded that the study only confirmed the need for testing on humans. At independent labs, he insisted, aspartame provoked seizures.
Industrial support tends to contaminate test data. Dr. Elsas, in a 1988 letter to the 'New England Journal of Medicine', advocates unbiased review of clinical research. "The NutraSweet Co.," he said, "may have had an interest in protocols that would find that their product had no untoward effects." 94
Monsanto reportedly granted one NutraSweet researcher a $1.3 million honorarium. 95 The same hired gun willing to manipulate lab results will have no qualms publicly defending a tainted pharmaceutical, like the diabetic specialist who objected that a Senate hearing on aspartame, which called him as a witness, might arouse groundless public anxiety. 96
Victims and health activists have attempted in the courts to put a stop to the marketing of NutraSweet, to no avail. In 1985 a coalition of consumer groups were handed a ruling by the federal Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that the FDA had followed proper procedures in approving aspartame for soft drinks.
A year later the 'Washington Post' reported that the Supreme Court again refused to consider the case "despite critics' arguments that the product, sold under the brand name NutraSweet, may cause brain damage." 97
Likewise, the medical establishment has thrown up an impenetrable wall to aspartame critics. Dr. Roberts, author of a brief study, "Aspartame-Associated Confusion and Memory Loss: A Possible Human Model for Early Alzheimer's Disease," found it impossible to publish the article in a peer review medical journal.
This was peculiar, he thought, "considering the increasing magnitude of Alzheimer's disease, and the relevance of my observations to newer biochemical findings and avenues of research." He can "personally vouch for the 'enormous' difficulty in getting published articles concerning reactions to aspartame products," a trend in censorship with "ominous overtones." The options, Dr. Roberts says, are "generally limited to 'burying' the findings in a small-circulation journal (such as the bulletin of a county medical society), reporting the results as a letter to the editor, or (unfortunately, most often) discarding the project." 98
Silence surrounds the most odious conspiracies.
FOOTNOTES:
"Sweet Talk," Science and the Citizen column, 'Scientific American', July, 1987, p. 15. "Adverse Effects of Aspartame-January '86 through December '90," Current Bibliography series, National Library of Medicine pamphlet, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1991. "Pepsi Switches Sweeteners - Aspartame Winning Diet Cola Market," 'Washington Post', November 2, 1984, p. A-1. Mae Brussell, World Watchers #842, KAZU-FM, Monterey, CA., January 25, 1988. 'Moody's Industrial Manual', 1975, p 2606. G.D. Searle's 1981 'Annual Report'. Also, Arnold Foster and Benjamin R. Epstein, 'Cross-Currents', Doubleday & Co. (New York: 1956), p. 153. Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsius, 'A Law Unto Itself: The Untold Story of the Law Firm of Sullivan & Cromwell', William Morrow (New York: 1988), pp. 13738, 163. John Marks, 'The Search for "The Manchurian Candidate ": The CIA and Mind Control', Times Books (New York: 1979), pp.58,67 & 212. Marks writes that incapacitating "large numbers of people fell to the Army Chemical Corps, which also tested LSD and even stronger hallucinogens. The CIA concentrated on individuals." John Peer Nugent, 'White Night.- The Untold Story of What Happened Before-and Beyond-Jonestown', Rawson, Wade (New York: 1979), pp. 143, 177. Michael Meiers, 'Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?A Review of the Evidence', Mellen House (Lampeter, UK: 1988) p. 42. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., pp. 42-43. For a sanitized account of Dr. Layton's career, see Min S. Yee and Thomas N. Layton, 'In My Father's House: The Story of the Layton Family and the Reverend Jim Jones', Holt, Rinehart and Winston (New York, 1981). National Council of the National Front of Democratic Germany and the Committee of Anti-Fascist Resistance Fighters of the German Democratic Republic, 'The Brown Book: War and Nazi Criminals in West Germany', Verlag Zeit im Bild, 1965, pp. 33-34. Dan J. Forrestal, 'Faith, Hope & $5,000: The Story of Monsanto', Simon and Schuster (New York: 1977), p. 159. 'Brown Book', p. 34. Tom Bower, 'The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Hunt for the Nazi Scientists', Little, Brown & Co. (Boston 1987), pp. 93, 95. Howard W. Ambruster, 'Treason's Peace: German Dyes and American Dupes', Beechhurst Press (New York: 1947), p.144 Nigel West, 'MI6: British Secret Intelligence Service Operations, 1909-1945', Random House (New York: 1983), p.92. Jaques Attali, 'A Man of Influence: The Extraordinary Career of S. G. Warburg', Adler & Adler (Bethesda, Maryland: 1987),p. 167. Forrestal, p. 121ff. Anthony Cave Brown, 'The Last Hero, Wild Bill Donovan', Vintage (New York: 1982), pp. 210, 211. Also: Ernst Hanfstangl, 'Unheard Witness', J.R. Lippincott (New York: 1957). "Search for the Tiger's Treasure," 'Las Vegas Sun', December 26, 1993, p.1. 'Moody's Industrial Manual', 1968, p. 4080. "Radiation and the Guinea Pigs," 'Guardian', March 3, 1994, p. 3. Also see, "Nuclear Scientists Irradiated People in Secret Research," 'New York Times', December 17, 1993, p. Al. Christopher Simpson, 'Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects On the Cold War', Wiedenfeld & Nicholson (New York: 1988), pp.26, 152-53.
Col. Pash, a former high school gym teacher, was an officer of the Office of Policy coordination under Frank Wisner. His unit, writes Simpson, "known as PB/7, was given a written charter that read in part that 'PB/7 will be responsible for assassinations, kidnaping, and such other functions as from time to time may be given it... by higher authority." Pash was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, a veteran of the Russian Civil War. Monsanto's Clinton Engineering Works in Oak Ridge became the Manhattan Project's headquarters in 1943, and was "manned almost entirely by experienced officers and agents of the CIC." See lan Sayer and Douglas Botting, 'America's Secret Army: The Untold Story of the Counter intelligence Corps', Franklin Watts (New York: 1989), pp. 71ff.,346. Robin Thomas Naylor, 'Hot Money and the Politics of Debt', Simon & Schuster (New York, 1987), p.289. "Statement from Adrian Gross, Former FDA Investigator and Scientist," 'Congressional Record', August 1, 1985, p. S10835. Florence Graves, "How Safe is Your Diet Soft Drink?" 'Common Cause', July/August,1984. Ibid. "FDA Finding on Aspartame," 'New York Times', January 14,1984, p. 28. Article in Medical World News,1978, cited in I.N. Love "NutraSweet Isn't that Sweet," 'Gentle Strength Times', October 1987, p. 3. "Dick Wurtman's Ideas Aren't So Crazy After All," 'Business Week', December 14, 1992, p. 60. "A Sour View of Aspartame," 'San Francisco Chronicle', August 25, 1987. "Amendment No. 60" (debate), 'Congressional Record', May 7, l985, p. S5516. "Lobbyist's Cozy Ties with Ex-Boss Sen. Hatch Include Client Referrals, Political Fund-Raising," 'Wall Street Journal', February 18, 1993. Eli Lilly contributed $17,500 to Hatch's campaign chest between 1985 and 1988. Sen. Hatch filed a of friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Eli Lilly in a 1989 patent case. Other pharmaceutical houses enjoy his political favors. Lobbyist Thomas Parry remains a key adviser to Sen. Hatch:- "Nobody gets better care than his former chief of staff," reports the 'Journal'. Ibid. Jane E. Brody, "Sweetener Worries Some Scientists," 'Science Times', February 5, 1985. 'Who's Who in Industry and Finance', 97th ed., Macmillian (Wilmette, IL.) p. 583. "Food and Drug Administration Food Additive Approval Process Followed for Aspartame," GAO Report B223552, June 18,1987. "GAO Investigating NutraSweet Approval," UPI, reprinted in 'Congressional Record', August 1, 1985,p. S10823. Graves. "Head of FDA Tested Drugs on Volunteers," 'Washington Post', June 26, 1983, p. A4. Austin H. Kiplinger, 'Washington Now', Harper & Row (New York: 1975), pp. 36-37. Daniel Guttman and Barry Willner, 'The Shadow Government: The Government's Multimillion Dollar Giveaway of its Decision-Making Powers to Private Management Consultants, ''Experts, " and Think Tanks', Pantheon, (New York:1989),p.173. Bruce Oudes, ed., 'From: The President-Richard Nixon's Secret Files', Harper & Row (New York: 1989), p. 173. James A Smith, 'The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite', Free Press (New York: 1991), p.282. Sterling Seagrave, 'Yellow Rain: A Journey Through The Terror of Chemical Warfare', M. Evans and Co. (New York: 1981), pp. 258 "After a meeting with President Nixon, Representative Gerald Ford attacks politicians who criticize the Pentagon CBW efforts, saying the critics seem to favor 'unilateral disarmament."' Christopher Palmeri, "Act Three," 'Forbes', October 26, 1992, p. 88 "Westmark Systems Expands Board, Hires 3 New Vice Presidents," 'Wall Street Journal', February 11,1988, p.33. Graves. Ibid. "Hon. Samuel K. Skinner," 'Congressional Record', Congressional Printing Office, Washington, D.C., August 1, 1985, pp. S10827, S10835. Graves. 'Congressional Record', August 1,1985, p. S10823. Graves. "Critics Cause Bush Cabinet Search to Stumble," 'Los Angeles Times', December 22,1988. Herman Rogan, 'Traditions and Challenges: The Story of Sidley & Austin', R.R. Donelly & Sons (Chicago: 1983), p.266. 'Who's Who in America', 48th ed., 1994. Ibid. "Deukmejian Thrives in Private Life, Law Work," 'Los Angeles Times', January 3, 1992, p. Al. "Chicago Law Firm Agrees to Pay Up to $34 Million in Lincoln S&L Case," 'Los Angeles Times', May 21, 1991, p. D5;and "Sidley & Austin RTC Said to Reach Pact," 'Wall Street Journal', October 31, 1991, p. B4. The basis of the suit was a memo written on May 10, 1988 by Margery Waxman, a partner in Sidley & Austin's Washington office, to Charles Keating. In it, she said "pressure" had been applied to M. Danny Wall, then chairman of the Home Loan Bank Board, "to work toward meeting your demands and he has so instructed his staff." "Suit Accuses 7 Drug Makers of Price-Fixing," 'Los Angeles Times', October 15, 1993, p. Dl. Other pharmaceutical houses accused of conspiring to fix prescription drug prices included Smith-Kline-Beecham, Ciba-Geigy Corp., American Home Products, Schering-Plough and Glaxo. Ida Honorof, "FDA Coverup of Hazards of Nutra-Sweet," 'Report to Consumers', Vol. XVIII, No.401, December, 1987. Also, "Two Ex-U.S. Prosecutors' Roles in Case Against Searle are Questioned in Probe," 'Wall Street Journal', February 7,1986, p. 4. Ironically, William Conlon won an appointment to the Illinois State Board of Ethics in 1982 (Kogan, p.359). Graves. 'Los Angeles Times', December 22, 1988. "Sam Skinner: A Pragmatist in a Storm," 'Wall Street Journal', December 6, 1991. "Samuel Knox Skinner," 'New York Times', December 23, 1988. Graves. "Statement from Adrian Gross, Former FDA Investigator and Scientist," 'Congressional Record', August 1, 1985, p. S10835. 'Congressional Record', August 1, 1985, p. S 10831, and "Statements from Adrian Gross," p. S10838. "FDA Handling of Research on NutraSweet is Defended," 'New York Times', July 18, 1987, p. 50 H.J. Roberts, M.D.,'Aspartame (NutraSweet): Is it Safe?', Charles Press (Philadelphia: 1990), p. 10. 'Congressional Record', August 1, 1985, p. S108-28. Ibid., p. S108-34. Ibid. Graves. "Sweet Suspicions," three-part CBS Nightly News series, January 1984. Transcript reprinted in the 'Congressional Record', August 1, 1985, p. S108-26. Ibid. Raymond Bonner, "Searle Stock Query Held 'Smokescreen,"' 'New York Times', February 29, 1984, p. D5 William Safire, "Sweet and Sour," 'New York Times', June 1, 1984, p. A31. Louis Wolf, "Accuracy in Media Rewrites the News and History," 'Covert Action Information Bulletin', Number 21 (Spring 1984), pp. 24-37. I.N. Love, "NutraSweet Isn't that 'Sweet,"' in 'Gentle Strength Times', October 1987, p.3. Graves. "Complaints on Aspartame Lead to Nationwide Investigation," 'Los Angeles Times', July 5, 1984, p. Hl. "Federal Agency Sees Little Risk in Sweetener," 'New York Times', November 2, 1984, p. A22. 'Los Angeles Times', July 5, 1984. 'New York Times', November 2, 1984. "U.S. Study of Aspartame Finds no Serious Effects," 'Washington Post', November 2, 1984, p. A18 "Pepsi Switches Sweeteners," 'Washington Post', November 2, 1984, p. AI. "Most Scientists in Poll Doubt NutraSweet's Safety," 'Washington Post', August 17, 1987, p. A23. Roberts, p. 238. 'Congressional Report', May 7, 1987, p. S5500. "New Findings Back Use of Sweetener," 'New York Times', August 1987, p. 30. "Researchers Differ Over Long Range Effects of Sweetener," 'Los Angeles Times', November 3, 1988, p. Hl. Roberts, p. 244. Roberts, p. 248. "High Court Rejects Sweetener Review," 'Washington Post', April 23, 1986, p. C. Roberts,p. 246-47.
http://www.nancymarkle.com/nutrapoison/article.htmlI can appreciate a carefully crafted digital tank rolling into combat as much as the next war game fan, but there are few things I enjoy more than a visible front line. Not the actual troops huddling beneath hedgerows as explosions tear up the dirt, but an actual line, drawn onto the map, bendling, flexing and breaking as the battle plays out.
Steel Division [official site] has authentically modeled units and detailed rules of engagement controlling their clashes, but it’s the front line that got me all excited when I saw a demo last week at GDC.
RTS games often frustrate me. If the foundation of a game encourages me to click fast and think occasionally, I’m unlikely to enjoy it for long, and if every unit is disposable, every encounter can become a numbers game with little tactical or strategic interest. Early in the presentation, even before deployment is complete and the first bullet has been fired, I’m relieved to hear a Paradox representative summarising what kind of RTS Steel Division is: “Clicks per minute doesn’t matter. This is tactics over twitch.”
Alexis Le Dressay, chief executive of Eugen Systems, is running the demo, playing the mission live. He explains that units will respond to your decisions but will also make choices of their own, responding to the changing situation in the field. If they come under fire, they’ll look for cover, and if you tell them to advance on a heavily defended enemy position with shells raining down around them, they might just break and head for the metaphorical hills.
By ensuring that units react to combat situations in a believable fashion, Eugen want to make sure the player is only responsible for “interesting tactical decisions”, Dressay says. “Babysitting isn’t an interesting tactical decision.”
So, then, what are the interesting tactical decisions? They begin with a choice of division. Rather than picking Axis or Allied forces, you select a specific division, with the selection including German, US, British, French, Polish and Canadian forces. The US 101st Airborne offer a very different set of tactical options than the 12th SS Panzer, and there’s a deck-building aspect to the actual make-up of your troops. Essentially, each Division has a set number of points to spend on units for each of the three phases of battle, and those phases are one of the key systems that affect Steel Division’s flow.
As far as I can tell, the phases will provide a sense of momentum, not quite mirroring the construction of bases in a traditional RTS, but allowing each battle to progress from early recon and skirmish phases to consolidation and heavy armoured warfare. Some units will only be available in later phases, reflecting the time it takes to move them to the front and deploy them, while others can enter combat in phase one, securing strong tactical positions and attempting to hold them until stronger reinforcements arrive.
The 101st would likely have an advantage against the 12th in phase one, able to storm the map with rapid infantry assault units that are able to capture key positions. As the battle moves into its later phases, however, armoured units will start to arrive and the Panzer will be attempting to turn the tide in their commander’s favour by breaking and dislocating the Airborne while their own backup scrambles onto the field. One of Eugen’s aims is to avoid the common RTS pattern which sees one side gain an advantage early in the game which is almost impossible to overturn. The phases should give battles ebb and flow.
An example of an unexpected change of supremacy involves a stealthy infantry reconnaissance unit. Left behind enemy lines early in the battle, where most units might see their morale shattered before long, they retained their composure and scouted the area. Their allies were losing ground in the centre of the map, taking heavy damage and unable to withstand the bombardment of enemy artillery. Unable to make any impact even if they approached from the rear, due to their inability to penetrate armour reliably, the recon unit was all but forgotten as attention shifted to the frontline.
Until, late in the third and final phase, the recon unit spotted a munitions truck, deployed to resupply the artillery. It never made that supply run, cut off and taken out of commission by that forgotten recon unit hadn’t taken it out of commission, causing the assault to falter. On the whole, it’s unwise to leave troops isolated behind enemy lines, as they can be captured or killed easily without support to back them up, but the rules of engagement in Steel Division are flexible enough to allow for this kind of twist.
That kind of dramatic turnaround might be rare, but head-on confrontations won’t just be a case of chucking stacks of units at the enemy. They come with their own tactical tricks and Eugen’s ballistic system is a key part of them, underpinning all of the game’s encounters. When selecting units you can see precisely what kind of weaponry they use, and the penetration power of projectiles. Shells and bullets can be seen punching through armour, or deflecting, and the difference between impacts can be seen visually as well as predicted by those with historical knowledge or an eye on the stats.
Thanks to the three phase system, which is an abstraction of the wider logistics that allow units to reach the battle, light tanks will have their uses, helping to clear out infantry or the spotter units that allow artillery to operate (all artillery units are off-screen, the spotters being their physical representatives). If heavier tanks arrive in phase three, it might be wise to pull lighter vehicles out of their path, sacrificing some parts of the front to concentrate your efforts elsewhere. Because the frontline changes shape dynamically, reflecting the course of the battle, you can see where reinforcements are needed, the points where the line is buckling, even if you don’t have direct line of sight to get the full picture.
It’s too early to say precisely how Steel Division will play out, particularly in its campaigns, which give players a group of units that they must lead through a series of missions without relying on reinforcements. Multiplayer will support up to 10vs10, with a wide range of maps built using historical recon photography. The most impressive aspect of the game, from what I’ve seen so far, is how the phase system and positional tactics combine to create a pace that allows for reactive play. Even when air support comes into play, making the screen even busier, battles shouldn’t feel too chaotic.
There is chaos in these clashes, of course, but from your commanding position you can read the situation and do what seems best, trusting your units to carry out instructions to the best of their ability. Along with all of the other elements that help to maintain the pace and sense of control, there’s the way in which many units are taken out of the fight. Rather than simply raining fire down on each other, vehicles will often fight until softened up, pinned or otherwise disabled, and then you’ll be able to move in another unit to capture them. The emphasis on shutting units down and removing them from the fight rather than destroying everything outright makes flanking, retreating and countering much more valid than in a game where the winner is whoever brings the biggest (or the most) guns.
With around 400 types of unit and genuine tactical differences between them, Steel Division should be a strong skirmish combat simulation if nothing else. The deck-building division customisation is intriguing as well and if it works as well as I hope it might, it’ll allow for all kinds of approaches, from bombardment to stealth, and from control of zones through carefully placed snipers to storming with aerial and artillery supremacy. And that dynamic frontline brings in a lovely reminder of Eugen’s R.U.S.E., allowing for a quick read of any battle based on incomplete information.
The phrase “World War II real-time strategy” doesn’t entice me, but if Steel Division’s tactical cleverness and smart phase structure work as well as this initial demo suggests they might, this’ll be a winner.It was probably supposed to be New Democrat leader Thomas Mulcair’s fourth question, but since he spent all his time on that occasion hectoring the government over its lack of a sustainable environmental plan, he had to hold on to it.
“Peter Penashue has finally resigned after breaking the law. The prime minister has to answer a simple question. If Penashue did nothing wrong, why did he resign? If he did something wrong, why is the prime minister allowing him to run again?” Mulcair asked Prime Minister Harper, who sat across the aisle, placidly.
“Elections Canada has not even finished its investigation into Mr. Penashue’s last campaign and the Prime Minister’s Office, using taxpayers’ money, has already started the next one,” Mulcair went on, before he wondered whether Harper would allow Elections Canada to finish its investigation before calling a byelection.
Mulcair was right on one thing. The Penashue 2013 re-election campaign was indeed just about to kick off — right in front of him.
Here’s what we know about Peter Penashue: His 2011 election campaign accepted 28 ineligible donations, totaling $27,850. He also received $18,710 from Provincial Airlines. Innu Development Limited Partnership, which was run at the time by Penashue’s brother-in-law, loaned the campaign $25,000. In fall 2012, the Conservative party transferred a total of $30,000 in two payments to Penashue’s campaign, and then a further $14,350 this month to settle his debts. Records obtained by the CBC show Penashue overspent his allowed campaign limit by over $5,000.
Last week, Penashue resigned both from his position as minister for intergovernmental affairs and as the MP for Labrador. The government has promised a byelection soon in the riding, which will no doubt be hard fought. Penashue is already preparing to run again, having taken out ads in local media and directing people to a campaign website — one that was registered days before he stepped down. In fact, as Kady O’Malley at the CBC noted Monday, it was registered the same day Penashue was in North West River, presenting $1.35 million in federal funding for “broadband improvements.”
“Minister Penashue has done the right thing under difficult circumstances,” the prime minister said in response to Mulcair’s question, mistakenly (?) referring to Penashue’s previous job description. “And he is prepared to take his record and be accountable to the people of Labrador, everything from defending the seal hunt to promoting the Lower Churchill project. This is the best member of Parliament Labrador has ever had.”
Liberal interim leader Bob Rae stood next and expressed his disbelief a moment later.
“This is truly incredible,” he sputtered from the far end of the chamber.
“A prime minister is refusing to admit that his member of Parliament broke the law, that the investigation by Elections Canada is not yet over and already on the floor of the House of Commons he has started a campaign with the same disgraced member of Parliament,” Rae summarized. “When does the Prime Minister start to apply some standards of shame to his conduct and the conduct of the members of his cabinet?”
Prime Minister Harper stood again, this time to explain something.
“Of course, it is the Liberal party and the Opposition which raised this particular issue today on the floor of the House of Commons,” he said. “While they are doing it, let me point out the work that minister Penashue did, not just securing the Lower Churchill falls…” Here, he was interrupted by groans and catcalls from the opposite benches.
This is the government’s strategy. Or game. Let’s call it a game. Game is a better word. The term “strategy” probably overly implies that anyone on the government side was taking anything seriously Tuesday. The game was explained to me quickly – or reiterated, really, as the prime minster hinted at it earlier in the House – by a Conservative staffer as I left Centre Block after question period. It’s very simple: If the opposition wants to ask questions about former minister Peter Penashue, the Conservatives will answer. The other parties might not like the answer, but one is provided. Isn’t that what everyone wants — for the government to answer questions in question period?
It’s the kind of thing – this defence by deference of accountability – that’s designed to annoy the opposition. Harper knows this well. It used to annoy him a lot, too, when he was on the other side of the House.
“If a minister engages in misconduct or gross incompetence… or outrageous statements, they are backed to the hilt by this prime minister,” then-leader of the Opposition, Stephen Harper disparaged during a speech on conduct in the House in June, 2002, referring to then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. “Then six months or a year later there is a cabinet shuffle and they are floating at the bottom of the Rideau River. However, he can say that there has been no misconduct and no one has ever been fired in his government.”
“All of this of course just generates cynicism,” Harper continued that summer day. “It is worse because after talking about it and opportunistically getting elected on it, the Liberals have turned around and have done nothing about it.”
Four years later, Harper had a message for voters on page one of his Conservative party campaign platform. “For those Canadians seeking accountability, the question is clear: which party can deliver the change of government that’s needed to ensure political accountability in Ottawa?” Harper asked Canadians. “We need change of government to replace old style politics with a new vision.”
Behold, Canada, the change.The business of protecting data is getting tougher by the day – but there are ways not to breach the law and still safeguard customer data
Since the Snowden revelations, the market for privacy-oriented services has only grown – indeed, it’s likely that it will keep growing. We’re not at peak surveillance, but we’re way past peak indifference to surveillance.
Running a privacy service comes with two distinct technical challenges: the cryptographic challenge of making messages secure in transit and at rest on your server; and the legal challenge of keeping your promises to your customers intact when a government wants to spy on them.
These two problems are intimately entwined, and so are their solutions.
The cost of getting it wrong is high. Take Lavabit, the privacy-oriented email provider used by Edward Snowden to communicate with journalists when he was planning his leak: a few months after the Snowden revelations, nearly two years ago, Lavabit mysteriously shut its doors, its website replaced with a message saying that owner Ladar Levinson took the action rather than “being complicit in crimes against the American people.”
Later, it emerged that the NSA had secretly demanded that Lavabit insert a “backdoor” into its system so that it could potentially spy on all of Levinson’s customers. Rather than betray their trust, Levinson folded up his business altogether |
out laggards, while also providing a strong guarantee during any
such transitions. Now I would like to propose something to do that, and
share a proof-of-concept patch. === PROPOSAL === The working name for the proposed feature is "causal reads", because it
provides a form of "causal consistency"[2] (and "read-your-writes"
consistency) no matter which server the client is connected to. There is a
similar feature by the same name in another product (albeit implemented
differently --'reader waits'; more about that later). I'm not wedded to
the name. The feature allows arbitrary read-only transactions to be run on any hot
standby, with a specific guarantee about the visibility of preceding
transactions. The guarantee is that if you set a new GUC "causal_reads =
on" in any pair of consecutive transactions (tx1, tx2) where tx2 begins
after tx1 successfully returns, then tx2 will either see tx1 or fail with a
new error "standby is not available for causal reads", no matter which
server it runs on. A discovery mechanism is also provided, giving an
instantaneous snapshot of the set of standbys that are currently available
for causal reads (ie won't raise the error), in the form of a new column in
pg_stat_replication. For example, a web server might run tx1 to insert a new row representing a
message in a discussion forum on the primary server, and then send the user
to another web page that runs tx2 to load all messages in the forum on an
arbitrary hot standby server. If causal_reads = on in both tx1 and tx2
(for example, because it's on globally), then tx2 is guaranteed to see the
new post, or get a (hopefully rare) error telling the client to retry on
another server. Very briefly, the approach is:
1. The primary tracks apply lag on each standby (including between
commits).
2. The primary deems standbys 'available' for causal reads if they are
applying WAL and replying to keepalives fast enough, and periodically sends
the standby an authorization to consider itself available for causal reads
until a time in the near future.
3. Commit on the primary with "causal_reads = on" waits for all
'available' standbys either to apply the commit record, or to cease to be
'available' and begin raising the error if they are still alive (because
their authorizations have expired).
4. Standbys can start causal reads transactions only while they have an
authorization with an expiry time in the future; otherwise they raise an
error when an initial snapshot is taken. In a follow-up email I can write about the design trade-offs considered
(mainly 'writer waits' vs'reader waits'), comparison with some other
products, method of estimating replay lag, wait and timeout logic and how
it maintains the guarantee in various failure scenarios, logic for standbys
joining and leaving, implications of system clock skew between servers, or
any other questions you may have, depending on feedback/interest (but see
comments in the attached patch for some of those subjects). For now I
didn't want to clog up the intertubes with too large a wall of text. === PROOF-OF-CONCEPT === Please see the POC patch attached. It adds two new GUCs. After setting up
one or more hot standbys as per usual, simply add "causal_reads_timeout =
4s" to the primary's postgresql.conf and restart. Now, you can set
"causal_reads = on" in some/all sessions to get guaranteed causal
consistency. Expected behaviour: the causal reads guarantee is maintained
at all times, even when you overwhelm, kill, crash, disconnect, restart,
pause, add and remove standbys, and the primary drops them from the set it
waits for in a timely fashion. You can monitor the system with the
replay_lag and causal_reads_status in pg_stat_replication and some state
transition LOG messages on the primary. (The patch also supports
"synchronous_commit = apply", but it's not clear how useful that is in
practice, as already discussed.) Lastly, a few notes about how this feature related to some other work: The current version of this patch has causal_reads as a feature separate
from synchronous_commit, from a user's point of view. The thinking behind
this is that load balancing and data loss avoidance are separate concerns:
synchronous_commit deals with the latter, and causal_reads with the
former. That said, existing SyncRep machinery is obviously used
(specifically SyncRep queues, with a small modification, as a way to wait
for apply messages to arrive from standbys). (An earlier prototype had
causal reads as a new level for synchronous_commit and associated states as
new walsender states above'streaming'. When contemplating how to combine
this proposal with the multiple-synchronous-standby patch, some colleagues
and I came around to the view that the concerns are separate. The reason
for wanting to configure complicated quorum definitions is to control data
loss risks and has nothing to do with load balancing requirements, so we
thought the features should probably be separate.) The multiple-synchronous-servers patch[3] could be applied or not
independently of this feature as a result of that separation, as it doesn't
use synchronous_standby_names or indeed any kind of statically defined
quorum. The standby WAL writer patch[4] would significantly improve walreceiver
performance and smoothness which would work very well with this proposal. Please let me know what you think! Thanks, [1]
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAEepm=1fqkivL4V-OTPHwSgw4aF9HcoGiMrCW-yBtjipX9gsag(at)mail(dot)gmail(dot)com [2] From http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1466448 "Causal consistency. If process A has communicated to process B that it has
updated a data item, a subsequent access by process B will return the
updated value, and a write is guaranteed to supersede the earlier write.
Access by process C that has no causal relationship to process A is subject
to the normal eventual consistency rules. Read-your-writes consistency. This is an important model where process A,
after it has updated a data item, always accesses the updated value and
will never see an older value. This is a special case of the causal
consistency model." [3]
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAOG9ApHYCPmTypAAwfD3_V7sVOkbnECFivmRc1AxhB40ZBSwNQ(at)mail(dot)gmail(dot)com [4]
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CA+U5nMJifauXvVbx=v3UbYbHO3Jw2rdT4haL6CCooEDM5=4ASQ(at)mail(dot)gmail(dot)com --
Thomas Munro
http://www.enterprisedb.com
Attachment Content-Type Size causal-reads-poc.patch application/octet-stream 67.5 KB
On 11 November 2015 at 05:37, Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>
wrote: Many sites use hot standby servers to spread read-heavy workloads over more
> hardware, or at least would like to. This works well today if your
> application can tolerate some time lag on standbys. The problem is that
> there is no guarantee of when a particular commit will become visible for
> clients connected to standbys. The existing synchronous commit feature is
> no help here because it guarantees only that the WAL has been flushed on
> another server before commit returns. It says nothing about whether it has
> been applied or whether it has been applied on the standby that you happen
> to be talking to.
> Thanks for working on this issue. > 3. Commit on the primary with "causal_reads = on" waits for all
> 'available' standbys either to apply the commit record, or to cease to be
> 'available' and begin raising the error if they are still alive (because
> their authorizations have expired).
> This causes every writer to wait. What we want is to isolate the wait only to people performing a write-read
sequence, so I think it should be readers that wait. Let's have that debate
up front before we start reviewing the patch. --
Simon Riggs http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
<http://www.2ndquadrant.com/>
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services
From: Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi> To: Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com>, Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> Cc: Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org> Subject: Re: Proposal: "Causal reads" mode for load balancing reads without stale data Date: 2015-11-11 08:42:55 Message-ID: 5642FF8F.4080803@iki.fi Views: Raw Message | Whole Thread | Download mbox Lists: pgsql-hackers
On 11/11/2015 10:23 AM, Simon Riggs wrote:
> On 11 November 2015 at 05:37, Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>
> wrote:
>
> Many sites use hot standby servers to spread read-heavy workloads over more
>> hardware, or at least would like to. This works well today if your
>> application can tolerate some time lag on standbys. The problem is that
>> there is no guarantee of when a particular commit will become visible for
>> clients connected to standbys. The existing synchronous commit feature is
>> no help here because it guarantees only that the WAL has been flushed on
>> another server before commit returns. It says nothing about whether it has
>> been applied or whether it has been applied on the standby that you happen
>> to be talking to.
>
> Thanks for working on this issue. +1. >> 3. Commit on the primary with "causal_reads = on" waits for all
>> 'available' standbys either to apply the commit record, or to cease to be
>> 'available' and begin raising the error if they are still alive (because
>> their authorizations have expired).
>>
>
> This causes every writer to wait.
>
> What we want is to isolate the wait only to people performing a write-read
> sequence, so I think it should be readers that wait. Let's have that debate
> up front before we start reviewing the patch. Agreed. And in the write-read sequence, you don't need to wait at the
write either, it's enough that you wait just before you start doing the
read. An application might do a lot of other things between the two, so
that in most cases, there would in fact be no waiting as the record is
already applied when you perform the read. I'm thinking the client should get some kind of a token back from the
commit, and it could use the token on the standby, to wait for that
commit to be applied. The token could be just the XID, or the LSN of the
commit record. Or the application could generate the token and pass it
to the server in the commit, similar to how 2PC works. So the
interaction would be something like: In master:
BEGIN;
INSERT INTO FOO...;
COMMIT;
Server returns: COMMITted with token 1234 Later, in standby:
BEGIN WAIT FOR COMMIT 1234 TO BE VISIBLE;
SELECT * FROM foo;
... - Heikki
From: Atri Sharma <atri(dot)jiit(at)gmail(dot)com> To: Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi> Cc: Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>, Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> Subject: Re: Proposal: "Causal reads" mode for load balancing reads without stale data Date: 2015-11-11 08:52:10 Message-ID: CAOeZVicJCMj=0_JsdGA7=MObTM5YPHtWMw5VY6YBOE7gAiSd=A@mail.gmail.com Views: Raw Message | Whole Thread | Download mbox Lists: pgsql-hackers
> I'm thinking the client should get some kind of a token back from the
commit, and it could use the token on the standby, to wait for that commit
to be applied. The token could be just the XID, or the LSN of the commit
record. Or the application could generate the token and pass it to the
server in the commit, similar to how 2PC works. So the interaction would be
something like:
>
> In master:
> BEGIN;
> INSERT INTO FOO...;
> COMMIT;
> Server returns: COMMITted with token 1234
>
> Later, in standby:
> BEGIN WAIT FOR COMMIT 1234 TO BE VISIBLE;
> SELECT * FROM foo; +1. The LSN should be good enough IMO.
From: Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> To: Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi> Cc: Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>, Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org> Subject: Re: Proposal: "Causal reads" mode for load balancing reads without stale data Date: 2015-11-11 09:22:11 Message-ID: CAEepm=3X40PP-JDW2cnWyRQHod9VAu-oMBTXy7wZqdRMtyhi0w@mail.gmail.com Views: Raw Message | Whole Thread | Download mbox Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 9:42 PM, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi> wrote: > On 11/11/2015 10:23 AM, Simon Riggs wrote:
>
>> On 11 November 2015 at 05:37, Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com
>> >
>> wrote:
>>
>> Many sites use hot standby servers to spread read-heavy workloads over
>> more
>>
>>> hardware, or at least would like to. This works well today if your
>>> application can tolerate some time lag on standbys. The problem is that
>>> there is no guarantee of when a particular commit will become visible for
>>> clients connected to standbys. The existing synchronous commit feature
>>> is
>>> no help here because it guarantees only that the WAL has been flushed on
>>> another server before commit returns. It says nothing about whether it
>>> has
>>> been applied or whether it has been applied on the standby that you
>>> happen
>>> to be talking to.
>>>
>>
>> Thanks for working on this issue.
>>
>
> +1.
>
> 3. Commit on the primary with "causal_reads = on" waits for all
>>> 'available' standbys either to apply the commit record, or to cease to be
>>> 'available' and begin raising the error if they are still alive (because
>>> their authorizations have expired).
>>>
>>>
>> This causes every writer to wait.
>>
>> What we want is to isolate the wait only to people performing a write-read
>> sequence, so I think it should be readers that wait. Let's have that
>> debate
>> up front before we start reviewing the patch.
>>
>
> Agreed. And in the write-read sequence, you don't need to wait at the
> write either, it's enough that you wait just before you start doing the
> read. An application might do a lot of other things between the two, so
> that in most cases, there would in fact be no waiting as the record is
> already applied when you perform the read.
>
> I'm thinking the client should get some kind of a token back from the
> commit, and it could use the token on the standby, to wait for that commit
> to be applied. The token could be just the XID, or the LSN of the commit
> record. Or the application could generate the token and pass it to the
> server in the commit, similar to how 2PC works. So the interaction would be
> something like:
>
> In master:
> BEGIN;
> INSERT INTO FOO...;
> COMMIT;
> Server returns: COMMITted with token 1234
>
> Later, in standby:
> BEGIN WAIT FOR COMMIT 1234 TO BE VISIBLE;
> SELECT * FROM foo;
>... I thought about this question, and considered three different approaches: 1. Reader waits with exposed LSNs, as Heikki suggests. This is what
BerkeleyDB does in "read-your-writes" mode. It means that application
developers have the responsibility for correctly identifying transactions
with causal dependencies and dealing with LSNs (or whatever equivalent
tokens), potentially even passing them to other processes where the
transactions are causally dependent but run by multiple communicating
clients (for example, communicating microservices). This makes it
difficult to retrofit load balancing to pre-existing applications and (like
anything involving concurrency) difficult to reason about as applications
grow in size and complexity. It is efficient if done correctly, but it is
a tax on application complexity. 2. Reader waits for a conservatively chosen LSN. This is roughly what
MySQL derivatives do in their "causal_reads = on" and "wsrep_sync_wait = 1"
modes. Read transactions would start off by finding the current end of WAL
on the primary, since that must be later than any commit that already
completed, and then waiting for that to apply locally. That means every
read transaction waits for a complete replication lag period, potentially
unnecessarily. This is tax on readers with unnecessary waiting. 3. Writer waits, as proposed. In this model, there is no tax on readers
(they have zero overhead, aside from the added complexity of dealing with
the possibility of transactions being rejected when a standby falls behind
and is dropped from 'available' status; but database clients must already
deal with certain types of rare rejected queries/failures such as
deadlocks, serialization failures, server restarts etc). This is a tax on
writers. My thinking was that the reason for wanting to load balance over a set of
hot standbys is because you have a very read-heavy workload, so it makes
sense to tax the writers and leave the many dominant readers unburdened, so
(3) should be better than (2) for the majority of users who want such a
configuration. (Note also that it's not a requirement to tax every write;
with this proposal you can set causal_reads to off for those transactions
where you know there is no possibility of a causally dependent read). As for (1), my thinking was that most application developers would probably
prefer not to have to deal with that type of interface. For users who do
want to do that, it would be comparatively simple to make that possible,
and would not conflict with this proposal. This proposal could be used by
people retrofitting load balancing to an existing applications with
relative ease, or simply not wanting to have to deal with LSNs and
complexity. (I have considered proposing
pg_wait_for_xlog_replay_location(lsn, timeout) separately, which could be
called on a standby with the lsn obtained from pg_current_xlog_location()
on the primary any time after a COMMIT completes, but I was thinking of
that as a different feature addressing a different user base: people
prepared to do more work to squeeze out some extra performance.) --
Thomas Munro
http://www.enterprisedb.com
From: Ants Aasma <ants(dot)aasma(at)eesti(dot)ee> To: Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> Cc: Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi>, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>, Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org> Subject: Re: Proposal: "Causal reads" mode for load balancing reads without stale data Date: 2015-11-11 11:10:29 Message-ID: CA+CSw_u4Vy5FSbjVc7qms6PuZL7QV90+onBEtK9PFqOsNj0Uhw@mail.gmail.com Views: Raw Message | Whole Thread | Download mbox Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Thomas Munro
<thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 9:42 PM, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi> wrote:
>> On 11/11/2015 10:23 AM, Simon Riggs wrote:
>>> Thanks for working on this issue.
>>
>> +1. +1. I have seen a lot of interest for something along these lines. >> I'm thinking the client should get some kind of a token back from the
>> commit, and it could use the token on the standby, to wait for that commit
>> to be applied. The token could be just the XID, or the LSN of the commit
>> record. Or the application could generate the token and pass it to the
>> server in the commit, similar to how 2PC works. So the interaction would be
>> something like:
>>
>> In master:
>> BEGIN;
>> INSERT INTO FOO...;
>> COMMIT;
>> Server returns: COMMITted with token 1234
>>
>> Later, in standby:
>> BEGIN WAIT FOR COMMIT 1234 TO BE VISIBLE;
>> SELECT * FROM foo;
>>... To avoid read anomalies (backwards timetravel) it should also be
possible to receive a token from read-only transactions based on the
latest snapshot used. > My thinking was that the reason for wanting to load balance over a set of
> hot standbys is because you have a very read-heavy workload, so it makes
> sense to tax the writers and leave the many dominant readers unburdened, so
> (3) should be better than (2) for the majority of users who want such a
> configuration. (Note also that it's not a requirement to tax every write;
> with this proposal you can set causal_reads to off for those transactions
> where you know there is no possibility of a causally dependent read).
>
> As for (1), my thinking was that most application developers would probably
> prefer not to have to deal with that type of interface. For users who do
> want to do that, it would be comparatively simple to make that possible, and
> would not conflict with this proposal. This proposal could be used by
> people retrofitting load balancing to an existing applications with relative
> ease, or simply not wanting to have to deal with LSNs and complexity. (I
> have considered proposing pg_wait_for_xlog_replay_location(lsn, timeout)
> separately, which could be called on a standby with the lsn obtained from
> pg_current_xlog_location() on the primary any time after a COMMIT completes,
> but I was thinking of that as a different feature addressing a different
> user base: people prepared to do more work to squeeze out some extra
> performance.) Although I still think that 1) is the correct long term solution I
must say that I agree with the reasoning presented. I think we should
review the API in the light that in the future we might have a mix of
clients, some clients that are able to keep track of causality tokens
and either want to wait when a read request arrives, or pick a host to
use based on the token, and then there are "dumb" clients that want to
use write side waits. Also, it should be possible to configure which standbys are considered
for waiting on. Otherwise a reporting slave will occasionally catch up
enough to be considered "available" and then cause a latency peak when
a long query blocks apply again. Regards,
Ants Aasma
--
Cybertec Schönig & Schönig GmbH
Gröhrmühlgasse 26
A-2700 Wiener Neustadt
Web: http://www.postgresql-support.de
From: Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> To: Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> Cc: Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>, Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org> Subject: Re: Proposal: "Causal reads" mode for load balancing reads without stale data Date: 2015-11-11 11:26:17 Message-ID: CA+TgmoZcmoJ-Bvbp=d8HPEvFvjsrvZkmQeurWG++0DzTvGfXGw@mail.gmail.com Views: Raw Message | Whole Thread | Download mbox Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 3:23 AM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> This causes every writer to wait.
>
> What we want is to isolate the wait only to people performing a write-read
> sequence, so I think it should be readers that wait. Let's have that debate
> up front before we start reviewing the patch. One advantage of having writers wait is that the master and its read
slaves can't ever get too far apart. Suppose the master is generating
WAL much faster than the read slaves (or one of them) can replay it.
You might say it sucks to slow down the master to the speed the slaves
can keep up with, and that's true. On the other hand, if the master
is allowed to run ahead, then a process that sends a read query to a
standby which has gotten far behind might have to wait minutes or
hours for it to catch up. I think a lot of people are enabling
synchronous replication today just for the purpose of avoiding this
problem - keeping the two machines "together in time" makes the
overall system behavior a lot more predictable. Also, if we made readers wait, wouldn't that require a network
roundtrip to the master every time a query on a reader wanted a new
snapshot? That seems like it would be unbearably expensive. --
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
From: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> To: Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi> Cc: Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>, Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org> Subject: Re: Proposal: "Causal reads" mode for load balancing reads without stale data Date: 2015-11-11 19:13:03 Message-ID: 5643933F.4010701@gmx.net Views: Raw Message | Whole Thread | Download mbox Lists: pgsql-hackers
On 11/11/15 4:22 AM, Thomas Munro wrote:
> My thinking was that the reason for wanting to load balance over a set
> of hot standbys is because you have a very read-heavy workload, so it
> makes sense to tax the writers and leave the many dominant readers
> unburdened, so (3) should be better than (2) for the majority of users
> who want such a configuration. One problem I can see is that even if you have a read-heavy workload,
the writes can still be a bottleneck, since they are necessarily bound
to one node. And so if the feature proposal is, we can make your reads
more consistent but the writes will become slower, then that's not a
good deal. More generally, no matter whether you pick the writers or the readers to
wait, if you assume that read-only slaves are an application performance
feature, then it's questionable how much better such applications will
perform overall when network-bound waits are introduced in the system. I think in practice applications that are busy enough to worry about
this don't really work like that anyway. For example, the writes should
go to a message queue and are written out whenever, with a copy kept in
a cache for display in the meantime. Maybe there could be additional
features to make managing this easier. I think there are a lot of different variations of this in practice, not
only depending on the workload and other measurables, but also
business-dependent decisions on application behavior and degradability.
From: Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> To: Ants Aasma <ants(dot)aasma(at)eesti(dot)ee> Cc: Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi>, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>, Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org> Subject: Re: Proposal: "Causal reads" mode for load balancing reads without stale data Date: 2015-11-12 00:49:30 Message-ID: CAEepm=24grE9werAXQTtOFuO6YNKVFVqkOzmnntZfLNzdzqeBQ@mail.gmail.com Views: Raw Message | Whole Thread | Download mbox Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 12:10 AM, Ants Aasma <ants(dot)aasma(at)eesti(dot)ee> wrote: > On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Thomas Munro
> <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 9:42 PM, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi>
> wrote:
> >> On 11/11/2015 10:23 AM, Simon Riggs wrote:
> >>> Thanks for working on this issue.
> >>
> >> +1.
>
> +1. I have seen a lot of interest for something along these lines.
>
> >> I'm thinking the client should get some kind of a token back from the
> >> commit, and it could use the token on the standby, to wait for that
> commit
> >> to be applied. The token could be just the XID, or the LSN of the commit
> >> record. Or the application could generate the token and pass it to the
> >> server in the commit, similar to how 2PC works. So the interaction
> would be
> >> something like:
> >>
> >> In master:
> >> BEGIN;
> >> INSERT INTO FOO...;
> >> COMMIT;
> >> Server returns: COMMITted with token 1234
> >>
> >> Later, in standby:
> >> BEGIN WAIT FOR COMMIT 1234 TO BE VISIBLE;
> >> SELECT * FROM foo;
> >>...
>
> To avoid read anomalies (backwards timetravel) it should also be
> possible to receive a token from read-only transactions based on the
> latest snapshot used.
>
> > My thinking was that the reason for wanting to load balance over a set of
> > hot standbys is because you have a very read-heavy workload, so it makes
> > sense to tax the writers and leave the many dominant readers unburdened,
> so
> > (3) should be better than (2) for the majority of users who want such a
> > configuration. (Note also that it's not a requirement to tax every
> write;
> > with this proposal you can set causal_reads to off for those transactions
> > where you know there is no possibility of a causally dependent read).
> >
> > As for (1), my thinking was that most application developers would
> probably
> > prefer not to have to deal with that type of interface. For users who do
> > want to do that, it would be comparatively simple to make that possible,
> and
> > would not conflict with this proposal. This proposal could be used by
> > people retrofitting load balancing to an existing applications with
> relative
> > ease, or simply not wanting to have to deal with LSNs and complexity. (I
> > have considered proposing pg_wait_for_xlog_replay_location(lsn, timeout)
> > separately, which could be called on a standby with the lsn obtained from
> > pg_current_xlog_location() on the primary any time after a COMMIT
> completes,
> > but I was thinking of that as a different feature addressing a different
> > user base: people prepared to do more work to squeeze out some extra
> > performance.)
>
> Although I still think that 1) is the correct long term solution I
> must say that I agree with the reasoning presented. I think we should
> review the API in the light that in the future we might have a mix of
> clients, some clients that are able to keep track of causality tokens
> and either want to wait when a read request arrives, or pick a host to
> use based on the token, and then there are "dumb" clients that want to
> use write side waits.
> Exactly! I see the causality tokens approach (thank you for that terminology) not so
much as a "long term" solution, but rather as an expert feature likely to
interest a small number of sophisticated users willing to take on more
responsibility in exchange for greater control. We should definitely add
support for that, and I expect the patch would be fairly simple and short. But I believe the vast majority of users would like to be able to run new
and existing plain SQL on any node and see the data they just wrote, with
graceful failure modes, and without extra conceptual load or invasive code
changes. So I think we should cater for that mode of usage that too. Also, it should be possible to configure which standbys are considered
> for waiting on. Otherwise a reporting slave will occasionally catch up
> enough to be considered "available" and then cause a latency peak when
> a long query blocks apply again.
> Good point. Here's a new version which adds the GUC
causal_reads_standby_names, defaulting to '*' (but as before, the feature
is not activated until you set causal_reads_timeout). Now you can list
standby names explicitly if you want a way to exclude certain standbys.
Also, I noticed that cascaded standbys shouldn't be available for causal
reads, so I added a check for that. --
Thomas Munro
http://www.enterprisedb.com
Attachment Content-Type Size causal-reads-v2.patch application/octet-stream 70.4 KB
From: Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com> To: Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> Cc: Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi>, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>, Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org> Subject: Re: Proposal: "Causal reads" mode for load balancing reads without stale data Date: 2015-11-12 12:16:16 Message-ID: CANP8+jKUhV9V7tqgQkBB+NkcJdu2-yD10FfXaTXUVxZd=e+PNw@mail.gmail.com Views: Raw Message | Whole Thread | Download mbox Lists: pgsql-hackers
On 11 November 2015 at 09:22, Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>
wrote: > 1. Reader waits with exposed LSNs, as Heikki suggests. This is what
> BerkeleyDB does in "read-your-writes" mode. It means that application
> developers have the responsibility for correctly identifying transactions
> with causal dependencies and dealing with LSNs (or whatever equivalent
> tokens), potentially even passing them to other processes where the
> transactions are causally dependent but run by multiple communicating
> clients (for example, communicating microservices). This makes it
> difficult to retrofit load balancing to pre-existing applications and (like
> anything involving concurrency) difficult to reason about as applications
> grow in size and complexity. It is efficient if done correctly, but it is
> a tax on application complexity.
> Agreed. This works if you have a single transaction connected thru a pool
that does statement-level load balancing, so it works in both session and
transaction mode. I was in favour of a scheme like this myself, earlier, but have more
thoughts now. We must also consider the need for serialization across sessions or
transactions. In transaction pooling mode, an application could get assigned a different
session, so a token would be much |
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http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/Creating an app interface is a complex task which requires a cooperation of business analysts, programmers, and graphic designers. When it comes to designers, the terms such as UX and UI are often used interchangeably in the first phases of the development project. Let’s begin with bringing both these terms closer, as they constitute the key phase in the whole mobile app development process and give the app its final look.
User Interface (UI) Design differs greatly from User Experience (UX) Design. The term User Experience is defined as “a person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service” and in case of apps, includes such aspects as the overall skeleton of an app, how it works, and how it can be used by the end-users.
Once the app skeleton is ready and having set the information structure, the navigation, and the final flow, it’s time to create the visual concept of the app. UI Designer work is always based on wireframes created in the UX phase. At this stage, no significant changes to app’s operation are made. Instead, what matters now is how the app looks. In theory, UI phase seems easy but in fact, UI Designer faces a crucial problem of finding a visual concept that will fulfill both the numerous prerequisites of each project and the general rules of graphic design, which in case of UI, are quite distinctive and interrelated.
In this article, I am going to describe 10 basic rules of UI Design, which are crucial for every project and constitute the core principles of creating an app interface.
1. Follow UI guidelines
Each development project dedicated for mobile devices must follow the UI guidelines recommended by the platform for which it is created, the most popular being Android and iOS. Each available platform has a set of rules, guidelines, and recommendations which help a UI Designer to decide on the look, size, and location of each interface constituent.
Such rules are important on every phase of UI Designer’s work because by following them, he makes the app intuitive to use by a certain target group. It also enables the UI Designer to suggest out of the box solutions that will be both useful and native.
2. Get to know the user
Knowing for whom the design is created is crucial for each app development project. It determines not only how the app works but also what it looks like. Among the important target-group-connected factors that may affect app design, the following should be definitely taken into consideration: age and sex of users, situations in which they will use the app, goals they want to achieve using the app, and how often and in which time of the day they will use it.
A good UI Designer should begin his work with an in-depth analysis of all these factors and then translate them into a design project.
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
– Steve Jobs
3. Interface design is not an art
Although it may seem that a beautiful design is just attractive and nice-looking, in fact, what makes it pleasing for users is how it fulfils their needs. A good design project cannot be only visually attractive – it has to be intuitive and useful, above all. These two factors are exactly what make an app pleasant and easy to use.
In app design there is no place for intuition or designer’s own taste. Each decision in the project has a reason and is based on a rational, valid premises. Therefore, user tests are an inevitable part of each development project, being the best way to find out whether the project is not only pretty but also fulfils its goals.
4. Keep it simple
Minimalism has become the main rule of designing for the internet and mobile devices in the recent years. The term ‘minimalism’ stands for a broad concept including numerous aspects which make the interface easy to use. Such aspects include, above all: transparency, simplicity, visual hierarchy, fulfilling each element’s goals, elimination of unnecessary details, adequate aspect ratio, careful choice of typography, and suitable layout of the white space (or negative space).
Combining all these aspects is now easier thanks to the trend of ‘flat design’, which simplified the design of applications and introduced many important issues.
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
5. Use grids
To make the design process easier, UI Designers use grids which help them to place all the elements of a certain screen basing on the geometrical layout of vertical and horizontal lines. Grids changes from one project to another and UI Designers use them on each level of the design process while setting the location and size of the elements.
6. Stay consistent
An app interface project is usually quite complex and it often includes working on many different screens of the app. Still, to make the app easy to use, a UI Designer has to remember of keeping the same style of all elements included in the project.
Of course, it is good to break this rule from time to time – to direct users’ attention to a certain element and make them do something within an app.
7. Establish the hierarchy of elements
Setting a certain path which will lead users through the app can be achieved by establishing a right hierarchy of interface elements. An adequate combination of colors, sizes, and distances helps to attract users’ attention and achieve the set goals.
8. Have multiple devices in mind
The mobile market offers hundreds of different devices, varying in terms of parameters and screen sizes. A good app design project should be compatible with different screen sizes so that it can be accessible by the most possible number of users.
Moving from one screen to another is now easier thanks to the introduction of the universal unit of measurement – ‘dp’, which measures the real size of each separate element depending on the DPI of a screen and its diagonal.
9. Make use of contrast & color
Each of these elements plays an important role in graphic design, both being closely interrelated at the same time.
While creating a color scheme, a UI Designer has to consider multiple factors, such as branding, users’ tastes, or places and situations in which the app will be used. There are many rules defining which colors should be used in which situations but in general two main shades of a color are used – the primary for the background and the secondary for accenting certain elements.
Contrasting the elements is crucial when it comes to readability and helps to interact with the interface. The contrast ratio should be in line with the 4.5:1 principle, which helps to find the right shades for the main colors in the application.
10. Use metaphors
Users learn faster when the elements of an app are recognized by them or refer to the experiences they are familiar with, both from the online and offline world. UI Designer can also base his project on the previous users’ experiences and use them in designing a new interface. Therefore, it is good to use the proven schemes or default styles of icons, buttons or navigation elements – thanks to them the interface seems familiar and intuitive.
Key takeaway
The above-mentioned issues are crucial in UI Designer’s work. However, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the final decision about how the app will look and work is made by its users. Therefore, it is worth to consult each phase of an app with coworkers and the client, as well as with end-users.
Are you no planning to develop your own app? Choose the software house which graphic designers know how to create outstanding visual concepts. Check Ready4S portfolio.
DOOM Platforms: PC | PS4 | Switch | XBO |
Developer: id Software
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Release: May 13, 2016
DOOM‘s 2016 reboot was a smash hit the second it hit the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. We loved it on its original hardware and the recent Switch port was a fantastic success as well. The announcement of DOOM VFR this past June led to a lot of excitement, but also many questions. While VR would theoretically be perfect for a game that relies so heavily on atmosphere, what would have to be sacrificed for the move to virtual reality? The control method was also something that would have to be modified since movement in tight spaces can be tough in VR. Fortunately, id Software has found some fine workarounds for some issues, while others are going to remain no matter what.
The core content of VFR is a remixed version of the campaign of the reboot. In terms of quantity, the content here is lean, but the key is that every moment that remains in this streamlined adventure is captured in a virtual reality environment, and for a game that relies so heavily on atmosphere to create fear instead of just throwing jump-scares at you, this means a lot. DOOM is all about creating fear with what’s around you — whether that is caused by the sound of demons surrounding you or the combination of demons around you and then said demons throwing fire at you all depends on the situation.
DOOM VFR takes its time to teach you what you need to know about the situation you’re in — and it’s dire. Your original human form has been destroyed by disease, leaving you with a new android body to get used to. As is often the case, this is something that is done quickly and requires minimal adjustment because you’re a space marine dammit! With a grit and determination to get to the bottom of what has happened to the space station, you need to defeat the demons from Hell in as violent and efficient a manner as possible. Being wasteful does you no good here because DOOM may be a modern shooter, but it’s rooted in the beginnings of the first-person shooter.
This means that DOOM in both its default and VFR forms doesn’t take it all that easy on you. Enemies are plentiful and out to kill you and unlike modern-day shooters, your health doesn’t regenerate. Health pickups are not exactly common — but around enough if you play the game in a smart way. Just going in to blast away is a bad idea since you will leave yourself open to attack and eventually take too much damage to survive. Playing defensively isn’t the most exciting way to play — but it can allow you to do better, so finding a happy medium is best. Going out and planning attacks to ensure that you not only blast a few enemies around, but also evade, is the key to success.
Controlling DOOM VFR feels familiar enough for users of the console game using just the DualShock 4 while frequent users of the Move controllers will be in for a treat as well. The DualShock 4 allows you to use the left stick to move while the d-pad dashes and the right stick looks. Head movement also works for looking and is far more natural — beyond just being more organic for being in the role of the space marine, having head tracking for aiming is far more accurate than a stick is. Head movement results in better play and if you’re playing with this on and a bit tepid — don’t be. Playing on medium or above is a must for this to keep a healthy challenge going.
Using the d-pad to dash around isn’t as natural as a left stick to move around, but is better if sensitive to a lot of heavy movement in VR. This style of movement is faster and also allows you to strafe and avoid enemy fire if you have a good amount of room to work with. R2 is your natural trigger button while R1 opens up your weapon wheel; L1 is your grenade launcher and L2 teleports. Teleporting around the area allows you to not only traverse the map in a faster way than you ever could by foot, but allows you to avoid motion-sickness and take out weakened enemies by teleporting into them when they’re nearly dead. It’s a bit strange to see a traversal maneuver turned into an attack, but it works surprisingly well here.
Move controls take a similar approach — but mix things up to make the left-hand wand mainly a grenade launcher that is also easier to teleport with. More buttons will teleport on that control setup while the trigger acts as your grenade-tossing button and feels a bit more organic there than using a bumper on the regular controller. The face buttons by the Move button act as your action commands, and they work, but aren’t quite as intuitive as they could be since the buttons are so rigid. Fortunately, thanks to the design of the control being so comfortable in the hand otherwise,, you at least know which button you’re hitting thanks to where they are spacially. No control method feels completely perfect, but the Move setup is slightly better than the DualShock 4 by itself.
Visually, DOOM VFR on a stock PS4 looks like a mix between the regular version on the hardware and the Switch port. The texture work has taken a hit, but the core experience remains even with a loss in graphical fidelity. The action is still intense and being able to see around the in-game world adds more tension to the action than ever before. Being able to peer around a corner and see enemies coming at you is a completely different experience than just hearing them and knowing they’re there. Now,you can map out a gameplan and with the teleporting ability and gain a slight edge thanks to the VR world you’re inhabiting.
DOOM VFR retains DOOM‘s soundtrack and it’s as kick-ass as ever. Playing it with some higher-end gaming headphones or with a solid home theater setup really brings out the action. You’ll have a horde of demons coming at you and then the soundtrack kicks into high gear and your blood starts pumping as a result. It’s an exciting adrenaline-fueled affair. The weapon effects also shine, with shotgun blasts sounding absolutely vile while your basic pistol gives off an effective — but far less rewarding — blast.
Closing Comments:
DOOM VFR is an outstanding, but limited, game. The lack of arcade and multiplayer content hurts the overall package, but it does its sole purpose of replicating the campaign in VR incredibly well. The fat has been trimmed from it resulting in an “all killer, no filler” approach that keeps the tension and action levels at a high point that exceeds even the base campaign from the reboot. Anyone who enjoyed that and wants to play it in VR should do so if they have a Vive or a PlayStation VR.KURTLEY Beale’s 47-day exile from the Wallabies is over, with the controversial star to fly out to Europe on Saturday to join the team and reboot his international career.
The Daily Telegraph understands Beale will depart alongside backrower Jake Schatz as the Wallabies bolster their squad for the final two games of their tour, and he will be strongly considered for selection against Ireland on November 23.
Beale has not pulled on the gold jersey since the Wallabies’ loss in Cape Town against South Africa on September 27.
COMPLETE GUIDE TO WALLABIES V FRANCE
CHEIKA AND COOPER THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX
After that match, he had an in-flight argument with then Wallabies business manager Di Patston, which quickly descended into the biggest scandal to engulf the ARU and saw the resignation of not only Patston but Wallabies coach Ewen McKenzie.
Beale’s career was spared when he was fined $45,000 by an independent tribunal for sending an offensive text message to Patston, while a second more offensive text alleged to have been sent from his phone could not be proved.
media_camera Kurtley Beale’s international exile is over.
Beale missed the Wallabies’ loss to Argentina and their final Bledisloe Cup Test against the All Blacks on October 18, and was left out of the spring tour squad despite being let off by the tribunal.
New Wallabies coach Michael Cheika and defence coach Nathan Grey had indicated that Beale had been left behind due to fitness, rather than any disciplinary issue, and that he could join the camp at some point.
That will come this weekend when the 25-year-old rejoins his national teammates, and he’ll watch them play France in Paris on Sunday at 7am (AEST).
Beale will be in contention to play in Australia’s next game, against Ireland in Dublin, the following weekend.
Ironically, it was a drinking episode in Dublin during last year’s spring tour, after which 15 Wallabies players were reprimanded, that tensions first arose between the playing group and McKenzie.
Beale was not on last year’s tour, but was back in the fold by June during the French series when Patston’s role within team management had increased and the playing group became perplexed with her role and responsibilities.
It was during that camp that Beale inadvertently sent Patston a photo text message of an obese woman, when he meant to send it to Wallabies teammate James Hanson.
The pair met to sort out their differences and the issue was buried until their argument three months later, on a flight from Johannesburg to Sao Paulo as the team made their way to Argentina.
Patston flew home from Buenos Aires two days later, and Beale was dropped from the team.
The following week, the team flew back to Australia, while Patston resigned under mounting stress and scrutiny over her qualifications.
Following the last-minute loss to the All Blacks in the Bledisloe Test, McKenzie shocked the rugby world by announcing his resignation, which came just days after ARU chief executive Bill Pulver had declared that he would be on the plane to the UK for the tour.
media_camera Kurtley Beale has been training privately before earning a Wallabies recall.
The ARU scrambled to sign Cheika and appointed him two days before Beale’s hearing.
Some expected Beale to have his contract terminated at that hearing but a three-man panel said the fine, the games he’d already missed, and the damage to his reputation over this incident were punishment enough.
However, Cheika had picked a 33-man touring squad before Beale’s hearing and had not included him due to the impending judgment.
The team departed and Beale was left to do his own training in Sydney in a bid to reclaim the fitness required to slot back into the side.
Beale was a pivotal member of Cheika’s winning Waratahs Super Rugby side this year and the coach is a close friend and mentor to the enigmatic star.
Cheika clearly wants Beale back in the national squad as Australia chase an undefeated tour, having started with wins over the Barbarians and Wales.
Originally published as Kurtley Beale flying out to join WallabiesRobert Koning heads off the fugitives at the Zuni Pueblo. Things do not go according to plan.
Show Notes Episode 9
Iron Horses Can’t Be Broken was written by Michael Coorlim, adapted from his novel of the same title. Produced by Kat O’Connor and Michael Coorlim. Audio technicians were Kat O’Connor and Bill Bullock.
Our cast, in order of appearance:
Clive, played by Vincent Truman
Robert Koning, played by CJ Julianus
Bright Rabbit, a Zuni child, played by Adriana Klisch
The Pekwin, played by Sean Francis
Father Dalton, played by Collins Yearwood
Lhadakwe, played by Deborah Craft
Aldora Fiske, played by Song Marshall
Alton Bartleby, played by James Sparling
Sarah Bartleby, played by Kat O’Connor
Synesthesia Theatre theme music by Stav Drieman. Learn more at StavMusic.com.
Additional music by Kevin MacLeod, at Incompetech.com. Used under a Creative Commons attribution 3.0 license. Titles: Reign Supreme; Greta Sting; Rumination; Stormfront.
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— Phone and Internet service began returning Monday night to some customers of Verizon and Time Warner after an outage that lasted over six hours.
Verizon said the outage was limited to phone calls on its network in Durham, Wake and Orange counties, but users from Johnston, Lee, Nash, Wayne and Wilson counties also reported being unable to make or receive calls. Some users were able to use their phones to send text messages, but others reported that service was offline as well.
Verizon customers who reside in other states but kept a North Carolina phone number had also reported having trouble receiving calls.
Landline service for customers of Time Warner Cable phone service was also interrupted.
Scott Pryzwansky, a spokesperson for Time Warner, said that the outage was caused after fiber was cut by a third party during construction work near the intersection of Tryon Road and Junction Boulevard.
"Our fiber...that serves customers in the area as well as the Verizon cell tower [was damaged]," said Pryzwansky. "Our crews are on site working to repair the fiber as quickly as possible."
Way to go Verizon and TWC we are back in action I hope everybody survived the Verizon outage of 2015 T-shirts coming soon Posted by Nicky Drury Howsare on Monday, September 21, 2015
On Monday evening, the Verizon Store was filled with customers whose lives were put on hold by the outage.
"It's really ridiculous," said Verizon customer Tom Moon. "I use my phone for business, so I can't run business without my phone."
For thousands of people, the outage was an inconvenience but the outage had the potential to be more serious since Verizon customers were not able to use their cell phones to dial 911 during the service interruption.
Dominick Nutter, director of the Wake County Emergency Communications Center said, luckily, there were no major issues. He said while some people were not able to make emergency calls, some could still text to 911. Nutter said a few people did that during the outage, but noted that it is not ideal.
"Anytime someone is unable to call by the phone, by all means, text us. But, if you are able to talk, we definitely would prefer you to talk because we can get emergency responders out to you much faster," Nutter said.
The Holly Springs Police Department set up an emergency email account for Verizon customers in the town who did not have landline phones and whose cell phones were their only means of contacting emergency services. Dispatchers monitored the email account until Verizon's network was fully restored.
The outage taught a lot of people how much society has come to rely on their devices.
"You need it today in this world to make anything happen," said Moon.
In a statement, Verizon said that service was fully restored at about 9:30 p.m. Monday and that they appreciated customers' patience during the outage.CHICAGO (April 18, 2014) – The Chicago Fire Soccer Club announced Friday that midfielders Benji Joya and Victor Pineda were called-up for the U.S. Under-21 Men’s National Team training camp at U.S. Soccer’s National Training Center in Carson, Calif. from April 20-24.
Following three days of training, the U.S. will face Club Tijuana in a friendly on Wednesday evening, April 23.
The U-21 MNT camp was set up to bridge the gap between the Under-20 National Team and the Senior National Team, as well as form a core group of players that will make up the majority of the Under-23 Men’s National Team that will attempt to qualify for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The U-23 MNT will begin programming in 2015.
Joya was acquired by the Fire on Feb. 5 in a weighted lottery from Liga MX side Club Santos Laguna. The San Jose, Calif. native scored the club’s first goal of the season in the Fire’s 3-2 season opening loss to Chivas USA. Joya entered the match in the 63rd minute and 49 seconds into his Fire debut, scored with his first touch of the game. Joya has started three of the four matches in which he has appeared this season.
Pineda, a Fire Academy product and the first Homegrown player in club history, made his competitive debut on March 23 in a 1-1 draw with the New York Red Bulls.
Joya and Pineda were part of the U.S. squad for the 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup in Turkey. They will depart following the Fire’s nationally televised match against the New England Revolution on Saturday, April 19 at 3:00 p.m. CT (NBC Sports Network). The first 5,000 fans attending the Fire match will be given a special commemorative Fire scarf. Tickets for Fire matches are available via Ticketmaster and www.Chicago-Fire.com.
Roster By Position:
GOALKEEPERS (2): Jonathan Kempin (Oklahoma City Energy; Leawood, Kan.), Kendall McIntosh (Santa Clara; Santa Rosa, Calif.)
DEFENDERS (5): Christian Dean (Vancouver Whitecaps; East Palo Alto, Calif.), Juan Pablo Ocegueda (Tigres UANL; Riverside, Calif.), Shane O’Neill (Colorado Rapids; Boulder, Colo.), Dillon Serna (Colorado Rapids; Brighton, Colo.), Oscar Sorto (LA Galaxy; Los Angeles, Calif.)
MIDFIELDERS (7): Luis Gil (Real Salt Lake; Garden Grove, Calif.), Alejandro Guido (Club Tijuana; Chula Vista, Calif.), Marlon Hairston (Colorado Rapids; Jackson, Miss.), Benji Joya (Chicago Fire; San Jose, Calif.), Collin Martin (D.C. United; Chevy Chase, Md.), Esteban Rodriguez (Club Tijuana; Bell Gardens, Calif.), Wil Trapp (Columbus Crew; Gahanna, Ohio)
FORWARDS (8): Daniel Cuevas (CF Lobos BUAP; Sacramento, Calif.), Danny Garcia (FC Dallas; Dallas, Texas), Jack McBean (LA Galaxy; Newport Beach, Calif.), Jordan Morris (Stanford; Mercer Island, Wash.), Sean Okoli (Seattle Sounders FC; Federal Way, Wash.), Victor Pineda (Chicago Fire; Bolingbrook, Ill.), Jose Villarreal (Cruz Azul; Inglewood, Calif.)BuzzFeed
Lena Sclove transferred to Brown University in January 2013 in hopes that the famously progressive Ivy League university would provide her with a less conservative experience than her former college. Her first semester lived up to her expectations: Sclove immersed herself in theater and activism work and even chose to live a few blocks off campus in Providence, Rhode Island, during the summer. Then, in August, she was raped so roughly that, months later, she had to go on medical leave for a spinal neck injury resulting from strangling. Administrators dissuaded Sclove, now 22, from pressing criminal charges against her assailant, a fellow student and former friend. Instead, they encouraged her to go through the university process, which requires a much lower standard of proof in sexual misconduct hearings. In October, a disciplinary panel found her assailant guilty of four violations of the Brown University code of student conduct, including sexual misconduct involving one or more of the following: penetration, violent physical force, or injury. His punishment: one year's suspension, meaning the two students would overlap during the 2014-15 academic year. "While I believe someone found guilty of violent rape should not be able to graduate at all, the least Brown can do is keep me safe for the rest of my time as an undergraduate," Sclove wrote when she appealed the decision. Vice President for Campus Life and Student Services Margaret Klawunn denied the appeal, writing in an email that the assailant's suspension length was "reasonably consistent with precedent in similar cases." Sclove says that later, Klawunn told her she was "sorry [Sclove] was disappointed." "It's not that I'm disappointed, it's that I find it extraordinarily scary because I don't feel safe with him here and I don't feel that other women are safe," said Sclove, who hasn't decided whether she'll re-enroll if her assailant is allowed to return in good standing. "How can Brown claim to be a progressive institution when they're making decisions based on 'precedents' that protect him more than they protect me?"
Brown didn't respond to a request for comment, but told other outlets that "The university takes a number of steps, including sexual assault orientation sessions for incoming students, to ensure that every student is aware of applicable policies" and that decisions do not "always yield a completely satisfying outcome for someone who has been victimized." The gender equity law Title IX mandates that schools work with complainants who seek accommodations including housing and class changes, whether or not they formally report. But the law is vague, and administrations are often warier of inconveniencing alleged rapists than they are quick to protect alleged survivors. Students have a right to education free of sex-based discrimination, harassment or violence, but when schools fail to act, they force them to choose between their life on campus and living alongside their assailants. I've reported on sexual violence on college campuses for years. In more cases than I can remember, the victim withdrew while her attacker graduated. Repeat rapists on college campuses are responsible for 90% of rapes and commit six rapes on average, according to research on "undetected rapists" on college campuses. (In fact, another Brown student wrote a letter to the university detailing her own assault by Sclove's reported rapist; it was not factored into the decision-making process.) The report also found that rapists who choke victims, like Sclove's assailant, are at a higher risk of repeat offenses. Around 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted while in college, according to a recent report from the White House Council on Women and Girls. Thanks to pressure from the White House and student activist efforts, schools are currently scrambling to ensure that they're following federal laws concerning campus sexual misconduct. Administrators at elite liberal arts schools that profit off their forward-thinking reputations know their communities expect more than compliance. But instead of enforcing stricter punishments for students found guilty of sexual misconduct — as this Huffington Post piece notes, students at elite universities across the country say their schools are too lax on sex offenders, a charge campus violence reports reflect — many schools attempt to create a parallel culture via "safe spaces." The tactic concedes that the rest of the world is a safe space for rapists. When schools imply rapists can't access these spaces, they protect them too. "The [Brown] administration talks a big game but when push comes to shove, there isn't always the largest commitment to maintaining safe spaces in actuality," said Becca Wolinksky '14, a co-organizer of Nudity in the Upspace. "But the school still gets to ride on the coattails of its progressive reputation." Effective anti-rape policy won't come from schools that distance themselves from assault by analyzing the space where violence occurs instead of the perpetrators — but, it's a great way to keep crime rates low. It's estimated that 63% of schools fail to accurately report campus violence as required by federal law. When administrators do decide to crack down, it's rarely on cases that will up their sexual assault numbers. In 2008, Brown alum Margaree Little was suspended for a semester with no guarantee of readmission after throwing a pie at New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. During the disciplinary process, she said, an administrator called for her expulsion by making the case that she had endangered his life by physically assaulting him. While she was waiting to hear if she was kicked off campus — later, she said, she was told she likely would've been expelled if she didn't apologize to Friedman — she remembered walking past an exhibit about the history of student activism and radical organizing. "I think Brown uses that history to market itself as a progressive place," she said. "Certain kinds of organizing are tolerated, but only if you don't cross the line of jeopardizing Brown's image." Who is charged with maintaining that image: men who rape or the women who get raped?
Students at other liberal arts schools also say they feel frustrated by the way their administrations only champion "safe spaces" in theory. Columbia University is papered with "Consent Is Sexy" posters with statements like, "Asking for consent can be as hot, creative, and as sexy as you make it." Freshmen take a mandatory workshop called "Consent 101" that attempts to make sexual consent a blast, between ice cream socials and walking tours during student orientation — students are given candy prizes for coming up with creative ideas, and counselors receive a bonus incentive of getting to move into their dorms a week early. But one Columbia student said she was raped as a freshman by the same "Consent Educator" who taught her how to discuss consent in low-stake terms in the fall of 2009. "Hosting school-sponsored or chaperoned parties just isn't a satisfactory Band-Aid," said Anna Bahr, a Barnard senior and reporter for the student news site Bwog who often covers campus sexual assault. "Students are assaulted sober, they're assaulted drunk, and they are absolutely assaulted in college-owned buildings at college-sponsored events, while college employees aren't so far away." Students at schools that permit them to host consensually sexy "safe spaces" have recently shuttered their events. For decades, Oberlin College students could attend "Safer Sex Night," described as "a time for scantily clad Obies to get together for some wild dancing, free condoms and dental dams." This year, the student-run Oberlin Sexual Information Center decided to cancel it, saying, "The reality was an environment where many students were intoxicated, not all people felt safe, and not all activity was consensual." In 2010, Wesleyan University's student society Eclectic canceled its annual "Sex Party" after too many sexual harassment allegations and trips to the hospital. As these decisions reflect, supporting the creation of temporarily safe spaces isn't the same as ensuring student safety. That doesn't stop schools from taking the opposite approach and constructing areas where sex isn't facilitated, consensual or otherwise.0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard
At least eight national polls were released on Thursday, according to RealClearPolitics, and a grand total of zero show Donald Trump beating Hillary Clinton.
That’s right – not a single one shows Trump ahead in this race.
Here’s a quick rundown of the polls released today:
CNBC: Clinton +9
ABC News: Clinton +6
Pew: Clinton +6
Economist/YouGov: Clinton +5
IBD/TIPP: Clinton +2
Rasmussen: Clinton +1
Gravis: Clinton +1
LA Times: Tied
Overall, the Democratic nominee is beating Trump by an average of 5.4 points with just 12 days to go – and as millions of Americans have already cast their ballots.
On the Electoral College front, RealClearPolitics shows that Clinton is ahead in states that total 333 electoral votes. One of the states she leads in is Arizona – a red state before Republicans nominated Trump.
To put things in perspective, Barack Obama was leading Mitt Romney by just a single percentage point on this day in 2012. That is what you call a close presidential contest, and Obama still went on to easily win.
Yet, as I write, CNN and other cable news networks continue to plaster the “close race” chyron all over their networks, claiming Donald Trump is making it a race again.
Here’s the thing: the contest between Clinton and Trump may be naturally tightening in a few polls, but that doesn’t mean it’s becoming a close race. It’s clear that, despite any one poll showing Trump gaining ground, Clinton still has a pretty durable lead.
|@FiveThirtyEight tackles question everyone is asking: Is the Presidential race tightening? (Answer: Not by much.) https://t.co/XoMxzleajd pic.twitter.com/Gq5O47rNsv — Jim Roberts (@nycjim) October 26, 2016
While the media looks silly for trying to make the Clinton-Trump race seem like a nail-biter for the ages, there is also some good that can come of it – besides high TV ratings.
Clinton supporters who may have previously assumed the race was in the bag for their candidate and were becoming complacent now may recognize, at least if they watch cable news, that the “race is becoming close again.”
This should provide a last-minute boost of energy among voters who fear a Trump presidency.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:We easily could have put together a Slam Dunk Death Match for Monday’s rout of the Lakers by the Nuggets, a game with 78 points in the paint for Denver for a reason. Understanding we missed a golden opportunity, it was great to see Blake Griffin and the Los Angeles Clippers give us so many to choose from Tuesday against Charlotte.
So, which was best? The contenders are:
1. THE TRAILING HAMMER
On some plays Griffin leaks out early for dunks in transition. In others, he trails behind to catch passes in stride and flush with maximum power.
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2. THE 70-FOOT ALLEY-OOP
CP3 delivers a strike from just beyond the Bobcats’ three-point line on this one. If you think this is easy, go jump from two feet outside the restricted area, while turning in mid-air to catch a pass and flush the oop.
3. THE SWITCH-HANDS AND-ONE
Griffin switched hands already once this season for a top-10 dunk, but may be even more impressive because he gets hit and switches near the peak of his jump.
Which was best?
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ars is a really great place to eat in the middle of the night. The main downside is that there is nowhere inside that you can sit. So you have to be outdoors and if it's hot and sweaty then it's not going to be too comfortable. Cold would be worse but it's Dallas, so that's rare. The good news is that the food is actually quite good. Not stratospheric, but good nevertheless. The torta is nice and the bread is fresh, while the meats are pretty good. Adobada was good, the Carnitas was good, and I have no complaints. The Gordita was enjoyable and probably the best thing on the menu. The charro beans are pretty good as well, and the tacos are not bad. Lots of cuties too and nice service ish, considering the location and atmosphere. Prices are low and on the whole, it's just about a five-star place, although it's far from the best Mexican food you'll ever eat. Then again Dallas doesn't have as much amazing Mexican food as you would expect. Not like Houston. Anyway I just received a Cesar and Desist letter from Yelp because I've written too many reviews today, so it's time to end this one, and go write another.
This is probably one of my favorite taco places in Dallas I have tried several different spots in the area and I was looking for something very authentic down south since I am from the north. A coworker brought me here for lunch one day and I was greeted with great customer service and we ordered the beef fajita tacos that were extremely delicious and juicy. The desserts are extremely good and fresh made in house. I want to order lunch for my entire staff
During my taco tour, I ordered just a pastor and chicharrones. First impressions were they use a pretty good tortilla. I like that their tortillas taste like corn. Had a good greasy profile, firm in structure, but still soft. I love their creamy avocado sauce that they offer. Their trompo is fucking legit! It seems more like charred grounded up pastor than chunks, but the texture and flavor are delicious. Their chicharones were ok. I don't like that they weren't fried. The marinade and taste reminds me of a hot dog. Not the worst thing in the world but not my idea of a taco. Oddly enough, they had horrible onions and cilantro. I don't know if they produce was getting old or if they had it sitting out too long but it struck an awful chord. This isn't a deal breaker, but I hope this was just an off day. Im curious to try their other tacos, but go for the pastor. I will be definitely trying other items, but for now, its Ok.
Came here for late night...our tacos took 45 minutes! They were cold, drenched in oil and inedible. I did not know it was possible to mess up a taco or rice and beans but this was awful! The sketchy cat hanging around and crowd with guns in pockets did not provide a pleasant ambiance either. DO NOT COME HERE.
First time here and Super delicious burritos. I defenetly recommend this place. The location is a bit sketchy but thats were the good food is at. I used to get burritos from fuel city but this place Caesars tacos beats it. The staff is pretty friendly and helpful.
While the food here was good, it was really the service that puts Cesar's over the top. We had ordered a LARGE to-go order (think for 40 people). We were first amazed by the low price of the order, and then we were blown away by Judy and how she took care of us. She made sure we had plenty of everything and nearly refused to take a tip (which was incredibly deserved). We had a taco bar with carnitas, beans, rice, chicken, and all the fixings. Everything was still hot and delicious, even after a 30 minute car ride. The two salsas (red and green) were definitely hotter than we anticipated, but were still good. Even heated up as leftovers the next day, everything still tasted good. Pro-tip: order the horchata and tres leches cake! The Dairyland Dolls roller derby team is a definite fan of Cesar's Tacos! Thanks Judy!
The best damn street Tacos I've ever had! I get them weekly and I'm never disappointed! The building looks pretty beat up but the food is on point!
Meh....just alright to me. I ordered 5 tacos for some late night hunger..not that I ever intended to eat them all, but you know...options. The only one that I really enjoyed was the chicken one and the carne asada. The others (grilled pork and barbacoa),tasted as if the meat was old.
This is a 24 hour taco stand, located on Davis St. in Oak Cliff. It's great for late night or a quick bite. You can walk up and order at the window, online or via telephone. I recommend the carne asada fries, fajita nachos (big enough to serve two), and the quesadilla de bistec.
My first (and last) time ever eating here. The food is not fresh. It's actually very salty and not tasty at all. Sorry but I won't ever come eat here again. I ordered Super Nachos which I could tell were thrown together then (over) heated in a microwave. There were flies all over this place, just yuck.
So I do delivery for several platforms.. Uber Eats, Grubhub, Amazon Flex, etc. So I'm all over DFW at all times of the day/night. If I'm wide awake at night, I'll still be out delivering until 3-4 am. My last Uber Eats delivery was at a hospital not far away. I wanted to eat before heading back home, checked Yelp for nearby taco places that were open. Surprise surprise, at 2:30am, Cesar's was open! I knew the Cliff had a couple of late night and 24 hour taco places, but hadn't experienced any of them. I had the gordita plate (crispy, with steak). Everything was great, I just wish the green sauce had a bit more fire to it (I saw someone else said it was too hot... I tried both green sauces, but I like a lot of fire). The spanish rice in particular was a stand out, very impressive for a fast food place. I just have to yank a star because the place was just... filthy. Granted, it was late, and all the employees are behind bars (literally). There was also a bullet hole in the window next to the booth I was sitting in, adding to the ambiance. Right across the street from the Oak Cliff Norma's Cafe on Davis, pretty easy to find. Staff seemed pretty friendly, and spoke good English.
I ate at the NW Hwy location in Dallas on 12-13-18 @ 3pm. I ordered at the drive thru. I ordered the grilled meat for 1 which came with refried beans, rice, tortillas and Pico de Gallo. There were no prices on the drive thru menu but I assumed the price would be $7.00 - $9.00 as other similar restaurants. It cost me $14.00 which would have been fine for quality food. This food was terrible. The meat consisted of Eckridge smoked sausage which you can buy at any grocery store. It had some very tough beef fajita meat which had a spoiled taste and a few pieces of tablido marinados ( ribs sliced horizontally very thin with the bone in. I couldn't eat much of this. It's now 4:45 pm and am going to El Fenix to get food I know is good and for less money. I'll never go back to this rat dump. I eat authentic Mexican often but this food is slop!!
Called ahead and ordered 4 steak tacos with chopped onions and cilantro and was advised it would be 20 minutes. When I arrived there were lots of people in line but as soon as I put the car in park I heard my name over the loudspeaker. I picked up my hot plate and ordered a Mexican Coke with real sugar. Upon arriving at my house I opened the package - applied the salsa - took one bite, oh my! The sounds of pure joy attracted my wife and kids and we had an awesome snack. My only regret is not ordering more! Easily one of the best taco shacks in town.
Pretty good lengua and Al pastor tacos. Parking is pretty compact. Seating is outside only. Most persons order to-go. If one is having a craving for late night street tacos I recommend this place.
I ordered off Uber eats and I can say this is the worst carne asada I have ever ordered hands down. The meat was extremely thin and absurdly chewy. It was thinner than my plastic fork. The refried beans were like refried bean soup. I put some steak and onions on a torta with a little salsa. After the first bite I picked the steak out of my teeth and reluctantly went down to the overpriced bar/grill in my hotel. The pictures are from after my first bite and that was the way I left the plate for housekeeping to throw out! I cannot recommend this place and I'm shocked the reviews are so good.
Good food. Great price. Amazon hours! Definitely underrated. Not the best place to dine in, but definitely good to go. Great authentic flavor.Making Sense Of Cleveland's Good And Bad News
toggle caption Thomas Ondrey/The Plain Dealer/Landov
As Cleveland embraces national attention for everything from its booming arts and culinary scene to its redevelopment plans, it struggles with recent high-profile crimes. Some residents and tourists are left with news whiplash as they try to figure out what these diverging story lines say about the city.
Carol Sand is visiting Cleveland from Cincinnati to compete with her husband in the National Senior Games, held in the city's brand new convention center. On Monday, came news of multiple murders in a nearby suburb – just a few months after three kidnapped women emerged from a home on Cleveland's west side after nearly a decade.
Sand says in light of the news, her 86-year-old mother worried about her coming here. "And so she said, 'Whatever you do, don't go up there and get killed.' "
An extreme and troubling comment for sure. But that fear isn't one that visitor Winnie Montgomery shares. She says she was at a store in a suburb with her friend, without a car, and realized they'd have to walk half a mile back to her hotel.
"And some guy's just sitting there on a bench, heard us talking. He said, 'Y'all need a ride?' 'Well, yes.' 'My car's right here, right around the corner,' " Montgomery says. "I just tell her, 'Let's take a chance.' The guy was super nice, he took us right to the hotel."
For Colette Jones, who heads marketing for Positively Cleveland, the city is widely misunderstood. It's her job to promote tourist events in the area.
"I think most people have outdated perceptions of Cleveland. Most people don't really know much about the city. I think the things they see typically relate back to what they see on television, whether it has to do with our sports teams or something else like that," Jones says.
She says many people still think of Cleveland as a blue-collar, manufacturing town. While there is still some manufacturing here, it's trying to become more of a creative town, with top-notch cultural institutions, tons of recreational facilities and world-renowned medical care.
"We have a world-class arts and culture community, we have a great music scene, our culinary scene gets some good national coverage. We have some great celebrity chefs who are great with partnering with us," Jones says.
Cleveland has received national attention for its free art museum, which just underwent a big expansion. There's also been a wave of people moving back into the city's downtown, where a hip street of outdoor cafes is just a short walk from the city's new casino.
But that's just one side of Cleveland, says Angie Schmitt, who runs a blog about the industrial Midwest. Schmitt thinks Cleveland boosters aren't acknowledging the city's many difficulties.
"They think the national image of Cleveland is wrong, it's a mistake, and that if the image problem could be repaired, Cleveland would recover," Schmitt says.
But she says like most big cities, that ignores endemic problems, like dwindling population, abandoned homes and high infant mortality rates in some low-income neighborhoods.
Community organizer Travelle Harp is familiar with many of these problems. He held a meeting in nearby East Cleveland just days after three bodies were found there. He says although some parts of this 2-million-person metro area are booming, places like this one are still largely left out of the recovery.
"We see a community with a lot of value. It's human capital that's overlooked, disrespected constantly by the lack of investment in our community," Harp says.
The discovery of three women who say they were held captive drove that point home for urban policy researcher Richey Piiparinen. He says the story, and the problems it shed light on, just about broke his heart.
"It was a reality that you can't hide from: concentrated poverty, vacancy, what happens when there's no people in the houses to look after your neighbor," Piiparinen says.
But Piiparinen worries that the country is teed up only to hear about decline in the industrial Midwest and takes any bad news as more evidence that the region is troubled.
At the same time, though, he says he's amazed at the attention Cleveland has been receiving lately, not just for its obvious challenges, but for its rebirth.
"It is mind-blowing to me. So, I think what that says is there's something going on, no one knows what it is, it's a mix of good and bad, but that's life, and that's Cleveland — Cleveland's life, Cleveland's reality," Piiparinen says.
And whether Cleveland wanted to or not, it's given the country a glimpse of both realities — the promise and the troubles, side by side.Story highlights A report of damage to a car lead a Sheriff's office to turn up similar cases
The damage to multiple vehicles is consistent with gunshots
No one has been reported injured
(CNN) Authorities in southern Michigan are investigating the possibility that someone fired upon vehicles on two freeways.
Several motorists driving on I-94 and I-69, notified law enforcement that their vehicles sustained damage from some type of projectile, the Calhoun County Sheriff's Office said.
Authorities received the first report on Aug 19. That report led police to uncover more cases dating between July 29 and August 21.
Tests from one of the investigations confirmed the damage found on one car was consistent with a bullet. Law enforcement said that other cases also likely resulted from the use of a weapon.
The incidents have occurred during the night and in broad daylight.
Read MoreSuperheroes stories are a genre that, like many others, rarely get explored in feature animation. Even more rare are the number of films based on actual comic book properties. Even last year’s Big Hero 6, despite being based off a Marvel property, only used the source material as inspiration to create something entirely new. To that end, fans have always wondered what an animated movie based on an actual comic property (emphasis on based, not inspired by) would look like. Luckily, the folks at Sony may be the first to answer this question!
Courtesy of Collider, Sony Pictures’ new chairman Tom Rothman made the announcement at CinemaCon yesterday that the studio has officially green-lit production on a fully animated Spider-Man film. The film is now in production for a July 20, 2018 release window. While Rothman didn’t exactly specify which studio will animate the film, it’s safe to say that Sony Pictures Animation might handle this specific area.
What’s more, the studio will enlist the talents of none other than Phil Lord and Chris Miller! The duo are currently set to write the treatment and produce the film (with a mild possibility that they could be in the director’s chairs).
The film will exist independently from the new string of live-action Spider-Man films, which will see the character relaunched and fully integrated into the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe). The first of these live-action films will arrive in July 28, 2017.
By this point, Phil Lord and Chris Miller are fully established as the hottest and most exciting names to watch in animation (and in Hollywood, period). Last year saw their star power skyrocket with The LEGO Movie, which was the recipient of multiple awards and universal praise. This not only kicked off the formation of Warner Animation Group, a creative think tank of writers, producers, and animators responsible for the creation of new animated Warner Bros. films, but also launched a mini-shared universe of LEGO films that are now in development (let’s refer to it as the LCU, or Lego Cinematic Universe).
The duo is well known for their charming, meta-heavy, quick-witted sense of humor and eye for brisk storytelling. All these elements have led Lord and Miller to become the creative powerhouses they are now and will certainly lend themselves well to a character like Spider-Man.
It’s still a mystery as to how they struck a deal with Sony for this film. Emails from last year’s company-wide hack revealed the duo’s dissatisfaction with the state of Sony Pictures Animation and the studio’s failed attempts to get Lord and Miller to spearhead a creative brain-trust in order to re-energize the company (a very similar arrangement to what they have going at Warner Animation Group). At this stage, we can only speculate that the changes in management (Sony Animation is now run by Kristine Belson) may have led Lord and Miller to come back on amicable grounds for this project.
What is clear is that Lord and Miller’s creative slate is going to be pretty busy over the next few full years (with animation and live-action projects). And, speaking of comic book films, they are also quite involved on the DC side of things. At Warner Bros., the first of the LEGO spinoffs will be the LEGO Batman film based on Will Arnett’s portrayal of the character (arriving February 10, 2017). Lord and Miller have also been courted to write the treatment for a live-action film adaptation of The Flash.
Like I’ve said many times before, animation can house more than the standard laugh-out-loud comedy. This news is very exciting, as it may open the door for more comic book properties to have animated treatments on the big screen.
What do you think? Are you excited for Sony’s Spider-Man film?
Edited by: Hannah WilkesEdinburgh Capitals to strengthen
13 December 2017
Season 2017-18 – Message to Edinburgh Capitals supporters
Following what we acknowledge has been a frustrating period for our fan base we’d like to assure our supporters that the Edinburgh Capitals are about to become stronger both on and off the ice.
We are in talks with a number of players and expect to announce new recruits from next week. We want to significantly strengthen the squad for the second half of the season, that is our immediate priority. We have three full calendar months left this season, we’re focussed on bringing in players who will battle for the club week in week out from now until the final game of the season.
Whilst we build on ice we are also seeking to strengthen off ice and are advertising for a Commercial Manager. We want to strengthen our current commercial ties whilst seeking to expand and identify new opportunities for growth. We recognise the need to strengthen in such areas as a necessity to bring success in the longer term in the EIHL.
We recognise that our supporters have remained loyal during this period, but naturally frustration has been felt. Our immediate goal is to provide you with a significantly stronger roster this season, a stronger second half to the season and for us to continue to build a club structure that provides a strong future in the Elite League.
As stated above, we'll bring you signing news shortly...Berlin-based eSports startup DOJO Madness announced today that it has raised a $4.5M Series A round. The round was led by March Capital Partners, with the Investment Bank of Berlin (IBB) and existing investors London Venture Partners and DN Capital, participating.
DOJO Madness has created a set of tools that harness the power of the latest innovations in machine learning to help gamers improve their skills. DOJO’s first product, LOLSUMO, a real-time coach for League of Legends, provides personalized guidance and actionable analysis while considering the user’s team-mates and opponents. With over 500,000 app downloads since launch last September, the app delivers insights for 70k daily active users, and is a top rated League of Legends app on both the App Store and Google Play.
The new funding round will be used to expand DOJO’s coaching apps to other eSports titles, as well as to expand into new data services in eSports. League of Legends, the world’s most popular game sees over 67 million people playing each month.
The number of people both watching and playing different eSport games continues to grow at an unprecedented rate. From 2012-2017 the eSports audience is expected to grow 20% (CAGR) and revenues are projected to increase 29% (CAGR).¹ “We launched our first coaching App, LOLSUMO, a year ago, and we have been overwhelmed by the positive user feedback. With our new funding, we will continue to add great features, and launch our service for additional eSports games,” says Jens Hilgers, DOJO Madness CEO.
“We have monitored the explosive growth of eSports, and believe that the future is in data services,” says Gregory Milken, Managing Director of March Capital Partners. “The machine learning technology that Dojo Madness brings to the table is a game changer for League of Legend players, and I can’t wait to see it rolled out to additional games.”
DOJO Madness was founded in December 2014 by Jens Hilgers, eSports veteran and Founder of ESL, Markus Fuhrmann, co-founder of Delivery Hero, and Christian Gruber.
¹ Source: Global Growth of eSports Report. 2015 Newzoo. More info can be found here.
About DOJO Madness
Passionate gamers by heart, DOJO Madness is a team of eSports veterans building next generation tools that help gamers master their play. DOJO’s technology-driven products solve real issues gamers and community are facing every day.
Press Contact
Kalie Moore
DOJO Madness Head of Communications
kalie.moore@dojomadness.com
+49 174 184 0124
@kaliemoore
Source: Press release / DOJO MadnessThe 20-year-old right-back has also attracted interest from Sunderland but the Championship club are holding out for a fee in the region of £10m
By William Joyce Southampton have had a £5 million bid for right-back Sam Byram rejected by Leeds United understands.The 20-year-old has already cemented his place in the Championship club’s first team and was set to be included in England’s Under-20 World Cup squad last summer before being forced to pull out with a hip injury.Sunderland have also submitted an offer for Byram but Leeds are holding out for a fee in the region of £10m.Southampton manager Ronald Koeman is keen to strengthen his defensive options ahead of his side’s opening Premier League fixture against Liverpool on August 17 and views Byram as a viable competitor to Nathaniel Clyne for the right-back spot.Leeds sold their former captain Ross McCormack to Fulham in an £11m deal earlier this summer but have signed six new players, including Gaetano Berardi, who is competing with Byram for a place at right-back.Students, not customers. Photo by wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock
In what is apparently a vogue of Republican state legislators exercising misplaced vendettas against college professors, Iowa Sen. Mark Chelgren recently made headlines when he introduced Senate File 64, “an Act relating to the teaching effectiveness and employment of professors” at Iowa public institutions.
Each year, the bill stipulates, any faculty who fails “to attain a minimum threshold of performance” based solely on student evaluations would be automatically fired regardless of rank or tenure. Lest you think that firing professors based on a questionable assessment metric affords them too much dignity, rest assured there is more. Some beleaguered governing body would also publish the names of the five professors with the lowest acceptable evaluations, and the student body would then “vote on the question of whether any of the five professors will be retained.”
In what has to be the most deadpan interview in the history of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Chelgren said:
There doesn’t seem to be any qualification where the professor understands that when they leave at the end of the school year, they’re leaving with a couple hundred thousand dollars, but that the students they’re teaching are paying these huge amounts of money to be there… Do I think that students who…are spending thousands of dollars to get an education are qualified to make those decisions? Absolutely. Why wouldn’t a student be qualified to make those kinds of determinations? They’re the ones paying the money.
Chelgren’s proposed legislation is in many ways a joke. First, the average salary of a tenured associate professor at the University of Iowa is not “hundreds of thousands” of dollars, but hovers around $80,000. Second, anyone who has ever heard the word “adjunct” knows full well that many Iowan professors make far less than that. They don’t need a poor man’s Survivor to get booted because of their student evaluations, since that happens to adjuncts all the time. Besides, I honestly don’t think that most students—especially not eminently practical Iowans—would want to do this to their fellow human beings.
Though we can sigh in relief that this bill appears to be dead already, there is still one deadly serious aspect of SF 64 and its sister legislation in North Carolina, whose goal is also to unemploy as many professors as possible (a goal, by the way, that is already taking care of itself without any help). And that is the adage, repeated by both Chelgren and North Carolina’s Tom McInnis—and, really, innumerable other higher-ed meddlers—that American universities need to be better at meeting the needs of their customers.
If given the benefit of the doubt, these assertions have some merit: College today is far too expensive. But let’s leave aside the fact that ballooning tuition does not, I repeat, does not, go to professors’ imaginary $200,000 salaries. Faculty are by and large co-victims, along with students, in the cratering of the American university system. Scaring the beejezus out of professors is largely redundant, and the GOP’s thirst for their blood is ideological.
But college students are not customers. That analogy needs to die. It needs to be drowned in the world’s largest bathtub. It needs a George R.R. Martin–esque bloodbath of a demise.
Legitimate research has determined that student evaluations of professors are biased, and so their “customer ratings” aren’t fair. Legitimate research also indicates that while professorial popularity and effectiveness do overlap, one does not immediately signify or correlate with the other. Further, most students don’t actually view themselves as customers, because they know how education works and actually want to get one.
But let’s ignore all this, and just reductio to some absurdum. If a university is a customer-service-oriented business—like, say, a restaurant—this means that the customer’s pleasurable experience (and thus continuing patronage) is the sole aim of the university. It does not matter, then, how much or how little the customer learns about a given area of study, because she is “always right.”
When, for example, a diner at a restaurant pairs tilapia with zinfandel, and then raises a holy fit about how disgusting her tilapia tastes, the manager has little choice but to restrain the irate sommelier and comp the food, even though it is the customer’s fault the food was “bad.” The staff would not dare suggest the customer try a different wine, because that rude attitude would be yet more fodder for a scathing Yelp review; e.g., “If I could give this place negative stars, I would!”
Imagine how the Yelp template would work in college. Despite the “sommelier”—in this case the professor—strongly recommending that the “customer” purchase the Chem 101 textbook for Chem 101, the customer, being always right and in possession of the money, decides instead to purchase the textbook for Abnormal Psych 500 because it “looks better.” Then, when it’s time for midterms (our customer has not attended a single lecture—she’s paid her money, after all!), our customer notices that none of the exam questions match anything she’s read. Since she’s paid many thousands of dollars for this course, she is, as the customer, fully entitled to both an A and a full refund. And if her professor, TA, adviser, the registrar, and the provost don’t issue her a profuse apology, it’s zero stars. Fire everyone!
Wait, what did you say? This scenario is absurd, you say? It is, and it has no bearing on reality—not even the most entitled student would act this way, and nobody would feel the need to kowtow to her if she did, precisely because students aren’t customers.
If students are customers, then the university is a business. A business’s only goal is to succeed, as in make the largest profit possible, which it usually does by purveying the cheapest product it can at the highest price customers will pay. In this model, tuition should be as high as the school can get away with, and all courses should cater purely to the tastes of the lowest common denominator of the customer base. In practice, it follows that each class should be five minutes long, taught by holograms of Rihanna, and consist entirely of self-graded multiple-choice tests composed in emoji. (Lest you think that for-profit university “businesses” utilize the model just fine, I’d recommend you Google “Corinthian Colleges” and perhaps “Axact.”)
Education is neither analogous to customer service nor does it need an analogous paradigm at all. It is its very own paradigm, one that has been established since before Socrates patiently nudged Glaucon into the light.
By the very nature of what they are signing up to do, college students are not always right, and since customers are always right … well, you know how a syllogism works. Thus the nonprofit university should not be acting like a corporation. That even today’s public universities do act like corporations should be infuriating to state legislators. Instead, they are doubling down, using these blatant category errors as an excuse to run professors out on a rail, all in the name of “customer service” to students who do not yet view themselves as customers. It’s not rhetoric to say that college students are not customers and that the university is not a business. This is not an angry proclamation. It is a statement of bland, indisputable truth.0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard
Bryon Williams the man who is sitting in a California jail currently accused of four counts attempted murder after a freeway shootout with police had even bigger plans, he wanted to assassinate member of the Tides Foundation, and he considers Glenn Beck his schoolteacher. Do you know who else said in a speech that they consider Glenn Beck and his chalkboard a teacher? Sarah Palin.
Here is the audio from Media Matters:
In a jailhouse interview, Williams told freelance journalist John Hamilton, “There’s only one conservative channel. That’s Fox. All the other ones are liberal channels.” When asked by Hamilton if he thought that Glenn Beck has gotten better, Williams answered, “You need to go back to June…June of this year, 2010, and look at all of his programs from June, and you’ll see he has been breaking open some of the most hideous corruption. I would say like a year ago I was watching him, and it was okay, he was alright, you know? A little young, but now he’s getting it. He really, really is a lot better. He’s getting used to it. I don’t think he’s a natural newscaster, you know what I mean? I look at him more like a schoolteacher on TV, you know? He’s got that big chalkboard, and those little stickers, the decals. I like the way he does it. He’s gotten a lot better at it.
Byron Williams is justifiably getting most of the attention, because he is the first person to openly discuss the influence of Beck’s teachings, but there is another person who has been deeply inspired by, and very helpful in pushing Beck’s message, Sarah Palin. Palin has told her ample following to watch and learn from Beck. On September 13, she tweeted, “Lamestream media: watch rerun of Glenn Beck’s show today. Listen/Learn/Don’t underestimate the wisdom of the people. Times,they r a’changin!”
According to Media Matters, on August 29, 2009, Palin invited all of her Facebook friends to watch Glenn Beck expose the truth about who is really running the White House, “”FOX News’ Glenn Beck is doing an extraordinary job this week walking America behind the scenes of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and outlining who is actually running the White House. Monday night he asked us to invite one friend to watch; tonight I invite all my friends to watch.”
During an April speech in Oregon, Palin credited Beck by saying, “his chalkboard technique he’s changing our country.” That is the same chalkboard technique that lead Byron Williams to view Beck as a schoolteacher, an opinion that I’m sure that Sarah Palin would not have disagreed with before Williams landed in jail. Just as Glenn Beck was a source of information and “truth” for Byron Williams, he serves the same purpose for Sarah Palin.
Williams may have acted on Beck’s teachings, but it is Palin’s platform that gives the message a face and a political entry point. Palin has been Beck’s doorway into Republican politics, and it is she, not Williams, who is Beck’s most valued disciple. Palin has been labeled Beck’s enabler by Media Matters, but I think her role is more important than that. She is more than an enabler. She is a legitimizer. By believing and adopting Beck’s message herself, she gives it legitimacy within the media. There are media outlets that ignore Beck daily, but they cover Palin’s repetition of Beck’s lessons.
If Byron Williams represents the danger of extremist and violent rhetoric, Sarah Palin represents what happens the language of conspiracy and hate are legitimized into the politics of fear. Beck would still be popular without Palin, but she will be providing his disciples a Beck messaged and approved candidate for 2012.
There are different ways to define danger. Sarah Palin is not going to shoot policemen or attempt to carry out an assassination plot, but she and Williams both share a belief in Glenn Beck’s message, and for this reason it is time for the Left to stop dismissing Beck. It is time to take him seriously. Sarah Palin does, and she is running for President in 2012, and this threat is not taken seriously she could carry Beck’s message with her all the way to the Oval Office.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:28-year-old Bowden, a former Highlander and Crusader, has been playing rugby in England since 2010 and is relishing the opportunity of returning to Auckland where he grew up.
“I’m really excited to be returning home along with my four-month-old baby and wife. I had opportunities to stay in the UK but coming back to be around my family and playing for the Blues is something I’ve always wanted to do,” Bowden said.
“I’ve spent time playing with the Highlanders and Crusaders but playing for my hometown team has always been an ambition of mine and I’m hoping to finally fulfil that.
“It was the team I grew up supporting and wanting to play for and I’ve taken the long way around to get to it. I was involved in the Blues Wider Training Group in 2005 so it’s been a long time coming but I’m excited to join the Blues and get back to playing Super Rugby.”
Bowden said he was confortable playing at either first or second five-eighths for the Blues.
“I played 10 for London Irish and mostly 12 for Leicester so I’m comfortable at either,” he said.
“I’m sure the Blues will have their ideas - I’d like to play 10 but I’m happy to play wherever is best for the team. There are plenty of talented players in the Blues backline and hopefully I can offer some guidance and experience there.”
Bowden enjoyed a highly successful career in England. An impressive inaugural season with London Irish earned him the “Players’ Player of the Year” award and he shared the captaincy at the Exiles during the 2011/12 season.
After two seasons with London Irish, the versatile playmaker joined Leicester Tigers in the summer of 2012 and ended the season as an Aviva Premiership champion. In his first game for the Tigers his finish for a length-of-the-field score against Saracens was voted the Aviva Premiership Try of the Season.
Born in Auckland and schooled at Auckland Grammar, Bowden has represented New Zealand at schools, under-17, under-19 and under-21 levels.
Blues head coach Sir John Kirwan said he was thrilled to welcome Bowden to the Blues.
“Dan has a great skill set and is really keen to come back and have another crack at Super Rugby in New Zealand so we’re really excited to have him,” he said.
“He’s really matured and developed playing in the UK. He was on the cusp of playing for England and he probably got injured at the wrong time which has helped him make the decision to come back and join the Blues so we’re looking forward to having his experience in the squad.”
Bowden is currently in Auckland and will head to Japan before returning to join the Blues for pre-season training in January.December 15, 2017
— A memorial marker will be erected at Arlington National Cemetery honoring NASA's Apollo 1 astronauts who were killed in a fire on the launch pad 50 years ago.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday (Dec. 12) signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018, which in addition to calling for appropriations for the military activities of the Department of Defense, included a provision to construct a memorial to the crew of Apollo 1.
The act directs the Secretary of the Army to authorize "the construction, at an appropriate place in Arlington National Cemetery [in] Virginia, of a memorial marker honoring the three members of the crew of the Apollo 1 who died during a launch rehearsal test on January 27, 1967."
The act |
50 divorce, covering such matters as the rights of citizens resident in other countries and Britain’s multi-billion-euro exit bill, before starting work on a future trade deal; Mrs May wants to negotiate on everything at once. Nothing much will be agreed on before the German election in September. At the end of it all, ratifying the deal will take six months. That leaves little more than a year for the talks themselves.
Mrs May’s priority is to fulfil the Leave campaign’s promise to “take back control” by ending the free movement of EU citizens to Britain and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). She has acknowledged that this means leaving the EU’s single market. But leaving would be a mistake. Even if it takes control of immigration, Britain will not be able to cut the numbers much without damaging the economy, as ministers are slowly realising. And the government is wrong to claim that there exists some relationship with the single market that has all the benefits of membership with none of the costs.
It is true that many Britons backed Brexit because they wanted to cut immigration and regain sovereignty, but they did not vote to make themselves poorer—as Mrs May’s “hard Brexit” will. Her government has been characterised by U-turns and her letter this week was more emollient than some of her earlier statements. Even so, in thrall to Brexiteering backbenchers and the Eurosceptic press, she is unlikely to change course now.
Mrs May is not just making the wrong choices, but also downplaying awkward trade-offs. By promising barrier-free access to the single market while stopping EU migrants and ending the ECJ’s jurisdiction, she is still telling Britons they can have their cake and eat it. Although she concedes that exporters to the EU will have to obey EU rules, the more Mrs May insists on controlling EU migration and escaping the ECJ, the less barrier-free will be Britain’s overall access to the single market. This is not just because free movement of people is a condition for the EU, nor because it will be hard to secure tariff-free access for trade in goods, something both sides can readily agree on. It is because the biggest obstacles swept away by the single market are not tariffs or customs checks, but non-tariff barriers such as standards, regulations and state-aid rules. Unless Britain accepts these, which implies a role for the system’s referee, the ECJ, it cannot operate freely in the single market—as even American firms trading in the EU have found.
Boxed into a corner
The most dangerous of Mrs May’s illusions has been her claim that no deal is better than a bad deal. Her letter this week steps back from this notion, but only a pace. To revert to trading with the EU only on World Trade Organisation (WTO) terms would cause serious harm to Britain’s economy. It would mean the EU imposing tariffs plus a full panoply of non-tariff barriers on almost half Britain’s exports. No big country trades with the EU only on WTO terms. An acrimonious break-up would make it harder to co-operate in such areas as foreign policy and defence. And it would surely increase the risk of Brexit triggering Scotland’s exit from the United Kingdom.
Mrs May needs not merely to soften her tone, as she has started to do this week, but to lower expectations. Instead of threatening to undercut her European partners by building an unregulated Singapore-on-Thames (something that, despite its appeal to free-traders, would horrify most Brexit voters), or hinting that Britain might co-operate less fully on security, or claiming that the EU needs Britain more than the other way round, she should accept that in these negotiations she holds the weaker hand. She should hence be more flexible over payments into the EU budget, a subject her letter skates over.
Because negotiating a full free-trade deal is certain to take more than two years—no country has concluded one with the EU in so short a time—she should accept another consequence: that transitional arrangements will be needed to avoid “falling off a cliff” in March 2019. Her letter talks airily of “implementation periods”, but does not acknowledge how hard these may be to sort out. A proper, time-limited transition might mean prolonging free movement of people and the rule of the ECJ, but that price would be worth paying for a better Brexit.
The softer tone of Mrs May’s letter might, with luck, encourage her EU partners to be more accommodating. So far they have reacted to threats from London in kind, talking up the exit bill, insisting that Britain ends up being worse off outside the club than inside and digging in over terms for co-operating in foreign and security policies. There is a possibility of a deal between Britain and the EU that minimises Brexit’s harm. Unfortunately, in a negotiation against the clock where both sides start so far apart, there is also a big risk of one that maximises harm instead.Even in the vast expanse of the old Wembley, the gap between both sets of substitute benches was only a few feet wide. Slightly enough to fit another column of chairs had the powers that be chosen to do so. Very close confines for today’s generation of animated managers. On the night no touchline clashes were observed. The two managers would exchange heated words only after the tie had ended, unsatisfied with each other’s approach.
Both of them were legends in their own right, each having already lifted the European Cup. Liverpool’s Bob Paisley had triumphed most recently, overseeing his side’s 3:1 win in the ‘77 final vs Mönchengladbach. The summer brought the challenge of replacing Kevin Keegan who made the £500.000 move to Hamburg. Keegan may not have gotten on the scoresheet in the final, but he was Liverpool’s top goalscorer in the EC with four goals, and for the season overall, netting 20 times in all competitions.
Enter Kenny Dalglish, a then 26-year old striker of slight stature, joining for £440.000 from Celtic, having scored 167 goals in 322 matches for the Bhoys. Dalglish proved an instant success. Though not blessed with blinding pace, Dalglish relied on his superior anticipation and finishing skills. He bagged 31 goals across all competitions in his inaugural season at Anfield.
Had he been a bit sharper in the first few minutes of this match, the 92.500 in attendance would have seen quite a different game.
From kick-off Brugge send it straight to their keeper Birger Jensen who botches his pass upfield. The ball lands on the foot of Dalglish, but with acres of space in front of him, he can’t control it properly.
Just a few minutes later Terry McDermott picks off a strange errant pass by Lajos Kű in a dangerous position on the wing. McDermott wants to shift play over to the middle where David Fairclough is waiting and uses Dalglish as a conduit, but the latter’s pass isn’t precise enough.
A rhythm for the final
Dalglish, Brugge and the game as a whole quickly settle into a rhythm. The Belgian side set up two narrow bands of four, with the defence positioned only ~20 yards in front of their own goal, with the midfield another ten in front of that. Liverpool are in control and Brugge are happy to concede possession until around the half-way line where they start pressing. Otherwise a sole striker is hurrying Liverpool goalkeeper Ray Clemence.
An early scare comes when Graeme Souness pings a ball high out to the left wing. Fairclough lays a header off into the box where Dalglish is beat to the ball by Jensen, colliding with Brugge’s keeper. Both men are down for the count but can resume play.
Souness had joined Liverpool at the season’s outset amongst a bit of reshuffling, by way of Middlesbrough. The £352.000 move had completed a trifecta of Scottish signings. The summer prior had seen the arrival of 21-year old Alan Hansen, brought in from Partick Thistle for £100.000. Altogether serious money for the late-70s, but not enough to win the league a third time on the bounce. Nottingham Forest claimed the First Division title 1977/78.
Liverpool were perhaps side-tracked by Europe. Though the early rounds were a breeze: They had received a bye into the Second Round, where they put the tie with Dynamo Dresden to bed in the first leg at Anfield (5:1). They could afford to lose in Dresden and did so (1:2). Two wins against Benfica in the Quarter-finals, away (2:1) and home (4:1), brought about a rematch with Gladbach in the Semis. Again Liverpool lost in Germany as they had in Dresden (1:2) but booked another final via Anfield (3:0).
Club Brugge’s defensive organization
At Wembley they encountered Brugge, or rather the defensive entity that was Brugge. Their approach on the whole wasn’t negative, even though their general deep positioning would suggest that. There was no mindless boot-the-ball-out-the-box to be found here. Instead Brugge relied on condensing space, applying pressure in the right areas and catching Liverpool’s strikers in their off-side trap.
Soon enough everybody but Clemence was positioned inside the Brugge half as Liverpool built their attacks. Brugge’s wider midfield players would fall back into the last line, either on the outside or slotting in between Centre and Full backs, with the whole line then pushing forward. This served them well on both of Liverpool’s attacking patterns.
When Dalglish dropped back to receive the ball at his feet, back to the goal, it gave Brugge always a man advantage in the middle to stifle his first movement.
Showing a bit of space behind their line also cajoled Liverpool into sending balls over the top for Fairclough to run onto. For most of the game the trap worked without a fault. Thus Liverpool were reduced to long range efforts for the early stages. Jimmy Case, the Reds’ European top goalscorer that season, took his cue. His first effort landed straight in the arms of Jensen (13’), the next in the upper decks of Wembley (18’).
Sustained success under Ernst Happel
On the day Brugge weren’t pretty to look at but it’s hard to argue with their overall results. Unlike Liverpool, Brugge did complete their league title hat-trick in 1977/78. In the European Cup they easily advanced through the First Round against Finnish champions Kuopion Palloseura easily (4:0 & 5:2). Afterwards Brugge would rely on their home strength, winning all matches at Olympiastadion 2:0 against Panathinaikos in the second round (losing 0:1 away), against Atlético Madrid in the Quarter-final (losing 2:3 away) and against Juventus in the Semi-finals (losing 0:1 away).
A similar run had brought Brugge to the UEFA Cup final two years prior, winning all of their home legs through five rounds, while winning only one away leg, and drawing another. In the final, which was also played over two legs, they met Liverpool. True to form the Reds won the first match at Anfield (3:2). Brugge then took the lead at home, but Liverpool quickly equalized and held on to win the trophy.
Residing over the Belgian side on both occasions was Ernst Happel. The Austrian had previously led Feyenoord to European success in 1969/70 and was now looking to become the first manager to win the EC with two different teams.
As the first half rolls on he sees a more physical match from both sides. Case goes into the book for a late tackle on Maes, while Case himself is brought down by Vandereycken only a few minutes later. Less retaliatory than last ditch, Vandereycken prevented Case to slip through after a nice move down the middle by Liverpool.
Mistakes to close out the first half
Mistakes from both sides characterize the last few minutes in the first half. Liverpool’s are hardly punished: While they try to up the tempo in the build-up, their pass completion rate drops. Brugge are are hardly threatening on the counter, sending just two or three players out on the break and being altogether to slow going forward.
Brugge’s mistakes, however, almost prove deathly. After 39 minutes the offside-trap fails for the first time, leaving Fairclough with an open path towards goal. Georges Leekens catches up with Fairclough and does just enough to slow Fairclough down, allowing Jensen to clear the ball and the defence to re-form. In the commotion the ball is put back in, Souness gets a volley-shot off which sails high and over the bar.
Moments later Fairclough again avoids the offside-trap, aided by a surprise turn-around, no-look pass from McDermott from the right wing into the attacking third. Jensen is out quickly enough to stifle Fairclough’s shot.
To close out the half, it’s again McDermott who puts in a free kick from the right wing. Hansen towers over the Brugge defence, but his header is not placed well enough. Jensen able to palm it over the bar
If the match were a boxing title bout, holders Liverpool would have won this first round simply virtue of their status. Challengers Brugge did not threaten them enough, only making Clemence work going for a few crosses and corner kicks. However, in the last 5 to 10 minutes Liverpool would’ve rightly earned the points for the round. Bringing more width into their play, with McDermott drifting out to the right and Hughes pushing up on the left wing, the Reds were finally turning their advantages on the ball into chances.
Dalglish breaks the deadlock
In the second half they doubled down on this approach. On the right wing Case is pushing up into the forward line with McDermott filling in. On the left Fairclough drifts very wide, almost holding the line at times. Going forward both full backs would overload.
Belying the strategy, their biggest chance on the day so far comes through the middle.
But that’s where Dalglish brings up the ball after 50 minutes, pulling two defenders out of position then playing a dinky lay-off pass for the surging McDermott, which catches the whole Brugge defence by surprise. The England International is clear through on goal but Jensen plays a good angle, stays up long and stops the shot.
As for Brugge’s attack, noteable achievements are few and far between. Of note is the midfield positioning, the row of three would hold their shape going forward but interchange amongst each other. Kű had a free role in front, while Simoen would drop back to form a 4-3-2-1. It is Vandereycken who notches up the first shot on target, but his effort from 30 yards out lands directly in the arms of Clemence (55’).
Both sides make a change around the hour mark, with Sanders and Heighway coming on for Kű and Case respectively. But before either of the newly introduced players can make much of an impact, the ball falls to Souness 20 yards out, after a stifled Liverpool attack. Dalglish had kept onside and is hovering on the shoulder of the back-line. Souness slips him a great through ball and this time Jensen, though out quickly, goes to the ground early. Dalglish lifts the ball over him into the far side of the goal.
Rather than go decisively for the 2:0, Liverpool sit back and play keep-ball, making the closing 20 minutes nervier than they need to be.
Last ditch efforts from Brugge
Happel brings on Volders for Maes, strengthening Brugge’s left side, where Heighway had rejuvenated Liverpool’s efforts. Vandereyken is at the forefront of an offensive push by the trailing side, with the whole Brugge midfield now in more advanced positions. Their main problem remains a lack of connection between midfield and attack. And, what’s more, Liverpool give them a taste of their own medicine and now use the offside trap to great effect themselves.
The only real chance at the equalizer comes ten minutes from the final whistle. Jensen sends a long ball up the field, which is headed on into the highest line. Hansen gets a foot on it and decides to play it round the back, but his pass is too short. Sorensen tries to get onto it and clatters into Clemence. The ball falls to Simoen who has to turn around to shoot, allowing Thompson enough time to get back and cover for Clemence, thus clearing Simoen’s shot off the goal-line.
In the end Liverpool’s experience may well have been the deciding factor. 77/78 was the 14th consecutive season in Europe for the Reds. That’s remarkable even by today’s standards.
Consequently Happel had seen his opponents in finer form, saying after the match that “Liverpool were only a shadow of the side they were two years prior”, and concluding it was an altogether bad final. Paisley pushed back, suggesting it takes two sides to make for an interesting game.
Upon watching the match, the truth, as so often, lies in the middle. And the verbal aftermath is also less dramatic than could be trumped up to be. In the same vein Paisley added that “Brugge were well organised at the back and it was a case of breaking them down”. Such was the case and from Brugge’s perspective a necessity looking at the overall superior skill in the English side. Liverpool on the other hand dominated for 90 minutes, but only clicked into higher gear for shorter bursts. Certainly not their best performance in the era, but nonetheless a “deserved victory”, as Happel himself admitted.
Awards
Man Of The Match: Tough one, Souness, McDermott & Case all at times ran the show, but didn’t sustain that level; thus Dalglish get’s it for the sublime finish
Best Hair: Lajos Kű with Souness a strong runner-up
Viewing recommendation: Yes, for Liverpool fans or if you’re interested in Happel’s tactical nous (and why wouldn’t you be?); otherwise skipable. Full match can be found over on footballia, highlights below.
If you have enjoyed the write-up, check out the other articles in the series and consider leaving a like over on Facebook or giving us a follow on Twitter, so you’ll always be up to date on new ones.CSAT Canton Protocol Strategic Alliance Treaty
Formed at the apex of the Canton Protocol summits, this strategic alliance of states is built upon the goals of mutual defense, expanded global influence, and sustained economic growth.
Set against the context of foundering economies and civil unrest across the west, CSAT has risen in prominence over the last decade. Investment in shared civil and military technology and the aggressive pursuit of opportunities and partnerships throughout Asia, South America and North Africa has led to a sharp increase in strategic tension across the globe, as traditional spheres of power and influence are encroached upon.
Recently partnering with the government of The Republic of Altis and Stratis, joint civilian and military projects are supported by an independent mechanized brigade-sized force officially operates under the authority of Col. Vahid Namdar.Files (aka Nautilus) received major changes in Gnome 3.6. While overall its re-fresh look is getting good critics, there are some discussions about the drop of features like Compact View and Extra Pane.
Jon McCann explains in 7 points in his blog the goals of Files 3.6.
None the less the new Files feels much more modern and pretty, but this is just optics. “Inside” is even better. A quick tour on changes proves it!
Files 3.6 Roadmap
Already done!
To be done!
Nice to have!
Visit Files Roadmap
Files 3.6 Goals | by McCann
Jon McCann explains in depth all the new features in Files 3.6.
1. Be Immediately Useful
Files has gained a “Recently” modified view. You aren’t required to navigate in Folders to find your recently files any more!
2. Have a Functional Search
This is the biggest improvement in Files 3.6! Searching in Files was completely broken and you had to use a terminal to search for you Files. One of the major bugs in Gnome is considered closed :)
3. Have Simpler and More Natural Workflows
This obviously is the whole point of Gnome 3, and Nautilus gained a super new feature. Select some files and immediately create a new folder inside the selection, and move your files there!
4. Be More Coherent
Some work is in progress to make the whole Gnome3+Files look more consistence. For example the re-designed Dialog Windows that are coming soon!
5. Be more Effective
This is a a goal how to make the Files features more clear and comprehensive, like the Tree View. McCann says: “We’ve heard the complaints loud and clear. They’ve been ringing out on the mailing lists and piling up in bugzilla“, which even if you do not believe it is totally true. There is an active response to everyone complains in Nautilus bugzilla and Nautilus mailing lists.
6. Be more Beatiful
Simple and beautiful, but yet powerful. If you can’t achieve the third(powerful) isn’t big deal. Simplicity and look are more important. In my opinion, they did great in this area.
7. Trading Spaces
The last goal is the one that got the most complains. This simply goes, if you want to change the workflow (Have simpler and more natural workflows) you need to remove some of the features that are opposite with this change. Obviously we are talking about the removal of Extra Pane and Compact view.
McCann explains these two decisions.
Why Extra Pane removed?
This was removed for a couple of reasons. The first reason was that it was undiscoverable. Not all undiscoverable interfaces are bad but this one also stood in the way of providing a better alternative. Even if you never used the Extra Pane you always had useless Move To and Copy To items in the menus.
We wanted to create a better Move and Copy workflow and really these items had to go. Once you remove all user facing ways to use the feature you have to ask yourself (as a good maintainer) whether the trade is worth it. Should we keep the feature for which we have a new and better alternative in Nautilus, a very similar and easily enhanced feature available in the Shell side by side view, and a pile of bugs getting no attention in bugzilla? We decided it was better for the project to remove it. This hasn’t pleased everyone but remember we still have some ways to go to make the experience complete.
Why Compact View removed?
This is a tricky one. A lot of reasons people have been using this view are due to the other two views sucking for various reasons. We want to fix the root problems. We intend to have more effective list views for identifying files by name, more effective grid or icon views for finding files by content, and more effective search for finding anything based on name, textual content, or metadata regardless of where it is. This is consistent with the other core GNOME 3 applications. Working around the default isn’t going to do it.
The role for compact view is unclear. Our research suggests that it is something like: the only view that works for browsing a lot of files at once. This is really hard to reconcile with providing good defaults that just work and having consistency with the file chooser.
The view itself was not without problems and we would rather focus on making icon and list rock. I won’t dwell on the reasons here since they have been discussed at length already.
Read the full McCann’s post
We’ll make a full review of Nautilus in the next days with all these new exciting features, but there is no doubt that new Files rocks!CLOSE Billionaire Paul Allen says his team located the wreckage of the USS Indianapolis in Philippine Sea. The ship has been missing since July 30, 1945.
USS Indianapolis (Photo11: Photo illustration)
"We've located the wreckage of the USS Indianapolis in Philippine Sea at 5500m below the sea."
That tweet from entrepreneur and billionaire Paul Allen around 12:20 p.m. Saturday confirmed what many have been searching for since the ship was sunk on July 30, 1945.
Allen, who is leading a 13-person team on his 250-foot research ship, the R/V Petrel, said the wreckage was found at a depth of more than 18,000 feet.
We've located wreckage of USS Indianapolis in Philippine Sea at 5500m below the sea. '35' on hull 1st confirmation: https://t.co/V29TLj1Ba4pic.twitter.com/y5S7AU6OEl — Paul Allen (@PaulGAllen) August 19, 2017
The heavy cruiser, carrying 1,197 sailors and Marines, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine while sailing back to the Philippines after delivering components for "Little Boy," the atomic bomb that helped end World War II. It took only 12 minutes to sink.
While 900 crewmen made it through the initial sinking, only 316 survived to be rescued when help arrived five days later on Aug. 2. Many had died of exposure or thirst, drowned or were attacked by sharks.
Families of those aboard the ship found out about the deaths of their loved ones just as the rest of the country was celebrating the conclusion of World War II.
The latest break in the search for the wreckage came in July 2016, when the Naval History and Heritage Command Communication and Outreach Division reported that a sailor had confirmed that a tank landing ship, LST-779, had passed the Indianapolis 11 hours before the torpedo struck. That backed up the testimony of Captain Charles McVay III and was confirmed by deck logs.
Important chapter of WWII history concludes--I hope survivors/families gain some closure. Anchor and ship's bell seen here. #USSIndianapolispic.twitter.com/Kk1YrcaeN1 — Paul Allen (@PaulGAllen) August 19, 2017
That finding narrowed the search — to a 600 square miles of open ocean
“To be able to honor the brave men of the USS Indianapolis and their families through the discovery of a ship that played such a significant role in ending World War II is truly humbling,” Allen said in a statement. “As Americans, we all owe a debt of gratitude to the crew for their courage, persistence and sacrifice in the face of horrendous circumstances. While our search for the rest of the wreckage will continue, I hope everyone connected to this historic ship will feel some measure of closure at this discovery so long in coming.”
Closeup view of ship's forward stack, superstructure and hull, from alongside her starboard side amidships, at the Mare Island Navy Yard following her final overhaul, July 12, 1945. Circles on photo mark recent alterations to the ship. Note float for a SC-1 floatplane stowed behind the stack, life rafts and floater nets, and bow of USS Hercules (AK-41) in the left distance. (Photo11: Provided by Bureau of Ships Collection in the U.S. National Archives)
Allen’s team is still surveying the site of the wreckage and plans to conduct a live tour of the wreckage in the next few weeks. The crew is working with the Navy and plans to honor the remaining 22 USS Indianapolis crew members and families of crew members.
"Even in the worst defeats and disasters there is valor and sacrifice that deserves to never be forgotten," said Sam Cox, director of the Naval History and Heritage Command, in a statement. "They can serve as inspiration to current and future Sailors enduring situations of mortal peril. There are also lessons learned, and in the case of the Indianapolis, lessons re-learned, that need to be preserved and passed on, so the same mistakes can be prevented, and lives saved."
In March 2015, an Allen expedition team discovered the remains of the Japanese battleship Musashi, and this past March his team found the Artigliere, a World War II destroyer.
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2wkd3oKA few days ago Jose and Ero presented in ReCon some of the latest ideas they have been working on regarding unpacking. We have put our slides up for your viewing pleasure here:
[slideshare id=4757587&doc=recon2010-100714205302-phpapp01]
Our slides are also available for download here. Beware that they are merely a visual aid to our live presentation. We will try to remember to announce when the ReCon video comes out so you can follow them there.
In addition, Jose will be presenting on the topic in SysCan Taipei on August 20th. That will be another good chance to catch the info fresh and live.
Bochs and Python
Bochs and our custom Python extensions were one of the fundamental tools onto which we built our research.
Ero has been keeping the Python extensions up to date for a few years and they are something we use a lot at zynamics. We have attempted to make them public in a few occasions (an old patch is available in the Bochs mailing list) but those attempts failed to make them known to more users. We are frequently reminded at conferences that people would love to play with them, so this time we are making them available through a zynamics GitHub project. The plan is to keep them in sync with all major releases of Bochs. In the GitHub page you can find basic instructions on how to get them working. The patch to apply to the current public version of Bochs (2.4.5 at this time) can be found here
We will add usage examples to the GitHub wiki as time allows. Also if there are special requests we will try to provide exemples on how to use the extensions for those cases. Download them, play with them and let us know your thoughts.
Tags: bochs, conference, python, slides, tool, unpackingES Football Newsletter Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account
West Ham are preparing a move for Arsenal striker Olivier Giroud as they look to strengthen their attack.
Arsenal are willing to allow Giroud to leave providing they first sign a replacement and West Ham have declared their interest in the 30-year-old, who played for France against England last night (right).
An informal offer from Arsenal of £87million for Monaco’s 18 year-old sensation Kylian Mbappe has been rejected, with Real Madrid apparently ready to bid around £120m.
Arsenal’s preferred alternative option would be Alexandre Lacazette with his club, Lyon, wanting around £60m for the 26 year-old.
West Ham manager Slaven Bilic has prioritised signing attacking players this summer, after his two main strikers, Andy Carroll and Diafra Sakho, were injured for much of last season.
Bilic is keen to add pace to his line-up and although Giroud does not fit that bill he is good in the air and has the strength to hold the ball and bring others into play.
Arsenal would be looking for around £20m for Giroud, who would want £100,000 per week and a long contract.
Carroll is the top earner at West Ham on £100,000 a week so the club would not be breaking their salary cap by signing the striker, who is keen to stay in London.
Arsenal transfer targets for summer 2017 6 show all Arsenal transfer targets for summer 2017 1/6 After signing a new two year contract at Arsenal Arsene Wenger is on the lookout for "top, top quality" signings.
Standard Sport runs down the names on his shortlist. Getty Images 2/6 Thomas Lemar - Monaco AFP/Getty Images 3/6 Kylian Mbappe - Monaco AFP/Getty Images 4/6 Virgil van Dijk - Southampton GLYN KIRK/AFP/Getty Images 5/6 Riyad Mahrez - Leicester Michael Regan/Getty Images 6/6 Ross Barkley - Everton Alex Livesey/Getty Images 1/6 After signing a new two year contract at Arsenal Arsene Wenger is on the lookout for "top, top quality" signings.
Standard Sport runs down the names on his shortlist. Getty Images 2/6 Thomas Lemar - Monaco AFP/Getty Images 3/6 Kylian Mbappe - Monaco AFP/Getty Images 4/6 Virgil van Dijk - Southampton GLYN KIRK/AFP/Getty Images 5/6 Riyad Mahrez - Leicester Michael Regan/Getty Images 6/6 Ross Barkley - Everton Alex Livesey/Getty Images
Giroud was frustrated to start only 11 League matches last season and a move would offer him regular football.
Arsene Wenger is on record as stating he wants him to stay but that would be very difficult were Arsenal to sign a top striker.
West Ham believe the arrival of a proven international - 27 goals in 64 games for France - would be a statement of intent.This is what the closing of a championship window looks like. It's expensive and it's ugly and there's fault everywhere.
The Bulls are a luxury-tax team but not currentlya playoff team. A season that began with management selling a coaching change as the final key to unlocking championship contention is one Pacers victory or Bulls loss away from the Bulls shockingly missing the playoffs for the first time since 2007-08.
That debacle cost coach Scott Skiles his job. But with fans screaming for change, early signs point to only a tweak to coach Fred Hoiberg's staff — sources said assistant coach Randy Brown could move back to a front-office role — and an offseason attempt to make the roster younger and more athletic.
All indications are executive vice president John Paxson and general manager Gar Forman will lead that attempt. Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf long has valued management continuity and praises Paxson in any rare interview. Forman has cultivated a strong relationship with Michael Reinsdorf, the team's president and chief executive officer. Their wives run the Bulls' charity arm.
So many elements contributed to the Bulls' underwhelming season and unlikable team.
Derrick Rose and Jimmy Butler showed only flashes of chemistry as the team's maximum-salaried players. An aging, unathletic team never fully embraced the system of Hoiberg, whose learning curve proved steeper than envisioned. Joakim Noah's originally reduced role and then season-ending shoulder surgery fueled a steep defensive decline and created a major leadership void inside the locker room. Management overvalued the abilities of Nikola Mirotic, Doug McDermott and Tony Snell to become consistent forces.
Photos of Derrick Rose, the Bulls' No. 1 pick in the 2008 draft.
The decline in public accountability from the top can't be overlooked either. That dynamic can filter down through a franchise.
Instead of raw, unfiltered accountability — who can forget Paxson scorching the earth after the Bulls lost his first game as general manager back in October 2003? — there are attempts at spin control.
It's why the planned postmortem with Bulls brass meeting with reporters, something not done in recent seasons other than to explain Tom Thibodeau's dismissal, will be welcomed.
Though all four decision-makers share respect and collaborate on major decisions in a strong working relationship, Forman's voice and vision have prevailed in recent moves.
Hoiberg is viewed as his hire, though it was signed off on unanimously. Forman prevailed in the internal debate over whether to try to finalize a Pau Gasol-to-the-Kings trade deadline deal, though there was sentiment that with Mike Dunleavy just back the team could make a run as well as not loving the return from the Kings. Forman then publicly doubled down on re-signing Gasol, calling him part of the core. That stance has softened with Noah a priority, sources said, and Gasol also will entertain free-agency options.
Photos of the former Bulls big man.
And the unceremonious dumping of veteran stalwart Kirk Hinrich to save $2.5 million on the imminent luxury-tax payment was pitched by Forman, beyond the cost-saving aspect, as giving the Bulls a free look at Justin Holiday, a trade exception and an unprotected second-round pick.
That those assets could become trade chips and Holiday has played well hasn't assuaged some players' puzzlement over Hinrich's departure. Beyond his limited-minutes defensive aptitude, Hinrich possessed a powerful, behind-the-scenes presence of accountability and quietly helped teammates in a well-received manner.
Also, while family situations typically don't factor into the big business that is pro sports, Hinrich took less money to sign with the Bulls under the assumption he'd stay. His family with four young children never left the area, even when the Bulls traded him the first time to Washington in 2010 for cap space to chase LeBron James.
The Bulls have a history of making post-career amends with well-liked players. See last week's hiring of special adviser Horace Grant, whom Jerry Reinsdorf once accused of reneging on a handshake deal, as the latest example.
But Hinrich's trade, which was strongly debated internally, had another ripple effect in an already fragile locker room.
Photos of Fred Hoiberg, the 19th coach in Bulls franchise history.
Hoiberg's hold on that locker room has varied.
The strong gains the first-year coach made with last summer's personal visits with players was offset somewhat in October when a story was concocted about Noah volunteering for his reserve role.
It also didn't help Hoiberg's authority that Brown moved from his front-office role to the bench. Fair or not, several players view the affable and well-liked Brown as Forman's eyes and ears, sources said. Their connection dates to Forman recruiting Brown at New Mexico State in 1989.
Butler's public declaration in December for Hoiberg to "coach harder" underscored a season-long theme — that Hoiberg struggled to hold players accountable. Hoiberg's individual relationships with players is stronger than the perception; he communicates with them regularly and is liked.
But Butler's emboldened state after landing a max contract led to several disruptive moments throughout the season, in film sessions and on the practice floor, sources said. That they continued sometimes unchecked throughout the season didn't bode well for team chemistry, which started to fray in Thibodeau's last season.
In fact, that reason is why there's optimism for Hoiberg's future. Even management now believes this core was held together one season too long, that any coach would've struggled to overcome this tired team's tendency to give in to adversity.From high farm growth to wages for the disadvantaged, even their employment levels, Gujarat comes out on top.
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detect some of the telltale signs of a burgeoning startup culture, including a Women 2.0 chapter and regional office for Startup Weekend.In its ongoing quest to increase goal scoring, the NHL/NHLPA Competition Committee has proposed a rule change to modify defensive zone face-offs so that the defensive zone player must always put his stick down first. This replaces the current format in which the visiting team player puts his stick down first. (Neutral zone face-offs would continue to follow the existing rule.)
It’s worth noting that over the past five seasons, the offensive zone team has only won face-offs at even-strength 48.4% of the time. Maybe the league has noticed and wants to bump that number up to 50% or higher, and thinks that a rise in scoring would follow.
But would this rule change actually cause a significant increase in scoring? I decided to do the math and the result was only a miniscule increase in goals. Here is my methodology:
I looked at every goal scored in the NHL from 2010-11 through 2014-15 and the outcome of the last face-off prior to that goal.
I calculated the league-wide rate at which goals were scored (i.e. goals per face-off) by either team after face-off wins and losses in each of the following situations: (1) even-strength offensive zone, (2) power-play offensive zone/shorthanded defensive zone, (3) shorthanded offensive zone/power-play defensive zone.
During these five seasons the home team won even-strength face-offs 51.6% of the time (or, a 1.6% advantage compared to a coin flip). While there are surely several factors contributing to this home-ice advantage, for the purpose of finding the maximum effect of the proposed rule change, I attributed the full 1.6% to the current rule forcing the visiting player to put his stick down first, and used this as an analog for the proposed rule.
I set up a model of scoring per game based on the number of face-offs per game in each of the above situations and the observed rate of scoring after each face-off, according to whether the offensive zone team won the face-off. I adjusted the offensive zone face-off win percentage to be 1.6% higher in each situation as a result of implementing the proposed rule change, and calculated the resulting change in scoring.
Here is all of this in a spreadsheet if you want to check my numbers or try plugging in some other number besides 1.6%. (Note that it won’t change the result much.)
So here is the change in scoring per game:
FO/game Change in goals per face-off after adjustment Change in goals per game Even-strength Off. zone 29.84 0.000113 0.00337 Power-play Off. zone 2.384 0.000307 0.000731 Shorthanded Off. zone 0.639 -0.000233 -0.000149 Sum 0.00395
Multiply that goals per game sum by the 1,230 games in a full season and we are talking about approximately 4.9 additional goals per year across the entire league. It’s an almost unnoticeable difference, but in a league desperate to increase goal scoring, it may be better than nothing.Ezeoma Obioha, arrested on suspicion of murder for the killing of Carrie Jean Melvin (via Facebook)
Police say the man arrested for the shotgun killing of a woman on Sunset Boulevard was in a financial dispute with his victim.
The LAPD arrested 31-year old Ezeoma Obioha on Friday evening around 7:15 p.m. and booked on suspicion of murder. Obioha is accused of walking up behind Carrie Jean Melvin on the night of July 5 around 10 p.m.—as she and her boyfriend were walking on Sunset Boulevlard and McCadden Place (near Highland Boulevard)—and shooting her in the back of the head with a shotgun. Melvin died at the scene, but her boyfriend was unhurt in the shooting and the shooter drove off without saying a word.
"We have been working hard around the clock on this and we didn't want to draw attention to the leads we developed," Lieutenant John Radke told the L.A. Times. "This was a terrible crime and it is one of those scenes you'll never forget."
The killing was originally thought to be a random act of violence but investigators now believe Melvin was targeted by Obioha due to a financial dispute. According to KFI AM 640, Obioha had hired Melvin to "produce online promotions for a security or clothing business." Just days before the killing, Melvin threatened to take Obioha to small claims court over a check he either bounced or canceled. The check was only for a few hundred dollars.
According to her LinkedIn, Melvin was the head of a social media company. Obioha lists himself as the head of a clothing company called Hoodfellas on his Facebook page, and is also the security guard at a pot dispensary. Police raided both the clothing store and the pot shop:
Then #LAPD raided Obioha's business on Pico and a pot dispensary. pic.twitter.com/EKU0gCNeGJ — Eric Leonard (@LeonardFiles) July 25, 2015
According to the report, Obioha had been named a suspect just days after the murder and was the focus of the investigation about a week after the shooting.The former NRL mentor says he will not be returning to Bradford in 2018.
The two-time Sea Eagles Premiership-player described his tenure in England as one of his toughest after the club was deducted 12 competition points following liquidation before he arrived.
The Bulls failed to fire after the setback and have been relegated to the third-tier competition for next season.
“It was a tough decision not to return to the Bradford Bulls for a second year. Last year was one of the most challenging years that I’ve had as a coach,” Toovey, who will remain in Australia, said.
“The club and the fans made the experience one I will never forget, from the bottom of my heart I would like to thank the club, coaching staff, players, sponsors and fans for their unwavering support throughout the year.
“I’m confident the club will have an excellent season in 2018 and continue to move forward beyond the coming year.”The emergency medicine residency program at Summa Health will lose its accreditation, and the system has been put on probation by the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education (ACGME).
The program's accreditation withdrawal is effective July 1, according to a Feb. 8 internal staff memo from Valerie Gibson, Summa Health's chief operating officer. The probation status for the institution means Summa can't start new residency programs or increase the size of existing programs, and it must notify current residents and applicants it is on probation.
"Needless to say, we are extremely disappointed by the decision, we respectfully disagree with the decision and we will appeal the decision within the next 30 days as allowed by ACGME," the memo stated. "Our program will remain in continued accreditation during the appeal process."
ACGME representatives visited Summa in late January, as expected, during the normal course of business, according to the memo.
Gibson stressed that this affects neither the ACGME accreditation of other residency programs, nor Summa's contract with U.S. Acute Care Solutions, the physician group that has been staffing its EDs since the start of this year. Negotiations with SEA — the group that had for decades staffed Summa's EDs — broke down in the final days of 2016, prompting a new contract with USACS and setting off vocal backlash and turmoil that ultimately culminated in the resignation of CEO Dr. Thomas Malone.
The memo also reiterated, as have others during the fallout, that the contract with USACS is final and will not change.
"The decision to transition to a new emergency medicine services provider was absolutely the right decision to make for our community, but I am sorry for the impact it has had on the organization," the memo stated.
In the memo, Gibson wrote that several factors led to the transition of ED doctors, "and, ultimately, today's decision by ACGME."
She noted that "without question," negotiations should have started sooner, which both Summa and SEA have already indicated.
Gibson then went on to address those negotiation processes, which Summa officials haven't commented on in recently available memos.
"At the same time, I cannot emphasize enough my profound disappointment with the leadership of SEA for its purposeful bad faith negotiations and its repeated attempts to harm our Emergency Medicine Residency Program," the memo stated. "Despite numerous offers by Summa to negotiate beyond December 31 to allow for a sound transition in the best interests of the residency program, they simply walked away."
In the past, SEA has strongly denied Summa's version of what happened in negotiations, citing a lack of trust and a belief that Summa officials weren't "putting the effort forward to get a contract finalized."
Gibson wrote that SEA's actions harmed Summa and the first and second year residents who now must attempt to find a new program July 1. In the memo, Gibson said that Summa will do "everything possible" to help those residents.
"Summa emergency medicine residency loses accreditation, health system put on probation" originally appeared in Crain's Cleveland Business.Kids as young as three are demanding makeovers, pedicures and face masks at "pamper parties" designed to make them feel like little princesses.
The children's birthday party concept is taking off in New Zealand after gaining popularity in Australia, where mobile beauty technicians charge up to $1000 for "pamper packages" which include makeup, hair and nails, foot massages, and a ride in a Hummer limousine.
But a child psychologist warns parents should think about the message they are sending to their daughters by putting the spotlight on beauty so young.
In Wellington, Nicole Cortese and Jess Wislang began The Perfect Pamper in 2013 after seeing a gap in the market. SInce then, they have employed another staff member and regularly hold two parties a weekend - offering packages from "Little Miss Makeover" to "Little Ladies Night In" and "The Grand Pampered Princess."
Their top package - the "Ultimate Diva Party" costs about $100 a girl and includes a foot soak, nourishing foot cream, hand and arm massage, a mini-facial, makeup, hair, and beauty salon staples like magazines, fluffy robes and "bubbles" in the form of pink lemonade.
Their website urges parents to "be the first in your group of friends to start the pamper party trend."
Cortese said demand had been strong. "It takes the hassle out of party planning for the parents, and we really thrive on making the girls feel special. I think when little girls see what their mums do they want to be like them, and sit down in a fluffy robe and be pampered."
The typical age of guests was between six and 13, she said, though they had kids as young as three join in. The makeup application was "really light" and they made sure parents had okayed it first. "Young girls of that age play around with their mum's makeup anyway, and they love having their nails painted. It's just a really nice girly thing for them to do."
Amazing Kids Parties, an Australian company, has added pamper parties to the line-up of kids parties they now offer in Auckland. Co-founder Silvia Hope said they run a few every weekend. "It's really about giving them and the birthday girl a fun time, rather than having really professional makeup done. Just a little bit of lippy is all they need. It's not about making them grow up before their time, if they're at the age when they're interested in that kind of thing they're going to start asking for this kind of party." Disney-themed Frozen parties and cooking parties were still more popular for girls, with science and superhero parties top for boys.
Mum Louse Telfer held a pamper party for her daughter Mikayla's 10-year-old birthday last year. "I did it for my daughter because it was her tenth, it was sort of a milestone and the girls loved it. I think there's a certain limit and I definitely think seven is too young, I don't think they would appreciate it or know what was going on."
Auckland University Senior Lecturer in Psychology Annette Henderson said research had shown children who engaged in adult behaviours could struggle to adjust when they were older. "Children might look like little adults, but they don't understand the same things. The important thing here is the message the parent is giving to the child - is it just 'this is something fun to do', or is it 'this is what you need to do to look pretty.' That is the kind of message parents need to be cautious about "
Kids cared about family and friends far more than money, so the pressure to throw the "perfect" party was created entirely by the parents, she said.Lena Dunham photographed at the Village at the Lift Presented by McDonald's McCafe during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 25, 2015 in Park City, Utah.
“The 'Famous' video is one of the more disturbing 'artistic' efforts in recent memory."
Girls star and creator Lena Dunham took to Facebook to discuss her “dis-ease” with rapper Kanye West’s newly released video for the Life of Pablo single “Famous” and its unwitting stars.
“Now I have to see the prone, unconscious, waxy bodies of famous women, twisted like they've been drugged and chucked aside at a rager?” Dunham wrote. “It gives me such a sickening sense of dis-ease.”
Kanye West's 'Famous' Video to Make TV Debut on E!
The “Famous” video -- which premiered at a viewing event at the L.A. Forum in Inglewood, Calfornia, on Friday -- features the naked images of a handful of celebrities, including Rihanna, Chris Brown, Bill Cosby, Anna Wintour and Dunham’s friend Taylor Swift.
“Seeing a woman I love like Taylor Swift (f--- that one hurt to look at, I couldn't look), a woman I admire like Rihanna or Anna, reduced to a pair of waxy breasts made by some special effects guy in the Valley, it makes me feel sad and unsafe and worried for the teenage girls who watch this and may not understand that grainy roving camera as the stuff of snuff films,” Dunham posted.
Dunham sees the visuals for the “Famous” video as insensitive given the news around recent sexual assaults, including the case of Stanford swimmer Brock Turner and the uncovering of Bill Cosby’s alleged crimes against women throughout his career. West’s nude depictions of the celebrities in one bed, side-by-side, was especially unsettling for Dunham.
“Kanye: you're cool. Make a statement on fame and privacy and the Illuminati or whatever is on your mind!" she wrote. "But I can't watch it, don't want to watch it, if it feels informed and inspired by the aspects of our culture that make women feel unsafe even in their own beds, in their own bodies.”Recap: Irwin and Fantine got married. Cid aged up into a teenager and gained the Natural Cook trait. Fantine discovered she was pregnant.
The meals in the Thrones household have always been easy-to-access snacks. Cid, Fantine, and Irwin consumed a strict diet of cereal, ice cream, and the occasional peanut butter and jelly sandwich for no reason other than that no one knew how to cook.
Cid decided enough was enough and that it was about time for the Thrones’s to have warm, hearty meals to put into their bellies. He popped open the fridge and grabbed some basic ingredients that had never been touched before. Staring down at them, he realized he could attempt to make some mac and cheese.
Cheese, milk, pasta, salt… how hard could this be? he thought to himself.
Slicing up the cheese and pasta seemed pretty simple, but he wasn’t really positive on how much milk to add. He decided to go with what his gut told him and just began to wing it.
The aroma of boiling pasta swept through the house and Cid’s mouth started watering.
Irwin and Fantine were bound to freak out when they tasted Cid’s mac and cheese masterpiece!
Before Cid even set the bowl on the table, he heard Fantine screaming from the living area. He sprinted over to where she was standing, shattering the bowl of mac and cheese in the process, and saw her clutching her stomach.
“Fantine! What’s wrong?” he cried.
She doubled over and pointed to the door. “It’s time, get your father!”
Cid frantically pounded on the bathroom door and could hear Irwin flushing the toilet. “Dad, Dad! Fantine’s in labor!” he announced. Irwin came running out into the room, sweat already beginning to fall from his brow. Cid led him to where Fantine was and Irwin gulped. This was it!
Never in a million years would Irwin have guessed Fantine was going to give birth to twins.
Irwin was absolutely beside himself. Twins. He had two twin boys coming home with him. Of course, he was nervous about being a father all over again, but at least this time he had Fantine to co-parent. There was comfort in knowing that, and Irwin settled down a bit during the trip.
They named the firstborn Russel. He was born with the traits of a Slob and also happened to be a Virtuoso. On the way out of the hospital, Russel would coo along with the songs playing on the elevators and even looked like he was trying to bob his head to the beat.
The second twin, born only minutes after Russel, was named Feign. The temperature outside was incredibly cold, but while Russel shivered in his tiny blanket, Feign closed his eyes and smiled. It was apparent he Loved the Cold. As soon as the new family got into the taxi, however, Feign crinkled up his nose and started crying. He had been born with a Grumpy trait as well.
Naturally, the household would need a little bit of a revamp before the twins could settle themselves in, so Irwin called his eldest and instructed him to call an architect or two to give them a new home. While Irwin and Fantine were at the hospital, Cid made the arrangements by hiring the fastest builders in the city. He helped supervise the workers when it came to demolishing their current residence and building a better one, as he felt he would be able to provide everyone with a stylish abode.
The kitchen was all Cid’s design. He knew he would be the only one cooking in there, so it was tailored completely to Cid’s own liking.
The master bedroom where Irwin and Fantine would reside contained a pet bed for Waffles in the corner next to the bedside table.
So as not to arouse suspicion to the builders, Cid went ahead and asked for his room to be furnished with a bed. He knew he didn’t need to sleep as humans did, but it would prove later to be a comfy spot to relax on. The chemistry set was Cid’s little gift to himself. He was excited he was learning how to cook, so he wanted to try to learn another skill.
Since it was too early for Cid to have known the twins’ favorite colors were Lime (Russel) and Spice Brown (Feign), he chose to decorate the nursery a neutral yellow.
The bathroom seemed a little plain, but he knew Fantine’s frugalness wouldn’t allow Cid to go on a spending spree for random clutter, so he filled it with only the essentials.
Last but not least, the living area became an actual living room that was adorned with portraits of Irwin and Waffles.
Fantine praised Cid for a job well done supervising the building process and happily led Irwin to the nursery. She felt so attached to Russel and Feign so quickly that she had a difficult time letting them out of her embrace.
Whenever she heard the slightest whimper coming from the nursery, Fantine would drop whatever she was doing and run. Suddenly, becoming a Visionary didn’t seem important anymore. She was now a mother to two gorgeous baby boys.
Well, she had become a step-mother when she married Irwin, but as much as she loved Cid, she knew she would never feel the exact unconditional love towards him that she now harbored for her own biological sons.
Cid loved his younger siblings as soon as he saw them. He helped care for them on nights when Fantine and Irwin were too exhausted to feed or change them.
When he wasn’t on his self-appointed babysitting duty, Cid was learning how to use his chemistry set.
Fantine’s birthday snuck up on her, as she spent so much time with her sons she actually lost track of the days. She aged up into an adult and immediately had an odd sense of regret wash all over her.
She stared at herself in the mirror and a bunch of wrinkles came into focus. She had crow’s feet around her eyes. Her cheeks looked like they were beginning to droop a little. She brought her hand to her face and traced the outlines, her heart pounding a little faster each time she discovered a new one.
Her camera sat on the dresser, having gathered enough dust at this point to make an actual bunny from it. When was the last time she had touched it? She really didn’t even get much opportunity to use it anyway — as soon as Irwin bought it for her and she registered herself as a self-employed photographer, she threw up in a toilet. Her pregnancy got in the way of her actually learning how to professionally use it.
How long ago was that? Weeks? Months? Years…?
Her lifelong dream was beginning to look completely out of reach. Fantine had endured a rough childhood thanks to constant bullying, and the only thing that kept her going forward growing up was the idea that one day, she would be the world’s greatest Visionary. Everyone who had ever doubted her would see her accomplishments and envy her. They would take a step back and apologize for all of the hurt they had caused her.
This, she had kept a secret from Irwin. This, she had dubbed a fate less important than motherhood the second she held her sons.
Her pregnancy got in the way of her dream. Her Workaholic side suddenly began to ache for the chance to go out and make money off of doing something she loved. Thoughts flooded her brain. Her two boys, her beautiful, happy little boys had prevented her from moving forward. They had sucked her in with their innocent glances and cheerful laughter and forced her to forget what life was all about. It was all their fault. They did this to her. They were the reason she missed years of her young adult life.
As she soaked all of this in, she flung open the drawers of her dresser and frantically searched through her wardrobe. She needed to wear something that would make her feel like she hadn’t just wasted the last few years of her life on screaming infants. She grabbed a shirt and tore it apart so it was more revealing. A white jean skirt from when she was a teenager was tucked away underneath business clothes. There were knee-high boots, gloves, and jewelry that made a statement in the bottom drawer. Fantine took all of these things out of the dresser and threw them on.
There. Much better. Surely, this new look of hers would help her take back these last few years.
Russel and Feign aged up into toddlers, so Irwin went out and bought some toys for them to play with. Russel’s hair grew in white like his father’s whereas Feign’s turned a dark black color.
Russel was drawn to the little toy xylophone Irwin had bought. He spent most of the time out of his crib and on that xylophone, creating musical patterns and trying to sing along to it. Feign wasn’t crazy about that particular toy — he enjoyed playing with blocks. He would build and stack them into small structures and whenever his Grumpy trait kicked in, he would knock the blocks down. It was almost therapeutic for him, and he would squeal with laughter every time his buildings fell.
The first thing adult-Fantine wanted to do was spend as much time as possible woo-hooing her husband into submission. She walked into the bathroom while he was showering and tapped on the glass.
Irwin was startled. “Fantine! I’m, uh…”
“Shut up and move over, I’m coming in.” She stripped her clothes off and waltzed into the shower, grabbing Irwin’s face in her hands and kissing him hard. He settled down from his initial shock and gave in to her frisky attitude.
While Irwin went to bed very satisfied that night, Fantine became even more anxious than she was before. One impromptu night in the shower wasn’t enough.
The next day, the very moment Irwin’s lunch break hit, Fantine arrived at the gypsy wagon and pulled him into an embrace. “Here?” Irwin whispered, his adrenaline starting up.
Fantine nodded. She asked him to lead her into the wagon to find a place where they could be alone.
The risk of getting caught made this particular woo-hoo the best they had ever had.
Fantine was just flat-out ignoring her children at this point. It was as if the bond she felt the moment she laid eyes on them had completely vanished from her psyche. The only thing that was important now was making sure she felt young again — that she felt she had more time to complete her one and only wish.
The woo-hoo wasn’t working. Sure, it was fun to surprise Irwin and all, but it wasn’t making her feel young and sexy, which in turn did not make her feel like she had more time.
Perhaps some new lingerie would do the trick?
AdvertisementsWhen you look at a minimalist wallet, ask yourself:
Is this thing comfortable enough for everyday carry?
Are the corners sharp?
Is it comfortable to sit on?
Do I really want to pull that thing in and out of my pocket?
I'm a big fan of the minimalist style wallet. The problem I was finding was that most have hard edges, sharp corners and are uncomfortable when I sit down in my car or at my desk. I've had a few money clips put holes in my pockets and I felt the space could use some extra creativity. So I looked for a better solution.
Billetus Design Criteria:
Super-strong
Finest Materials: Carbon fiber, titanium and aircraft grade aluminum
Lightweight
RFID blocking
Super Slim: As thin or thinner than an iPhone 4S (not empty, full with cash and cards)
Easy access in and out of your pocket
Enclosed Money Clip - Standard money clips have sharp corners that put holes in your pocket
Above else, comfortable to carry!
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Billetus Minimus shown with optional Cardus Openus
>>>>>> Here's how Billetus Maximus works:
#1 Pressing the slot on the bottom of the wallet creates an opening on the front of the wallet so you can insert cards. #2 Eject cards using this same slot. #3 The clip on the top of the wallet keeps pressure on the entire assembly and functions as a money clip.
>>>>>> Here's how Billetus Minimus works:
#1 Simple uni-body design with an elastic strap to hold cards and cash tight. #2 Pressing on the bottom strap applies pressure on the bottom card through a hole on the bottom of the wallet. This opens the front of the wallet, allowing you to insert cash and cards.
Try a rigid wallet. Your business cards will thank you!
Both wallets are available in 5 colors: black, silver, red, blue and Kickstarter green.
To do this I created custom panels of carbon fiber. Using 2 x 2 twill weave on the outer layers and uni-directional fibers oriented at 0° on the inner layers. These were layered to achieve a thickness of 1.43mm (.0565 inches) and placed in a heat press to bake for an hour. The result? 50" x 100" sheets of super high strength carbon fiber goodness.
Not all carbon fiber is created equal. The above process creates panels of carbon fiber that are 3X stronger than standard twill weave carbon fiber which is then CNC machined into the bottle openers you see below. To make it even lighter, add grip and just plain look cooler, we machined out additional inner material.
Cardus Openus - World's thinnest, lightest (and coolest) carbon fiber bottle opener
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Just finished sanding. Next step, clear coat
Lots of product testing. The bottom ridge on the opener was updated a dozen times.
Billetus frame prototyping shown here performed at Red Wolf CNC
We did an initial run of 25 pieces to establish cycle times
Machining the plates. Prototyping here done by Steve Nusco at Nusco Machine in Poway CA
Checking molds with machine plates
Milling out the carbon fiber at Nusco Machine
Initial Mold Testing - Holding 50 PSI!
Internal Frame Assembly with Plate
First print samples of the carbon fiber bottle openers!
Rhinocerous 3D Drawing (link)
Rhino Drawing (link)Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Nov. 28, 2015, 5:59 AM GMT / Updated Nov. 28, 2015, 5:59 AM GMT By Associated Press
At least three people have died in fast-moving floodwaters in Texas as freezing rain and flooding pummeled the state and other parts of the central U.S. on Friday, with forecasters warning that the chilling weather would worsen over the holiday weekend.
Forecasters issued flash-flood watches and warnings from northern Texas up to St. Louis, with up to 4 inches of rain reported in some places as the storm slowly moved to the northeast. Freezing rain and strong winds have been blamed for several fatal accidents in Kansas and Texas since Thursday.
"There's a pretty substantial shield of rain extending from parts of Texas across a lot of Oklahoma and into the mid-Mississippi Valley," said John Hart, a meteorologist with the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.
In North Texas, where more than 4 inches of rain fell overnight in the Dallas-Fort Worth area — pushing the annual rainfall total into the record books — three people died in separate accidents after being washed away in rapid floodwaters. At least one other person remained missing Friday night.
Firefighters in Garland, a Dallas suburb, found the body of a 29-year-old man inside a submerged Hyundai Elantra after the car was swept from a bridge. The body of a 33-year-old woman was found downstream from her vehicle just west of Fort Worth after it was washed off the road in waters flowing 10 to 12 feet above the banks of Rock Creek, Johnson County Sheriff's Office spokesman Tim Jones said.
Sheriff's deputies also responded to a high-water rescue early Friday after three people were swept into the water overnight. Two people were rescued, but the third person's body was later recovered near Mansfield, about 18 miles southeast of Fort Worth, sheriff's spokesman Tim Jones said.
Conditions were still too dangerous Friday night to search for a woman whose car was swept off a bridge hours earlier along Deer Creek, on the southern fringe of the city, Fort Worth Fire Department spokesman Kyle Coay said. A local sheriff's deputy was swept away trying to rescue the 70-year-old woman, but a dive team later found and rescued the deputy, who was clinging to a tree.
A sheriff's spokeswoman said it wasn't clear what role the wet roads had on a collision Friday afternoon on a U.S. highway in South Dallas in which two children were killed. They were ejected from the car carrying five family members after an SUV traveling 100 mph struck the vehicle. The driver of the SUV was held on a vehicular manslaughter charge.
A total 55.23 inches of rain has been recorded at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport this year, topping the annual rainfall record of 53.54 inches set in 1991. More rain if forecast through Sunday.
In the Texas Panhandle, ice and snow covered dozens of major roads, bridges and overpasses. Winds whipping around snow also kept visibility low in some places, and about 100 crashes had been reported by midafternoon, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety office in Amarillo.
No highways in the Texas Panhandle and South Plains have been closed despite the icy conditions, but officials have been discouraging travel. Still, about 100 crashes had been reported as of Friday evening, said Trooper Cindy Barkley of the Texas Department of Public Safety office in Amarillo.
Extra troopers have been mobilized to patrol the glazed highways, including heavily traveled Interstate 40 where three people died Thursday when their van skidded across a median and under the trailer of a tractor-trailer. State troopers are trained to drive slower in icy conditions, "and I probably drive slower than all of them," Barkley said. "But we see people passing us all the time. It's so frustrating."
In Oklahoma, road crews have been applying salt and sand in the Panhandle and northwestern part of the state since Thursday amid an ice storm warning that was in effect until noon Saturday. Rain in the southeast closed some highways because of flooding.
"We definitely understand that people travel to see family and friends (for Thanksgiving), and have to travel back home. If people have to travel in these affected areas, definitely plan plenty of extra travel time and check conditions before they head out," Oklahoma Department of Transportation spokesman Cody Boyd said Friday evening.
He said motorists need to take "especially extra, extra caution when driving after dark in conditions like this."
The weather service also issued flood warnings throughout Arkansas, saying much of central and western Arkansas could see 5 to 7 inches of rain through Sunday, while the Ouachita Mountain region could get more than 8 inches.
The weather service issued a winter storm warning for sections of central and southern Kansas through early Saturday and said up to a quarter inch of sleet and ice could hit the state by Friday night.In what most sane people would consider non-controversial news, the White House announced today that first lady Michelle Obama will be leading the U.S. delegation at the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. Conservative bloggers, whose coverage of the first lady never strays from the simple equation "Michelle Obama + anything = bad," have already gotten to work on embarrassing themselves over the story.
At his Gateway Pundit blog, Jim Hoft complains that the Obamas are "hijacking the Olympics." At Weasel Zippers, "ZIP" mocks Michelle Obama as the "Underexposed First Lady" and presents this latest news as evidence of her supposed narcissism, declaring, "All Mooch, all the time."
Their attacks might (barely) rise to the level of "vaguely coherent" if it were unprecedented for the first lady to lead the U.S. delegation at the Olympics, but, as the AP notes, it's "become somewhat of a tradition for first ladies to lead the U.S. delegation." Laura Bush led the U.S. delegation at the 2004 Olympics and Hillary Clinton led the U.S. delegation at the 1994 games.
Had Michelle Obama not led the delegation, it would not be hard to imagine these same bloggers attacking her for breaking an honored patriotic tradition because of Alinsky tactics and socialism and Bill Ayers.
In his post about this, Hoft writes of the Obamas, "They're everywhere." I swear, sometimes it's like they think they're the president and first lady of the United States.Following the 2011-2012 AHL season, Hockey’s Future provided this talent analysis for Brendan Smith,
Smith, who is regarded as a high-end offensive defenseman, is a silky smooth skater who moves effortlessly. He also has very good vision and soft hands, which complement his overall mobility very well.
Hockey’s Future proceeded to grade him as an 8.0 prospect with a level “B” probability of success. The 8.0 translates to a No.2 defenseman and the “B” rating means that Smith should reach his potential but could drop one rating to 7.0, which is a No. 3-4 defenseman. Coming out of Wisconsin you could easily see why Smith would garner such praise. Smith’s junior season saw him tally 15 goals and 52 points in 42 games, finishing as a finalist for the Hobey Baker Award, which is given to the top NCAA player.
Fast forward to present day and we see that Smith has struggled to live up to the hype. He’s 26 years old with 180 NHL games under his belt and he has just 10 goals and 45 points in those games. The more concerning part is that in Smith’s first 48 games, he recorded one goal and 15 points, or an average of 1.06 points/60 minutes. In his last 132 games, Smith has scored nine goals and 30 points, or an average of 0.75 points/60 minutes. At the end of this season, Smith will become a restricted free agent With the improved play of Kyle Quincey, and the emergence of Danny DeKeyser, Xavier Ouellet, and Alexey Marchenko, is it time for the Red Wings to part ways with Brendan Smith?
Smith’s Misleading Numbers
When I first brought up the idea of the Wings dealing Smith’s rights in the offseason, a commenter on Twitter brought up Smith’s Usage Adjusted Corsi Against/60, and showed how his mark is 6th best in the entire NHL over the last two seasons. Here is his full graph courtesy of Own The Puck and Domenic Galamini.
The numbers that have “UA” in front of it mean that those statistics have been adjusted for zone starts, quality of teammates, and quality of competition. Essentially, it’s how well does a player drive possession within his team’s overall style of play. You’ll see that his Usage-Adjusted Corsi Against/60 and Usage Adjusted Corsi% are both of a top pairing defenseman. He appears to excel at shot suppression. However, how much of his “shot suppression skills” are Smith’s abilities as opposed to Mike Babcock’s system?
Of all NHL defenseman who have played at least 100 minutes this season, Detroit has the #1, #3, #4, #6, #7, and #11 players when ranked by 5v5 shot attempts against. Take a look at Marek Zidlicky. His |
the lamppost bumpers were removed from Brick Lane after only 24 hours, the debate over such "nanny government" maneuvers and the rampant dangers of walking while texting rages on. It's a debate that New Yorkers joined last year when State Senator Carl Kruger of Brooklyn introduced a bill in Albany to combat "iPod oblivion." His bill, which was prompted by the death of two constituents who were killed crossing the street while listening to their iPods, sought to ban pedestrians from using earphones in crosswalks in New York's large urban areas. The bill languished in committee last year, but the Senator has reintroduced it in 2008.
Intuitively, the perils of texting while walking make sense. But George Branyan, pedestrian coordinator for the District of Columbia Department of Transportation, says that in most pedestrian accidents, neither text messaging nor iPod oblivion are major factors. "I am not seeing it in the crash data," Branyan says.
Most pedestrian accidents, according to Branyan, happen because people jaywalk or drivers ignore existing traffic laws which require, for example, yielding to pedestrians in the crosswalk, heeding the speed limit and stopping at red lights. A pedestrian dies every 110 minutes in the United States, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, and there has been an increase in the last few years in pedestrian deaths in Washington and other urban areas across the country, prompting governments in the D.C. metro area to launch a new advertising campaign aimed at increasing pedestrian safety. It is both "edgy and blunt," Branyan says of the radio spots and posters, which depict a violent pedestrian-car collision. The most recent pedestrian fatality in Washington was typical, Branyan says: an elderly woman who was crossing the street with the right of way was hit last week by a driver turning right on a green light, knocking her almost 50 feet.
When the Department of Transportation and the D.C. police recently conducted a two-month street-safety campaign, undercover cops at crossings and pull-over police units issued 6,000 tickets two-thirds to drivers and one-third to pedestrians for jaywalking, Branyan said. Though Washington police, along with other law enforcement agencies, agree that the increase in text messaging endangers both drivers and pedestrians (many states have outlawed text messaging while driving, and Maryland and Virginia are considering banning cyclists from text messaging on the go), Branyan thinks that creating new laws to ban texting, particularly in urban areas where police already face many law-enforcement challenges, is less useful than enforcing laws that are already on the books.
Traffic safety engineers are developing new technologies to alert drivers to areas where pedestrian traffic is heavy at certain times of the day. St. Petersburg, Fla., for example, has installed motion detectors at some crossings where there are no traffic signals; when a pedestrian approaches, a squawkbox urges him or her to push a button before crossing, triggering high-intensity flashing lights that drivers can see some distance from the intersection. City officials credit the system with boosting driver compliance with crosswalk laws from 8% to 84%. Washington plans to install similar bilingual devices at some of its high-risk intersections. In Boulder, Colo., the city has placed audible warning devices at busy crosswalks when a pedestrian pushes the crosswalk button, lights flash and a "Use caution when crossing" message is played to remind the pedestrian to be careful.
Some communities, however, have opted for much lower-tech solutions. In County Mayo, Ireland, where rising pedestrian accidents have caused concern, elementary-school children persuaded the Irish Road Safety Authority last week to revive a popular 1970s ditty called the "Safe Cross Code," which exhorts six easy steps (including "look for a safe place" and "don't hurry") for safe street crossing. But even the classics can sometimes afford a little modernization: the Irish musician Brendan Grace has agreed to re-record the old-time jingle as a cell-phone ringtone, which can now be downloaded for a fee that goes toward supporting national traffic-safety programs.Edward Norton's Obama Documentary Gets A Hollywood Ending
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Long before President-elect Barack Obama had even made up his mind to run for the highest office in the land, Edward Norton and his Class 5 Films production company were already documenting the Senator’s life. The 39-year-old actor said that he became inspired by Obama’s 2004 speech at the National Democratic Convention and felt inspired to capture someone from his generation — and not his parent’s — inspiring so many and rising in leadership.
“At the time, he was the new senator from Illinois,” Norton told Variety earlier this year. “None of us had voted for him or contributed to his campaigns. None of us was saying, ‘I want to back this guy for president.’ It was more this generational experience, of seeing someone we felt represented us in a very unique and fresh way, and the desire to explore what would happen to the first person our age who staked a claim to national leadership.”
Since 2006 — starting with Obama’s trip to Africa — Norton and his team have had the cameras rolling every step of the way. The whole project was kept fairly secret — since neither the campaign nor Norton wanted it to fuel any criticism of Obama’s ‘celebrity’. Last month, Norton spoke briefly about the project to the Vancouver Sun saying, “We’re making a historical record, not something to play a role in the election. So we have an agreement with [the campaign] that we won’t talk about this, or publicize it until the election is over. I can’t talk about access [but] it’s a fascinating thing to document.”
What an amazing hunch to run with documenting Obama — from before he declared his candidacy to last night’s acceptance of the Presidency! Such a historical record of those behind-the-scenes events is certainly priceless.
Of course, you can bet this footage to carry some kind of price. Back in August, it was reported that HBO was highly interested in snagging the rights to the footage. Their initial plans were to air the series within the first ‘100 days of the Obama Presidency’; provided he win. Mission accomplished.
So — stay tuned. We may have witnessed history last night, but we’ll also be privy to the behind-the-scenes two years of effort and drama it took to get there. Thanks to Edward Norton for having the foresight to document the ride.CLOSE The body was found in the same Tampa, Florida, neighborhood as three other bodies in October. USA TODAY
An aerial view shows several Tampa police cars in the Seminole Heights neighborhood of Tampa on Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2017, after a body was found. (Photo11: WTSP-TV, Tampa-St. Petersburg)
TAMPA — Tampa police are connecting the Tuesday morning shooting death of a man in the Seminole Heights neighborhood to three earlier October deaths.
Tampa police found a man, whom police identified as Ronald Felton, 60, dead before 5 a.m. Tuesday. Tampa Police Chief Brian Dugan said it's believed Felton was crossing the street to meet with someone when a suspect came up from behind and shot him.
Information on the suspect was limited: a thin black male, dressed in all black and wearing a black baseball cap.
More: 3 shooting deaths in two weeks in Tampa neighborhood fuel fears of a serial killer
Spokesman Steve Hegarty said detectives can't immediately say whether Felton's shooting is related to last month's 10-day spree where three people were slain, but officers are treating it like it is.
"I believe this person lives in this neighborhood and we need everyone's cooperation," said Dugan.
"We need everyone to pay attention to what's going on in this neighborhood.... I can only imagine how they are on edge right now, having a fourth murder."
The first responding sergeant got to the scene in "about a minute," Hegarty said.
Residents within the police perimeter were asked to stay in their homes and to keep their children home from school until an "all clear" is given.
"We want to talk with as many people as we can, we don't think whoever did this has gone very far at this point," Hegarty said.
More: 3 killings in Florida neighborhood connected, police say
The October killings spanned a 10-day period, beginning Oct. 9. The three victims were fatally shot within days of each other, all within a few city blocks. All were alone and had gotten off a bus when they were gunned downed at night for no apparent reason. None were robbed.
Police asked residents to review any surveillance cameras they might have and share it with investigators.
"If you own a gun and it's in your home, I want you to go to your home right now... and find out if your gun is still there," Dugan said. "If it's not, we need you to call us."
Community outreach, patrols after October murders
The Seminole Heights neighborhood has seen an increased police activity since the Oct. 9 shooting death of Benjamin Edward Mitchell, 22. He was killed at a bus stop.
On Oct. 13, the body of Monica Caridad Hoffa, 32, was found in a vacant lot.
A third victim, Anthony Naiboa, 20, was killed on Oct. 19. Tampa police said he took the wrong bus home when he was shot to death.
Tampa police and elected leaders hit the sidewalks to show their commitment to the neighborhood not long after the first murder. To help quell families' fears during Halloween, Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn and Dugan, who was the interim police chief at the time, walked with children during trick-or-treating.
A $41,000 reward is available for anyone with information leading to the arrest and conviction of a suspect in the October killings.
Seminole Heights is a working-class neighborhood northeast of downtown Tampa that's slowly becoming gentrified. Run-down homes sit next to renovated, historic bungalows, and trendy restaurants have sprung up near auto body shops.
Residents and business owners have said there are car burglaries and fights between kids, but nothing like this.
Contributing: Eric Glasser, WTSP-TV, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla.; The Associated Press. Follow Andrew Krietz and Mark Bergin on Twitter: @akrietz and @mdbergin
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2idN4X5California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein made an impassioned call for gun control during a Capitol Hill hearing Thursday, recalling putting her fingers into bullet wounds on the body of slain gay activist Harvey Milk. But the gun that did the killing — a.38 special — doesn’t appear on the list of firearms she wants the federal government to ban. And Feinstein carried the same model revolver in her purse for nearly four years after the attack.
“When you come from where I’ve come from and what you’ve seen, when you found a dead body and put your finger in bullet holes, you really realize the impact of weapons,” the California Democrat told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Thursday, after a pointed exchange with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz about the Second Amendment. (RELATED VIDEO: Ann Coulter blasts Feinstein for exchange with Cruz)
Feinstein was referring to Milk’s death in 1978. Then president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, she came upon his dead body after fellow San Francisco pol Dan White killed him and Mayor George Moscone with a.38 special — the same model gun Feinstein herself owned.
“I was the one that found Supervisor Milk’s body, and I was the one to put a finger in a bullet hole, trying to get a pulse,” Feinstein, who served with Milk on the Board of Supervisors and succeeded Moscone as mayor, told reporters in January 2013. “Once you have been through one of these episodes, once you see what the crime scene is like, it isn’t like the movies — it changes your view of weapons.”
Feinstein mentioned the shooting in 2008 during an emotional on-camera interview with the San Francicso Chronicle.
“I remember it, actually, as if it was yesterday,” she said then. “And it was one of the hardest moments, if not the hardest moment, of my life. It was a devastating moment. For San Francisco, it was a day of infamy.”
Despite her emotional reaction to Milk’s murder — press reports in 1978 said Feinstein was so shaken she needed police support — she did not turn in her own gun until four years later.
William Strawn, a spokesman for Feinstein when she was mayor, told The Washington Post in 1982 that she planned to hand over her Smith & Wesson.38 caliber Chief’s Special to police. Strawn said she had purchased the gun while serving as a city-county supervisor in the 1970s, after a local terrorist group shot out some windows of her home.
Feinstein eventually gave up her gun in July 1982, more than four years after the assassinations of Milk and Moscone.
Milk’s shooting “crystallized the issue for me,” Feinstein told Newsweek four months before she parted with her firearm.
“Even Feinstein concedes that patchwork gun-control legislation is ‘not a perfect vehicle,’ Newsweek reported. “What’s needed, she says, is a federal ban.”
Feinstein pushed a city-wide ban on handguns that went into effect in June 1982. “All we’re asking is for an opportunity to try it,” she said at the time. “Nothing will be lost, and it’s bound to save lives.”
But many liberals argued against that ban, including San Francisco Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver, who argued that it made women and small merchants vulnerable to assault. “Many of us, including myself,” Silver told Newsweek, “believe that the only defense we have is that little stash of metal.”
Silver and the other supervisors challenged the ban in court and won.
“The whole idea is to reduce the availability of handguns and try to reduce the pool of handguns that is created through burglaries,” Strawn, Feinstein’s spokesman, explained.
The 1982 law, which passed by a 6-to-5 vote of the board of supervisors, exempted gun stores, security guards, gun clubs, gun collectors and other citizens who could demonstrate a need to own a gun.
Residents had 90 days to dispose of their pistols. After that, ownership became be a misdemeanor, with a maximum penalty of 30 days in jail and a $500 fine.
Follow Charles on TwitterI’ve never been fully committed to the notion that we’re going to have a “double dip” — that the economy will slide back into recession. But it has been clear for a while that it’s a serious possibility, for two reasons. First, a large part of the growth we’ve had has been driven by the stimulus — but the stimulus has already had its maximum impact on the growth of GDP, will hit its maximum impact on the level of GDP in the middle of next year, and then will begin to fade out. Second, the rise in manufacturing production is to a large extent an inventory bounce — and this, too, will fade out in the quarters ahead.
Two stories this morning highlight the risks. The WSJ has a report on highway construction titled Job Cuts Loom as Stimulus Fades:
Highway-construction companies around the country, having completed the mostly small projects paid for by the federal economic-stimulus package, are starting to see their business run aground, an ominous sign for the nation’s weak employment picture.
Meanwhile, the ISM for manufacturing suggests that industrial growth is already slowing down.
I’d be more sanguine about all of this if there were any indications that private, final demand is taking off — consumers, business investment, whatever. But I haven’t seen anything suggesting that sort of thing.
The chances of a relapse into recession seem to be rising.Well, he gets a gold star for effort, at least.
A Connecticut judge has ordered a Trump supporter to stay away from a West Hartford elementary school after police say he vandalized the playground with anti-Trump messages. Steven Marks, 32, allegedly told police he wanted the graffiti to look like it was made by liberals, per the Hartford Courant.
WEST HARTFORD POLICE Steven Marks in a booking photo.
On June 15, Marks went to the playground at Morley Elementary School to play fetch with his dog. He spotted a green Sharpie on the ground, and allegedly used it to scribble messages like “Kill Trump,” “Left is best,” “Bernie Sanders 2020” and “Death to Trump” on a objects that included a bench, a “Little Free Library” book shelter and on the playground’s welcome sign.
Mark said he was motivated by ”‘anger towards liberals and they are breaking major laws everyday and being disrespectful towards our government,’” according to the warrant for his arrest, obtained by the Courant.
The incident was caught on surveillance camera and released to the media. When Marks saw it on the news, he called detectives and turned himself in, police told BuzzFeed News.
“He admitted to doing the criminal act and said he regretted it,” Lt. Rocheleau told Buzzfeed. “He said the reason he did do it was to show support towards Trump by having the other side bash him, to show how the other side is basically crazy enough to go and write stuff on a school playground.”
Marks was charged with two misdemeanors, second-degree breach of peace and third-degree criminal mischief.
On Wednesday a judge ordered him to stay away from the school and the case was delayed until August 2.The president’s 55 percent approval rating also matches the highest levels he has hit since his first year in the White House. | Getty Obama's approval rating reaches new high
President Barack Obama’s job approval rating hit 55 percent in a new poll released Thursday, the highest that number has been at any point during his second term in office.
The CNN/ORC poll released Thursday marks the seventh consecutive month that Obama’s job approval numbers have been above 50 percent. His job approval number is up 4 percentage points over the previous CNN/ORC poll and is up 11 points relative to a similar CNN/ORC poll conducted in mid-September, 2015. In addition to being the high-water mark for his second term, the president’s 55 percent approval rating also matches the highest levels he has hit since his first year in the White House.
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The president’s rising job approval rating is thanks mostly to increasingly warm feelings towards him from Democrats in the past year, with whom his approval rating is up 12 points to 89 percent, and independents, whose approval of the president climbed 14 points to 56 percent. Over that same year-long span, the number of Republican respondents who said they approved of Obama’s job performance climbed just 2 points to 13 percent.
Obama’s approval rating has also improved with white voters in the past year, climbing from 32 percent last fall to 47 percent in the most recent poll. He’s up 8 points with Hispanic voters, to 68 percent, over that same stretch, while his 86 percent approval rating with African-American voters has stayed roughly the same.
The CNN/ORC poll was conducted from Sept. 28 to Oct. 2, reaching 1,501 adults from around the country via telephone. The poll’s margin of error was plus-or-minus 2.5 points.
This article tagged under: Polling
Barack ObamaForty-two years ago, the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade granted American women the right to a legal abortion.
Four decades later, it remains under attack. In recent years, conservative politicians have launched a particularly aggressive campaign to turn back the clocks on women's reproductive rights. They've depicted abortion as an immoral, dangerous and painful procedure sought by misguided women who will undoubtedly regret their decision, and they've used those myths to justify a slew of new laws and restrictions. As a result, American women now face a growing number of obstacles to obtaining legal, safe abortions.
But amid all the rhetoric, some of the most important facts about abortion get obscured. Here are some oft-repeated myths we need to clear up:
1. MYTH: Abortion is dangerous.
REALITY: Over 99.75 percent of abortions do not cause major medical problems.
Less than one-quarter of 1 percent of abortions performed in the United States lead to major health complications, according to a 2014 study from the University of California, San Francisco, that tracked 55,000 women for six weeks after their abortions. The researchers note that this makes an abortion statistically about as risky as a colonoscopy.
If that fact seems surprising, consider how American pop culture misrepresents the risks of abortion: Nine percent of film and television characters who have abortions die as a direct result of the procedure, according to another 2014 study from UCSF.
2. MYTH: Medical abortions -- those performed using pills -- are still fringe.
REALITY: About one in five abortions are medical abortions.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 19 percent of abortions in 2011 were medical abortions and that 28.5 percent of those took place in the first nine weeks of pregnancy.
The Guttmacher Institute also found that medical abortions increased substantially from 2008 to 2011, meaning more women have ended their pregnancies with this alternative to surgery.
3. MYTH: Women who get abortions will regret it, and are more likely to suffer mental health issues.
REALITY: Most women will not regret their decision, and are no more likely to experience mental health problems than women who carry an unplanned pregnancy to term.
While many women experience mixed emotions after an abortion, 95 percent of women who have abortions ultimately feel they have made the right decision, according to an August 2013 study from UCSF. "Experiencing negative emotions postabortion is different from believing that abortion was not the right decision," the researchers explained.
Furthermore, while unplanned pregnancies often cause emotional stress, there is no evidence to suggest that women who choose to terminate their pregnancies will be more likely to suffer from mental health issues, according to a 2008 report from the American Psychological Association that investigated all relevant medical studies published since 1989.
The APA found that past studies claiming abortion causes depression and other mental health problems consistently failed to account for other risk factors, particularly a woman's medical history. The APA accounted for these factors and found that, among women who have an unplanned pregnancy, those who have abortions are no more likely to experience mental health problems than those who carry the pregnancy to term.
4. MYTH: Fetuses experience pain during abortions.
REALITY: Fetuses cannot feel pain until at least the 24th week of pregnancy.
Experts ranging from Britain’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists agree with that timeline. In fact, research from UCSF found that fetuses can't perceive pain before 29 or 30 weeks of development.
Then why have so many states banned abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy? Perhaps misrepresentation of research is partly to blame: Many of the researchers most frequently cited by pro-life politicians told The New York Times that their research does not prove anything about fetal pain.
5. MYTH: The majority of Americans don't think abortion should be legal.
REALITY: Most Americans support a woman's right to choose.
According to a Gallup poll from 2014, 78 percent of Americans think abortion should be legal in some or all circumstances. (Fifty percent said "some circumstances," while 28 percent said all.) What's more, in 2012, Gallup found that 61 percent of Americans think abortions that take place during the first trimester of pregnancy should be legal. (Nine out of 10 abortions in the U.S. do take place during that time period, according to Guttmacher.)
6. MYTH: The abortion rate in the United States is skyrocketing.
REALITY: The abortion rate in the United States is the lowest it's been since 1973.
The abortion rate has been on the decline for years, and hit its lowest level in 2011, according to the latest data available from the Guttmacher Institute. The study's author partially credited the decline to better contraceptive use and more long-term contraceptive options, such as the IUD.
7. MYTH: Most American women have easy access to abortions.
REALITY: Women face a growing number of barriers to accessing abortions.
More than 57 percent of American women live in states that are hostile or extremely hostile to abortion rights, according to the Guttmacher Institute. That represents a marked increase from 2000, when 31 percent of American women lived in such states. In 2011, 89 percent of counties in America had no abortion clinics.
This is no accident: Across the U.S., lawmakers have enacted 231 new abortion restrictions over the past four years, according to a Guttmacher analysis from January 2015. As a result, many women have to travel great distances to reach an abortion clinic, where they may face 24-hour wait periods. These barriers particularly affect women living in rural areas and low-income women, who often can't afford to take time off work and pay for gas and a hotel room. Other laws force women to go through potentially distressing procedures, such as viewing their own ultrasound photos, in order to move forward with an abortion.
8. MYTH: Women are frequently coerced into having abortions.
REALITY: Women rarely cite pressure from family or partners as leading to their decision to abort.
A 2005 study from the Guttmacher Institute found that less than 1 percent of women surveyed cited such pressure among their main reasons for having an abortion. A 2013 study from UCSF reached a similar conclusion, and found that while women rarely cited partner coercion as a reason they sought an abortion, many did cite the desire to escape a bad relationship or domestic violence.
9. MYTH: Women would never have abortions if they knew what it was like to have a child.
REALITY: Most women who have abortions are already mothers.
Sixty-one percent of women who had abortions in 2008 were mothers, and 34 percent had two or more children, according to the Guttmacher Institute. That number only increased after the 2009 financial downturn. The National Abortion Federation told Slate that between 2008 and 2011, 72 percent of women seeking abortions were already mothers. A study from Guttmacher found that mothers typically have abortions to protect the children they already have; they simply cannot afford to raise another child.
10. MYTH: It is dangerous to perform abortions in clinics that do not meet the same standards as ambulatory surgical clinics.
REALITY: Requiring abortion clinics to meet these standards does little to improve patient safety and forces many to shut down.
Currently, 22 states require abortion clinics to meet a set of restrictive and often arbitrary standards, dictating that they be close to hospitals and that their hallways and closets meet certain measurements. Clinics often need to undergo expensive renovations in order to comply, and leading doctors' groups say the laws do little to improve patient safety.
What's more, 11 states now require that doctors at abortion clinics obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, but many hospitals flat-out refuse to grant these privileges. As a result, hospitals essentially have the power to shut down nearby clinics.NEW YORK (AP) — Office Depot Inc. said Wednesday it will buy Office Depot in an all-stock deal that would transform office-supply retail sector.
Boca Raton, Fla.-based Office Depot Inc. and Naperville, Ill.-based OfficeMax said holders of OfficeMax shares will receive 2.69 shares of Office Depot for every OfficeMax share they own.
That’s equal to about $13.50 per share, based on Office Depot’s $5.02 per share closing price Tuesday, giving the deal a total value of about $1.2 billion. OfficeMax had about 86.7 million shares outstanding as of Oct. 26, according to SEC filings. It is a 3.8 percent premium to OfficeMax’s closing price of $13 on Tuesday and a 26 percent premium to OfficeMax’s closing price on Friday, before word of negotiations leaked out.
The combined company’s name, marketing brands and corporate headquarters will be determined after the company names a CEO.
There was some confusion about the deal Wednesday morning when Office Depot reported terms of the deal in a release on its Web site early Wednesday and then removed it, before restoring it after the market opened.
But Morningstar analyst Liang Feng said he did not expect the premature release would damage to the companies.
“I don’t think it will cause that much of headache for the companies unless deal doesn’t go through,” he said.
The move would combine the No. 2 and No. 3 office supply retailer and lead to consolidation in an industry that analysts have said for years has too many stores. It reflects the changing retail landscape as “big box” stores become outmoded and more people shop online.
Office Depot and OfficeMax, along with bigger rival Staples Inc., were all founded in the mid- to late 1980s and helped pioneer the big-box boom in the 1990s, expanding rapidly in the U.S.
But the rise of Web retailers like Amazon.com and more expansion into office supply categories by discounters like Costco and Wal-Mart has been tough on the sector. In addition, office suppliers were slow to bounce back from the recession, as consumers and small businesses alike cut back on ordering office products.
The companies have closed stores, slashed costs and streamlined operations to offset stagnant sales. Rumors about possible consolidation have swirled around the sector for years but nothing ever materialized.
The Wall Street Journal reported the possibility of the deal on Monday, sending stock across the sector soaring on Tuesday.
OfficeMax said the move is expected to result in $400 million to $600 million in cost savings by the third year of the deal. Both companies will have equal representation on the combined entity’s board.
The deal is expected to be complete by the end of the calendar year.
Analysts say that if the deal closes it would likely benefit the largest office supply player Staples Inc. since the combined entity will likely close stores, leading to market share opportunities for Staples.
“We think a potential merger would result in a significant number of store closings, and thus an improvement in the overall economics of the office supply retail business,” said S&P analyst Ian Gordon on Tuesday. “This area has been under pressure from a weak business spending environment and competition from non-traditional channels like Amazon in our view.”
The office supply sector is worth about $21.2 billion, according to research firm IBISWorld Inc. in Santa Monica, Calif. Of that, Staples holds a 35 percent market share, Office Depot 26.1 and Office Max 15.6.
Staples is much larger than its smaller rivals, with 2,295 stores worldwide and a market capitalization of $9.56 billion. In contrast Office Depot’s market capitalization is $1.43 billion and OfficeMax is $1.13 billion. Market capitalization is the market value of a company’s outstanding shares and can be used to measure a company’s size.
The deal still has to go through shareholder and regulatory approvals, and office supply mergers have been questioned by regulators in the past. In 1997, Staples Inc. attempted to buy Office Depot but the deal was nixed by the Federal Trade Commission due to concerns the combined company would have too much of a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Office Depot, which also reported quarterly results that missed expectations on Wednesday, saw shares fall 8 cents to $4.94 in morning trading. OfficeMax shares rose $1.18, or 9 percent, to $14.18.
Staples shares fell 29 cents, or 2 percent to $14.36.
(TM and © Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Thursday, September 21. All times are Eastern.
Top pick
Nathan For You: A Celebration (Comedy Central, 10 p.m.): It’s been nearly two years since we last saw Nathan Fielder, who graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades, use his knowledge to help struggling small business owners make it in this competitive world. So while Comedy Central spools up the series’ fourth season, Fielder and his team present this follow-up special, in which the host reconnects with folks who’ve received his, shall we say, unorthodox guidance. Did Sue Stanford stick with the ghost-realtor gimmick? Did Brian Wolfe ever learn to take his Yelp rating seriously? Presiding over the festivities is Anthony Napoli, real host of season one’s fake dating show The Hunk—maybe this time around, Nathan can get a straight answer about that threesome.
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Regular coverage
Gotham (Fox, 8 p.m.): Season premiere
The Orville (Fox, 9:01 p.m.)
Better Things (FX, 10 p.m.)
Zoo (CBS, 10 p.m.): Season finale
Wild card
American Beauty Star (Lifetime, 10:30 p.m.): We’ll cop to being somewhat flummoxed by the setup for this reality competition, in which 12 makeup artists and hairdressers team up to create eye-catching runway looks—but only one individual will walk away as the titular beauty star. Odds are we’ll stick around after Project Runway to see if we can make heads or tails of American Beauty Star after the first 10 minutes, but we can’t guarantee we’ll make it that far, because this just might be the week those goddamn Buitendorp twins finally go too far and drive us to throw the remote through the TV screen.Variety is reporting that Yahoo will keep Community alive for at least another season. Yes, for real. The emotional roller coaster is over. Take a moment to celebrate.
Variety reports that Yahoo will be producing 13 episodes featuring the original cast from NBC and executive produced by series creator Dan Harmon, to be available only on Yahoo Screen. (Weird. Way to come through in the clutch, Yahoo.) Harmon had this to say about the resurrection of his cult hit:
I am very pleased that Community will be returning for its predestined sixth season on Yahoo […] I look forward to bringing our beloved NBC sitcom to a larger audience by moving it online. I vow to dominate our new competition. Rest easy, Big Bang Theory. Look out, Bang Bus!
Joel McHale was equally jubilant about the news:
The reports of our cancellation have been greatly exaggerated.’ —Mark Twain (The other version of this quote has been wrong for years). […] Thank you Sony. Thank you Yahoo. Thank you Dan Harmon. And thank you to the greatest f%$#ing fans in the history of the human race. Sixth season. #CommunitySixthSeason — Joel McHale (@joelmchale) June 30, 2014
Brightest timeline indeed.
Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, & Google +?Joshua Freeman, CP24.com
The Toronto Transit Commission is defending its handling of a massive service disruption that shut down part of a major transit artery for much of Thursday evening and left thousands of passengers scurrying to find another way to their destinations.
“Safety comes before service,” the commission said in a news release Friday. “The TTC appreciates the frustration these situations can cause, but it will not compromise public or employee safety whenever fire or smoke is detected.”
The problems started at around 4:30 p.m. when smoke was reported on an empty train at High Park Station. That led to a closure between Keele and Islington stations.
Just as that problem was fixed, a communications cable malfunctioned at Runnymede Station, shutting down proper radio communication on part of the line.
Ultimately service was suspended between Keele and Jane for the rest of the day from around 6 p.m.
The shutdown left many customers scurrying to try and find an alternate way of getting to their destinations.
The TTC dispatched shuttle buses and customers were allowed to board GO Train or UP Express service for the price of a TTC fare.
“The root cause of these fires is under investigation,” the TTC said in its release. “The TTC believes, however, that the problem began with a faulty power cable on the underside of a westbound train.”
Service returned to normal Friday morning.Already some preliminary work has begun on a $1 billion construction project at Reagan National Airport, but there’s still lots of work to be done before a new commuter concourse is completed by 2021. This spring, demolition is expected to begin on the airport’s executive offices.
Once the project is complete, there will be a concourse for short-hop flights, which will replace Gate 35X. The Washington Post reported that Gate 35X is infamous for being a “choke point” for travelers who are required to board shuttle buses to get to their planes.
The glass-enclosed walkway on the concourse level of Terminals B and C, known as National Hall, will also experience changes that are expected to complete by the fall of 2020. These changes involve moving security screening to the upper level arrival level.
According to The Washington Post, this will be the first major construction project at National Airport since Concourses B and C were opened in the late 1990s.Senate GOP Vows To Block All Action Until Tax Cut Deal Is Reached
Doug Mataconis · · 2 comments
The entire Senate GOP caucus has vowed to block any further legislative action other than budget measures and a tax cut deal:
Senate Republicans will block controversial legislation during the lame-duck Congress until a deal on tax cuts is worked out, according to a letter signed by every GOP senator. In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Republicans said they would not agree to proceed on any legislative item until the Senate has acted to fund the government and prevent “the tax increase that is currently awaiting all American taxpayers.” (…) Democrats are facing pressure from their base to push through as many priority agenda items as possible during the lame-duck Congress. In particular, gay-rights activists are pushing for the end of the military’s prohibition of gay and lesbian members of the armed forces. But the Senate’s ability to move forward on the tax issue seems dependent on the progress made by the group designated by President Obama on Tuesday to negotiate a compromise on tax cuts. That group, which includes Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Jack Lew, along with House and Senate representatives from both parties, is scheduled to begin its meetings at the Capitol on Wednesday. With just weeks left to go in the lame-duck before the Christmas holiday and recess, the clock is running out on Democrats.
McConnell expanded on this in an interview with ABC News:
Assuming that they stay united, the Republicans seem to be well situated to get what they want here. With 42 votes, they can block pretty much any piece of legislation they want through cloture votes, which strongly suggests |
to the Royal Navy, while the articles hype the assertion that the navy was “scrambled” to intercept the Russian warships. The fleet had already been shadowed by Royal Norwegian Navy vessels the previous week, and the US announced the dispatch of the Arleigh Burke Class DDG USS Carney in response to the Russian naval deployment, to reinforce the USS Ross, already on station with the French Navy’s Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier, which is carrying out strike missions against targets in Syria and Iraq. Yes, you read that correctly, NATO did the exact same thing that Russia is now being vilified for, having sent an aircraft carrier and accompanying vessels to the Mediterranean from Western Europe. Did Vladimir Putin or the Russian MOD accuse France or NATO of saber rattling? No, they actually welcomed the move by France, and offered to aid the French carrier strike group in the region in attacks against Islamic State.
Hopefully, the UK public will be able to see through the blatant propaganda being peddled to them by their mainstream media outlets. In a rational world, the media would simple report the pre-announced passage of a fleet of Russian vessels through international waters, on their way to combat the internationally recognized terrorist groups that have been illegally fighting to depose the legitimate government of Syria. Unfortunately, the mainstream media in the West abandoned reason and truth a long time ago.
Brian Kalman is a management professional in the marine transportation industry. He was an officer in the US Navy for eleven years. He currently resides and works in the Caribbean.
DonateSir Winston Churchill's bravery in leading Britain during the Second World War may have been down to him suffering'short man syndrome', a new book by Boris Johnson has claimed.
The Mayor of London says that with the wartime prime minister standing at just five feet six inches tall, there is evidence to suggest he was driven to succeed to prove a point to bigger bullies at school, who teased him for his height.
So-called'short man syndrome' has been described by scientists where short men overcompensate for their lack of height through acts of aggression.
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A new biography of wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill by Boris Johnson suggests he may have suffered from'short-man' syndrome
The Mayor of London says there is evidence to suggest he was driven to succeed to prove a point to bullies at school, who teased him for his height
It has long been associated with some of history's most notorious tyrants, including Adolf Hitler, Napoleon, Mussolini and Stalin.
And in Mr Johnson's new biography on Churchill, who was two inches shorter than Hitler, he suggests the syndrome was what spurred him on to tackle bigger bullies.
In the book, serialised in the Telegraph, Mr Johnson writes: 'Who else was 5 foot 6 or under? Some of the biggest tyrants and creeps in world history: Augustus (5 feet 6), Napoleon (ditto), Mussolini (ditto) Stalin (teensy at 5 feet 4). Hitler was only 5 feet 8.
'All these characters have been associated with the over-compensatory aggression that is sometimes referred to as'short-man' syndrome; and there is some evidence, at least on the face of it, that Churchill did, too.'
At five foot eight, Hitler, left, was two inches taller than Winston Churchill. So-called'short-man' syndrome is often referred to as Napoleon Complex, named after Napoleon Bonaparte, right, who was five feet seven
The new book, called The Churchill Factor, took the author over a year to research and will be published later this month ahead of the 50th anniversary of the leader's death.
In it Mr Johnson also explains how Churchill's early life as a pupil at the prestigious Harrow School may have led him to show he was made of stern stuff after being bullied for being a 'runt'.
He explains that Churchill was not in the Harrow football team, the school's more violent version of the game, or the cricket team and even ran away from other pupils on one occasion when they threw cricket balls at him.
He also suggests that he probably would have been picked on for his lisp and speech impediment too.
Mr Johnson, who himself is five feet ten inches tall, adds: 'Churchill's bravery wasn't something he just put on. It wasn't a mask he struggled with. He was made like that. The spirit of derring-do just pumped through his veins, like some higher-octane fuel than the one the rest of us run on. Nothing could stop him.'
However, Mr Johnson explains that what sets Churchill apart from other 20th Century leaders was his 'greatness of heart' and his ability to be immensely compassionate.
He points out that when Churchill's mother decided to sack his nanny, he used his small income to give her financial support as he was so appalled.
Studies into so-called short-man syndrome say that society's obsession with height forces smaller men to overcompensate by becoming chippy, more aggressive and - in extreme cases - lust power.
However, some have questioned whether the syndrome, sometimes called Napoleon complex after Napoleon Bonaparte is real.
Historians have also pointed out that at 5 feet 7, Napoleon was around the average height for his day.
Mr Johnson also points out that tyrants Mussolini, left, and Stalin, right, have also been associated with short-man syndrome
Meanwhile Mr Johnson has also said he believed the wartime leader would have approved of Parliament’s decision to back air strikes on ISIS.
He made the comments after revealing thousands of terror suspects in the UK are being monitored by the security services.
'I think he would be appalled by the spectacle of these cowards executing journalists, and I think he would have wanted to do something to set them back a long way, and if need be, to neutralise them altogether,’ Mr Johnson said."Hank Paulson never should have had that job in the first place. He had a $700 million conflict of interest, and everything that he did while he was Treasury secretary, every single thing that he did, has one explanation: What's good for Hank Paulson?"
-- Florida Rep. Alan Grayson on MSNBC
I don't recall the last time Congress came up with such a direct redistribution. Occasionally Congress closes a few tax loopholes at the top and offers a refundable tax credit to workers at the bottom, or it creates a poor people's program like Medicaid, paid for out of general revenues from a progressive income tax. But to say out loud, as the House has just done, that those in our society who can most readily afford it should pay for the health insurance of those who cannot is, well, audacious.
There's another word for it: fair. According to the most recent data (for 2007), the best-off 1 percent of American households take home about 20 percent of total income-- the highest percentage since 1928. Yes, I know: Critics will charge that these are the very people who invest, innovate and hire, and thereby keep the economy going. So raising their taxes will burden the economy and thereby hurt everyone, including those who are supposed to be helped... [T]here's no reason to suppose that taking a tiny sliver of the incomes of the top 1 percent will reduce all that much of their ardor to invest, innovate and hire in the future. Yet if this tiny sliver means affordable healthcare for a far larger number of Americans, who will be able to get regular checkups and thereby stay healthy and productive, the positive effect on the American economy is likely to be far greater.
When Blue America endorsed anti-war profits crusader Alan Grayson last year we did it primarily because we knew he would hold the bad guys' feet to the fire. And he has-- far more than almost any other members of Congress. This discussion with former CNBC reporter Dylan Ratigan is the kind of sunshine Americans need to be able to understand the enormous rip off that characterized the relationship between the government and the banksters. It isn't a coincidence that Paulson's former company, Goldman Sachs, is swimming in profits and about to start handing out the mega-bonuses again. Watch Grayson and feel a sense of satisfaction that if not for our contributions early on in his campaign, we would probably still find worthless slug and corporate shill Ric Keller representing Orlando. (It isn't for no reason that Alan is the Republican Party's #1 target for 2010, the Democratic incumbent they hate most, fear most and most want to defeat. Don't let them Like I said, there aren't many in government like Alan Grayson. But if I had to come up with a few names of people with the guts and the brains and the passion to figure stuff out and do something about it, one name on the list would surely be ex-Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. I want to recommend a Salon post he wrote yesterday, Tax The Wealthy To Keep Everyone Healthy. A fan of Robin Hood economics, his proposals are enough to make GOP heads explode all over Capitol Hill.These Geithners and Emanuels and Summers... feh. Obama could have donemuch better. Or maybe he needs crooks to fight crooks. Let's see how far we get with the two big battles over health care reform and financial reform.
Labels: Alan Grayson, banksters, Robert ReichJust like there are different "camps" when it comes to parenting styles — from attachment, to helicopter, to hippie — there are different "camps" when it comes to nudity and parenting. I fall in the nude parenting category. Now, I'm not saying my home is a nudist colony and my family eats dinner in the buff. Instead, I'm simply talking about letting my kids see me naked, because I don't think there is anything wrong with it. In fact, IDGAF if my kid sees me naked and I've got quite a few reasons why.
Some people might find it particularly scandalous that I walk around naked because I have boys. I know. How dare I parade around my boys with the breasts that I nursed them with for a cumulative total of nearly three years, right? How uncouth of me to let them see the c-section scar right above my pubic bone, the opening from which they each emerged. This is not only an IDGAF kind of thing, but an active choice I make to let my boys see me naked and for it to not be that big of a deal. This is my body, this was their vessel, and my body is a real body. I mean, a naked body is as "real" and true as it gets. If I can't be true with my children, and in my home, am I really giving them a sanctuary in which they can be real and true with themselves?
The degree to which I live the "nude life" around my kids may change as they get older. Still, I hope that they will always know that being naked is nothing to be ashamed of, being naked doesn't necessarily have to be attached to sex, and being naked is a choice. You can set your own boundaries about being naked, and you must respect the boundaries other people set. So, with that in mind, here are my reasons for being completely at ease when I'm naked in front of my kids:
Because I Don't Have Time Or Patience To Be Formal In My Own Home Giphy If I'm getting out of the shower, and I've got a towel on my head, I'm not about to get all fancy and put on a silk robe to walk from the bathroom to the closet. For one thing, I don't have a silk robe. Second, my apartment literally faces an expressway and if I didn't give an eff what the truck drivers were seeing on my way to my closet, you can be sure I give less what my 5 year old sees.
Because I Don't Ascribe To The Idea That Nakedness Is Sexual Giphy Apparently, some people on the internet think being naked in front of kids is inappropriate in a sexual way. I don't get it. Is every time I get undressed — like at my OB-GYN's office or in one of those department store public dressing rooms with horrible lighting — a time to cue up some Marvin Gaye? When my kid wakes up with a night terror at 3 a.m. and I rush to his room in just underwear and a bra, because it was more important that I comfort him than waste time finding appropriately conservative night time wear, am I being sexual or maternal?
Because I Believe In Normalizing Regular Human Bodies Over Airbrushed Ones If my sons don't grow up accustomed to seeing regular human bodies — the kind that have freckles, birth marks, cellulite, stretch marks, or sagging breasts (thanks breastfeeding!) — I fear they'll expect their own bodies and (the ones of every partner they have) to look like the ones on Instagram. I know I'm guilty of succumbing to the trap of the Instagram Lie, after having spent countless hours staring at gorgeous "It Girls" and "Influencers" in all their filtered and photoshopped perfection. When I emerge I can't help but look at my own face and body and instantly assess what is wrong with me and what needs work. If this is how I feel after just a few years of being exposed to social media, I can't imagine how it will be for my boys, who are growing up with social media as a given part of life. If putting a real naked body or two in their faces can help offset the false realities around them, I'm all for it.
Because I Want To Set An Example Of What It Means To Be Comfortable In One's Own Skin Being naked in my house is a form of therapy for me. Feeling comfortable moving past mirrors without sucking in or whizzing past my image is an exercise in tolerance. I'm not saying this requires full nudity — underwear is usually part of the equation — but I do force myself to be OK with what I see. Since I'm rarely home without my kids also being there, that means they are present during this exercise. I hope when they see me move around in the nude and "living life," they're absorbing a message of what it looks like to be at ease with oneself.
Because I Don't Want Them To Feel Weird About Being Naked Giphy Right now, my kids move with joy and abandon. They run around naked with no sense of when situations call for modesty (because, honestly, that's my job). For example, they will gleefully run straight from the bath to the front door to say "hi" to the food delivery person in the buff (usually beating me to the door before I can cover them in towels). I'm not saying this is "wrong," per se, it is just that this is where I draw the line. In the end, I don't want the delivery person to see my kids naked. As they grow older, I hope they can maintain that "wild child" relationship to their naked bodies, though. This is not to say I want them to greet delivery people naked for the rest of their lives. I don't. What I do hope is that they eventually learn to set their own boundaries about when is the right time to be naked but without attaching shame to it.
Because I Think You Can Be Naked In Front Of Your Kids And Still Maintain Comfortable Boundaries Giphy Every "naked family" has their own set of boundaries as to what being naked means to them. For me and my husband, being naked in front of our kids means we are naked in the bathroom going in and out of showers, semi-nude in the middle of the night when we attend to middle of the night wake-ups (because that's how we prefer to sleep), and we don't close doors when we are changing. We do not take baths with our kids, and we do not shower with them. I don't think we set out to have these specific boundaries, but this is what fell into place for us and what feels right.
Because, For The Time Being, My Kid Doesn't Have Questions About Sex Maybe I will feel differently when my kids start having crushes, or showing signs of approaching puberty. However, from where I sit right now, I like the idea of all of us living comfortably in our home without hastily slammed doors and shouts of, "Get out! I need privacy!" I would love to be able to change my shirt in my room like it is no big deal, all the while talking to my kids about whatever. Sure, I guess you could argue I'm probably being an idealist. The minute they start expressing discomfort, I will likely back off and cover up. And of course, when they request privacy of their own bodies, I won't hesitate for a second to respect that.This is the final entry in a series of blogs based on excerpts adapted from the 2nd edition of Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth. I wrote Agenda to spur a national conversation on economic policy issues and options that are otherwise largely ignored. This blog series is intended to contribute to that conversation. —DK
Like most white middle class Americans of my generation, I grew up believing that our strong market economy and democratic political institutions make us the world's greatest and most prosperous nation. The America of my youth was the product of a strong social contract that said we are all in this together—at least the white folks—and we all do best when we all do well. That contract made America the envy of the world. With the civil rights movement, many of us hoped we could expand the contract to truly include everyone.
Then Wall Street got greedy, abandoned the contract, and created a winner-take-all economy controlled by an oligarchy dedicated to growing its personal financial assets. Contrary to what Wall Street propagandists would have us believe, Wall Street is a job killer, not a job creator. It prospers by depressing wages, eliminating and outsourcing American jobs, and extracting usurious interest rates from Americans forced to borrow to put food on the table or to maintain a middle class lifestyle. The result is an America in decline and out of work.
Wall Street flies the American flag when it is convenient. It relates to America, however, as an alien occupier, much like the British prior to the American Revolution. Tax breaks and deregulation for Wall Street will only strengthen the role of the occupier and destroy more jobs than they create. An effective jobs program will increase taxes on Wall Street corporations and billionaires and regulatory restraints on their destructive practices.
As I witness the devastation wrought by the Old Economy, my greatest source of sadness comes from an awareness of the profound gap between our human reality and our human possibility.
Main Street is the job creator. We rebuild America’s productive capacity through programs and institutions that support and invest in Main Street businesses, farms, and infrastructure owned by people who have a stake in being responsible citizens in their communities. These programs and institutions are properly funded, at least in part, by taxing the financial wealth expropriated by Wall Street corporations and billionaires through deception and unproductive financial manipulation.
To build a prosperous 21st century America we must declare our national independence from Wall Street and build a New Economy adapted to the realities of a finite planet and an interconnected 21st century world.
The underlying institutional structure of this New Economy will look a good deal like the Main Street economies of human-scale, locally rooted businesses that produced the American middle class, made America the world leader in industry and technology, and fulfilled the American Dream for millions of Americans. This economy was the product of rules put in place in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s to limit Wall Street power and hold it democratically accountable to Main Street needs and interests.
Shifting economic and political power from a predatory Wall Street economy to a generative Main Street economy is the common theme of most every initiative documented or recommended in my book, Agenda for a New Economy and this blog series.
Unlike the American economy either before or after the Wall Street takeover, America’s new 21st century economy will:
Bring America’s material consumption into balance with our ecological resources.
Secure for every American—irrespective of race or gender—the opportunity to achieve an adequate and dignified living.
Take a bold new step toward true democracy by creating a nation of owners who have a strong stake in the health and vitality of their local communities and natural environments.
We humans are a species of many possibilities. Wall Street has proven our ability to create a culture and institutions that cultivate, celebrate, and reward the pathologies of our lesser evolved reptilian capacities for ruthless individualism, greed, and violence. We can, if we choose, create a culture and institutions that nurture, celebrate, and reward the higher order capacities for creativity, sharing, and cooperation that make us distinctively human.
We can turn as a species from an economic system devoted to perfecting our capacity for violent exclusionary competition to one devoted to perfecting our capacity for caring, inclusive cooperation. We can turn from economic institutions that draw down Earth’s nonrenewable reserves of fossil energy to oppose, dominate, and mine Earth’s biosphere to institutions that work in integral partnership with the extraordinary generative capacity of Earth’s self-organizing living systems.
Agenda for a New Economy
How can we build an economy that works for all of us? David Korten lays out his vision in this special serialization of his latest book.
As I witness the devastation wrought by the Old Economy, my greatest source of sadness comes from an awareness of the profound gap between our human reality and our human possibility. My greatest source of joy and hope is my awareness of the vitality of the human spirit as demonstrated by the millions of people who are working to realize their shared vision of a just and sustainable world that works for all. My greatest source of motivation is the knowledge that it is within our collective means to unleash the positive creative potential of the human consciousness and make that vision a reality.
We are privileged to live at the most exciting moment of creative opportunity in the whole of the human experience. Now is the hour. We have the power to turn this world around for the sake of ourselves and our children for generations to come. We are the ones we have been waiting for.Cage the Elephant
Cage The Elephant
“Come A Little Closer: Cage The Elephant Live From The Ogden Theatre”
September 9, 2014 – 11:30 ET | 8:30 PT
Originally hailing from Bowling Green, KY, Cage the Elephant are described by Rolling Stone as a mix of “warp Sixties garage rock, Seventies punk and Eighties alt-rock rolled into excellently weird new shapes.” They aim to always improve and evolve, ensuring that each subsequent release and tour represent a step forward. Their newest release “MELOPHOBIA” is their third album following 2008’s “Cage The Elephant” and 2011’s “Thank You, Happy Birthday,” which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Top 200. Cage The Elephant has sold over 550,000 copies to date and spent 73 consecutive weeks on the Billboard Top 200. The band has toured extensively, selling out several headlining runs. Cage the Elephant will be bringing their intriguing new take on alternative rock to the Ogden Theatre in Denver, Colorado, and you won’t want to miss this performance.
Get Social with Cage the Elephant:
cagetheelephant.comLast Friday, a white dude tried to blow up a plane to "fight a war" in America and no one cared
Last Friday, a white guy named Michael Christopher Estes walked into Asheville Regional Airport in North Carolina, dressed in black and carrying an AN/FO chemical explosive as well as sharp nails and bullets, used to create shrapnel in such bombs.
He was arrested and he told the arresting officers that his terrorist attack was motivated by his desire to "fight a war on U.S. soil."
Had he been a Muslim, or black, this would have been a bigger story than the Vegas shooting. Because he was your basic deranged white guy who wanted to burn the planet down, it's no news at all.
A Muslim attacker’s mugshot would become a meme across the conservative media. Mainstream American outlets would be covering the heroic bravery of those who thwarted the terrorist plot. We’d all be seeing footage of the perpetrator being walked from the police car to the jail and from the jail to the court room. Out loud, people would talk and tweet about the man’s family and friends and networks — wondering where he was radicalized, and if anyone else feels the way he does. In this case, though? Crickets. We hear nothing at all — almost exclusively because the man who planted an improvised explosive device, just like ones that have been used to murder and maim people all over the world, was white. His guilt starts and stops with him. His actions aren’t an indictment of his whole faith, political outlook, and race. White people aren’t, thanks to Estes, suddenly labeled terrorists or seen as a threat to American safety in the way that would almost certainly happen had it been anybody other than a white man.
THE AIRPORT BOMBER FROM LAST WEEK YOU NEVER HEARD ABOUT
[Shaun King/The Intercept]FORTUNE — For nearly six minutes, “The Answer,” a filmed version of an industrial show tune by General Electric, drills its sunny message of silicone straight into the base of your brain. It lodges itself there for at least half a day:
When you’ve got a problem, think silicones,
When you’ve got a question, think silicones,
Because, you see
Silicones from G.E.
Are unquestionableeeeeey…..
The answer
That’s the chorus. The verses, which change up almost to the point of being separate movements, explain the many properties and uses of GE’s (GE) various silicones. They resist all resistible things — heat, cold, water, flame. They’re even “corona-resistant.” And they’re used in everything from household products to the astronauts’ lunar boots, and from — ick — instant coffee to “the coating on your waistband to make your waistband hold.”
To depict that waistband, the film displays a pair of pants that could easily have been worn below a tight knit shirt on a Sunday afternoon by Mike Brady, patriarch of the TV’s eponymous Bunch. That’s because the film was made in 1973 — so the pants look like they might well be made of silicone, too. Visually, the film resembles a strange mixture of a TV commercial from that era and Woody Allen’s futuristic comedy Sleeper, which came out the same year.
It’s quite a production, and probably pretty expensive. Of course, this was well before Jack Welch took over the company and started looking around for costs to cut. GE was already well known by then as a bloated, profligate multinational conglomerate with so many layers of management that top execs might never have even heard of this project.
Stumbling upon this wondrous thing inevitably raises the question: what other such works exist? And the answer is: countless — enough to comprise a genre all their own. There are even whole compilation albums devoted to them, such as Product Music Vol. 1: Industrial Show Tunes In Praise Of Products We Trust.
“My Bathroom is a Private Kind of Place,” from American Standard, is a wistful, elegiac ballad sung by a woman as an ode to “the only place where I can stay, making faces at my face” and “where I can wash and I can cream. A special place, where I can stay and cream and dream and dream and dream.”
American Standard put that cut on an album it produced in 1969 as part of a sub-genre — the industrial musical. This one was called The Bathrooms are Coming! American Standard explained it this way in the album’s liner notes:
The Bathrooms Are Coming premiered a new decade of bathroom fixtures born out of exhaustive human and product research by American-Standard. The story began with the introduction of a mythical Greek goddess Femma, the epitome of all women’s attitudes, reflections and desires and the leader of all women’s movements. In the play Femma is called upon by other women to start a bathroom revolution – “Join the fight for bathroom safety, Femma … the fight for beauty and luxury. We need freedom from bathroom oppression. Join the fight for better bathrooms.”
Makes perfect sense. Why flush money away on developing, say, a water-saving toilet or a more durable valve when you can put on a faux-counter-culture, pseudo-feminist musical in praise of the powder room? Other tracks include: “My Ultra Bath” and “Look at This Tub.”
Around that same time came tunes like “Westinghouse Power Flower” and Squibb Pharmaceuticals’ “The New Generation,” a folk-rock tune that is all about love, peace and togetherness but never once mentions Squibb. It doesn’t even mention pharmaceuticals. Though, they seem to be implied.
Perhaps the most famous company songs came from IBM, which were collected in the hymnal “Songs of the IBM” in 1931 — the most famous tune being “Ever Onward” which employees sang at company meetings, ostensibly to boost morale. The genre flourished mainly in the mid-20th century into the 70s, as both the modern corporation and Madison Avenue were ascendent, though the tradition lives on today. During that period, Broadway songwriters were often drafted to come up with the tunes.
What separates such songs from simple ad jingles are length, complexity, and the fact that they’re generally aimed not at consumers, but at employees, stockholders, or corporate customers. They generally are, to one degree or another, cringe-inducing. Witness this entry from a few years back, where the last person anyone would ever pick to sing a Barry White-like tune sings (or rather, lip-syncs) a Barry White-like tune, “Reach that Peak,” for drugmaker Agilent. (Sample lyric: “Yeah girl, you know what I’m talkin’ about. I’m talkin’ about pharmaceuticals.”)
As America entered the Age of Irony sometime in the ’90s, many corporate songs were made to induce cringes on purpose, or at least to acknowledge that red-faced embarrassment was a valid reaction. For the ultimate in post-modern corporate music, just have a look at “We Built This Starbucks” which was quite knowingly a rewrite of a song that’s often cited as the worst song in the history of recorded music: Starship’s “We Built This City.”
But the most amusing songs are generally the older, self-serious ones. “Up Came Oil” by the Exxon (XOM) Singers was written for a 1976 musical called Exxon: Spirit of Achievement. It’s best to keep in mind when listening that this was produced during an era of perennial energy crises, and the dawn of environmentalism. The opening lyric:
Oil’s been around for centuries, sure
Floating in springs, in lakes, and in streams
The Indians used it as a medicine cure
But never in the wildest of dreams
Did anyone think that black sticky stuff
Always in short supply
Would ever have power enough
To gush its way to the sky
Here it is with a satirical video treatment by the anti-corporate agitprop group The Yes Men, who said it came from “one of George Bush’s favorite musicals”:Most people are probably completely unaware of the fact that NATO, the biggest military alliance in the world has appointed a new Secretary General. And to be quite honest, considering all the news events that we are bombarded with every single day, it’s not anything extraordinary about the fact that this particular piece of information has failed to make an impact in the news world. Anyway, when the current Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen steps down from this position on October 1, 2014 a new man is waiting in the shadows ready to step forward and assume his role and that man is Jens Stoltenberg former Labour Party MP and ex-prime minister of Norway.
Most people are probably unfamiliar with Mr. Stoltenberg and his political views, many have probably never even heard of him and that’s completely understandable considering that he hails from a relatively small country with a population of just over 5 million people. Those who are curious to find out more about the man can of course do a quick Google search which will point them to the ‘official’ biography on Wikipedia, which is comprehensive, but fails to include several important episodes from Mr. Stoltenberg’s long political career. It also falls short of giving the reader an impression of the man himself, i.e. what is he like as a person, and whether he is someone that can be trusted.
That’s one of the reasons I decided to write this article. I figured that someone should shed some light on those lesser known facts that can’t be found in the Wikipedia entry and which most non-Norwegian nationals are unfamiliar with. It is important to note that I haven’t written this article because I have an agenda against Mr. Stoltenberg, or because I wish to portray him in a less than flattering light (the information that I have included here is true and it can easily be verified by clicking on the various links that I have provided - links leading to Norwegian articles can be Google translated), but because I believe that people deserve to get a better insight into the man who’s been chosen to lead NATO for the next four years.
Please also note that all the information presented in this article has at one stage been published in Norwegian and International MSM newspapers, i.e. it’s not of a questionable nature.
Anyway here’s a list of some of the lesser known facts about the future Secretary General of NATO.
Enjoy (^;
* In an interview published in a Norwegian newspaper in 2013 it was revealed that Jens Stoltenberg had a strong desire to travel to Haiti and start a revolution when he was younger. He was at the time heavily influenced by his older sister Camilla who was a member of the Norwegian communist organization ‘Red Youth’. In the particular interview Camilla Stoltenberg stated that her little brother was inspired by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, but that he started to have second thoughts when he discovered that their ideas and ideology required the use of violence and terror.
* In the early 1970’s a young Jens Stoltenberg attended an anti-war rally outside the American embassy in Oslo to protest against the US involvement in Vietnam. The demonstration quickly got out of hand and several of the most radical demonstrators started throwing rocks at the embassy building. In a newspaper interview published a few years ago, Stoltenberg stated that he couldn’t remember whether he had thrown any rocks or not, citing that it happened such a long time ago, and went on to say that he couldn’t completely rule it out. Several of his friends however who were actively involved in the communist organization ‘Red Youth’ did throw stones and were subsequently arrested and fined.
* In the late 1990’s Jens Stoltenberg was subpoenaed to appear in the Oslo City court to give evidence against charges of alleged financial misconduct during his leadership of AUF (The worker’s youth league) in the 1980’s. Stoltenberg initially admitted in a newspaper interview when the story first broke that there was a culture of misappropriating government funds in the organization during his leadership; however later on in court he denied any knowledge of such illegal practices. He was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing, but several former AUF members were found guilty and handed prison sentences. Several political commentators in Norway at the time felt that powerful political forces had been operating in the background in order to prevent Jens Stoltenberg and several other prominent politicians from being prosecuted.
* In 2001, just days after Jens Stoltenberg had stepped down as the prime minister of Norway he accidentally crashed into another car while reversing out of a car parking slot causing damages to the other car to the tune of approximately US$ 1200. Stoltenberg was observed getting out of his car to inspect the damage by a witness and was seen attaching what appeared to be a note on the windscreen of the other car before driving off. The note turned out to be a blank piece of paper, which prompted the witness that had observed the incident to suggest that Stoltenberg was trying to avoid paying for the damages. This became a big news event in Norway at the time
ø rn Selbekk the editor of the small Norwegian periodical Magazinet which printed the cartoons however maintains that he felt pressured by the Norwegian government, which at the time was led by Stoltenberg, to apologize for his actions. Mr. Selbekk eventually apologized at a press conference organized by the Norwegian Minister of Labour and Social Affairs, Bjarne Håkon Hanssen in Mr. Hanssen’s government office. * In 2006 at the height of the so-called Mohammed cartoon crisis, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Shaukat Aziz claimed that Jens Stoltenberg had apologized to him over the phone for the actions of a Norwegian newspaper that had published the cartoons. Mr. Stoltenberg vehemently denied these allegations and claimed that he was only expressing remorse over the fact that Muslims had been offended. Vebjrn Selbekk the editor of the small Norwegian periodical Magazinet which printed the cartoons however maintains that he felt pressured by the Norwegian government, which at the time was led by Stoltenberg, to apologize for his actions. Mr. Selbekk eventually apologized at a press conference organized by the Norwegian Minister of Labour and Social Affairs,
ø m, a small town northeast of Oslo, Mr. Stoltenberg appeared to be * In 2008 while giving a Labour Day speech in Lillestrm, a small town northeast of Oslo, Mr. Stoltenberg appeared to be intoxicated ; slurring his words and at various stages during the speech lose his train of thought. This was later on vehemently rejected by Stoltenberg’s political advisor who suggested that it was nothing but vicious rumours spread by political opponents. The incident was quickly picked up by several newspapers and the speech in its entirety was eventually posted on Youtube
funded * The Norwegian Government led by Jens Stoltenberg alsothe trip of two radical left-wing Norwegian surgeons, Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse to Gaza during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead campaign in 2008-2009. The two surgeons eventually ended up becoming part of the Hamas propaganda machinery. At some stage during their stay in Gaza, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg contacted them via phone and informed them that “all of Norway is behind you.” It should also be noted that both Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Fosse defended the attack on the twin towers in NYC in 2001.
* The Norwegian Government led by Jens Stoltenberg was also heavily criticized for being the only western government to recognizing Hamas after the organization won a landslide victory in the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006, a move that was strongly criticized by both the US and Israel on account that Hamas was, and is still deemed a terrorist organization. A Hamas representative was also invited to Norway where he met with several prominent Norwegian MP's in the Norwegian parliament.
Taliban * In 2013 several Norwegian newspapers reported that members of the Afghanhad secretly been invited to Norway for peace talks in September 2011 by the Norwegian Government which at the time was led by Jens Stoltenberg. The Norwegian Government also contributed funds to pay |
from the custody of a revenue officer of the United States.” Three days after the pardon was issued, Grant withdrew it.
A federal court upheld Grant’s decision. However, constitutional law expert Brian Kalt argued in a Washington Post op-ed that the DePuy case was different from modern cases because that pardon had not been delivered and accepted yet and because it was contingent on a fine that had not been paid.
Love questioned whether the concept of “delivery” has the same meaning in a world of cell phones and computers. She also pointed to Jimmy Carter’s blanket pardon of Vietnam War draft dodgers as a case where the action was legitimate despite the document never being delivered to specific people.
“There’s some very ancient case law that talks about the need to deliver a deed, whatever that means these days,” she said. “It certainly doesn’t mean riding on horseback through brick and briar to deliver the warrant to the prison warden.”
George W. Bush did reverse one of his own pardons the day after announcing it in 2008. The pardon for Isaac Toussie, a New York developer convicted of fraud, was revoked after campaign contributions from his family to Republicans were revealed.
The White House said the discovery of those donations justified the change and Toussie had not yet received formal notification of the pardon. Toussie’s attorneys had also bypassed the pardon attorney and the Department of Justice and taken their application directly to the White House counsel, so Bush said the pardon attorney should review it before a decision is made.
Legal experts, including Kalt and Love, questioned whether the president had the authority to do that at the time, but it was not challenged in court. Toussie’s attorneys told the New York Times that they hoped the pardon office would still grant the pardon after its review.
“The Toussie controversy was highly irregular and remains debatable as to the propriety of the action the next day,” Turley said. “The Justice Department insisted that it had not been finalized because it was not served upon Toussie.”
Federal prosecutors could conceivably keep Manning in prison if they present evidence of a new offense that she was not already tried for.
“Whether or not a person can be prosecuted for related conduct that was not prosecuted the first time, that seems to be a matter of double jeopardy and it may or may not apply,” Love said.
Love said Obama’s commutation for Manning and his pardon of retired Gen. James Cartwright for lying to investigators about leaking classified information on Tuesday seemed typical of the kind of action most presidents take in their final days.
“I would not say that they stood out,” she said. “I think that many presidents do a handful of controversial grants at the end of their term.”
Tuesday’s announcement also included many nonviolent drug offenders, like hundreds of other sentences Obama has pardoned and commuted in recent years. More such pardons are expected Thursday.
Love suggested those cases should be seen as the regular exercise of pardoning power rather than last-minute surprises.
“This president turned to his pardoning responsibilities rather late in the game,” she said.
According to Price, having this many pardons this late is unusual, but it is the result of an initiative Obama launched three years ago to find inmates who would face shorter sentences or not be charged at all if they committed their crimes today.
“The fact that there are a lot at the end doesn’t surprise me,” she said.
Until recently, sentencing reform advocates had hoped the next administration would continue to work on such cases, but Price said Trump’s victory cast that into doubt.
“I don’t think that there’s that confidence now.”Adam Schefter reports that the Seahawks are still planning to start Russell Wilson in their matchup with the Jets and have no plans on signing another quarterback. (0:53)
Topics this week include what could've been with Drew Brees and the Chargers, the London coaching curse, Terrelle Pryor's emergence in Cleveland, and more.
Could Broncos use Siemian as trade bait?
Denver is playing like a world champion in large part because quarterback Trevor Siemian is playing like Peyton Manning.
Just compare Siemian's first three games this season to Manning's first three games last season.
Through three games in 2016, Siemian has thrown for five touchdowns, three interceptions and 756 yards.
Through three games last season, Manning threw for five touchdowns, three interceptions and 755 yards.
The big statistical difference between Siemian and Manning is a mere one passing yard.
As if that weren't enough, Siemian also has leapfrogged former Broncos and current Texans quarterback Brock Osweiler, whom he played and studied behind last season.
Trevor Siemian posted an 87.1 Total QBR against the Bengals in Week 3. Joe Robbins/Getty Images
But Siemian also is having other unintended beneficial consequences for Denver. The better he plays, the longer he allows the Broncos to sit rookie first-round pick Paxton Lynch. Denver already thought Lynch was good enough to start this season, sooner rather than later, but there is no need now for the Broncos to rush him along, not when Siemian is playing at a Manning-like level.
Plus, if Siemian continues to make plays and impress the league -- and the next chance comes Sunday in Tampa against the Buccaneers -- it's fair to wonder if he could become trade bait, with another team in need of a starter making an attractive-enough offer to pry him loose from Denver. As it stands now, the Broncos have a starting quarterback who has impressed them, a quarterback waiting in the wings to impress them, and the answers on how to best go about replacing one of the greatest players in NFL history.
-- Adam Schefter
What if Drew Brees had re-signed with Chargers?
Former San Diego Chargers great RB LaDainian Tomlinson is fond of both of his ex-quarterbacks, Drew Brees and Philip Rivers, but he can't shake one belief.
"If Drew had been our quarterback [in 2006], we would have won the Super Bowl," said Tomlinson, a lock for the Hall of Fame "There were a lot of circumstances that were in play -- obviously, Drew's injury right at the end of the [2005] season and the front office wasn't willing to make the [financial] commitment to keep him."
To be fair, there were questions about Brees' future after a devastating shoulder injury in the final game of the 2005 season. General manager A.J. Smith said the team wanted to re-sign Brees, a pending free agent, but conveyed that "business is business." Brees signed with the Saints that offseason and hasn't missed a start because of the injury since.
Tomlinson said his thoughts will resurface this week when Brees and the Saints travel Sunday to San Diego to play Rivers and the Chargers.
Tomlinson's conviction is not shaken even when it's pointed out he was the league's MVP as the Chargers had their best season (14-2) in 2006 during Rivers' first year as a starter. They lost a dramatic 27-24 AFC divisional home playoff game to the Patriots.
"Philip hadn't played enough [just 64 snaps while Brees was the starter] to get it done at that time," Tomlinson said.
Drew Brees and LaDainian Tomlinson played together for five seasons in San Diego. Rick Stewart/Getty Images
Rivers arrived in 2004 because the Chargers finished with the NFL's worst record (4-12) during the '03 season when Brees had overtaken Doug Flutie as the starter. Tomlinson remembers a discussion that coach Marty Schottenheimer had with team leaders about the franchise's inclination to use the draft's No. 1 pick on another quarterback: Eli Manning, Philip Rivers or Ben Roethlisberger.
"I remember Marty talked to the core team leaders about who we might want as a quarterback because the front office wasn't convinced at that time Drew was a franchise guy," Tomlinson said. "I wanted to stick with Drew and build a better team around us. If they were going to draft a QB, I remember I wanted Ben. And when Philip ended being the guy, I saw why they liked him.... But Drew was just coming into his own and he had very unique leadership abilities that we all saw on that team."
Tomlinson became more firm in those beliefs during that 2004 offseason after Rivers had a prolonged contract negotiation that cost him a good portion of his rookie training camp and preseason and relegated him to backup duty for two years behind Brees.
"Drew was never going to relinquish that job -- it became his team," said Tomlinson, an NFL Network analyst. "I mean, they both may end up in the Hall of Fame but at that time, I'll say it again: If Drew had been our quarterback, we would have won the Super Bowl [in 2006]. A lot of guys on the team felt that way about Drew. It was so unfortunate."
For the record, the Colts won the Super Bowl in the 2006 season with Peyton Manning. The Steelers won the Super Bowl in the 2005 season with Roethlisberger, who soon won a second ring. Eli Manning won the first of two Super Bowls in the 2007 season with the Giants. Brees won a Super Bowl with the Saints.
The gifted, competitive Rivers has been shut out, perhaps victim of another circumstance in which Schottenheimer was fired after the 14-2 season that also haunts Tomlinson.
"We lost our discipline when Marty left," Tomlinson said. "That didn't help anyone, including Philip."
-- Chris Mortensen
Watch out Gus Bradley, there's history to losing in London
For almost anyone who has done it before, a trip to London is a great adventure. For NFL coaches, it has been an ominous sign.
Of the 14 previous NFL games played in London dating back to 2007, two head coaches have been fired right after their teams lost in London, and eight in total have been fired in the same season their teams played there.
A loss in London usually has meant a looooong flight home, and a quick departure once on the ground.
London Curse? A list of NFL head coaches who were fired in the same season their teams played in London. Year Coach Team Note 2015 Joe Philbin Dolphins Fired after Week 4 loss in London 2014 Mike Smith Falcons Fired end of season 2014 Dennis Allen Raiders Fired After Week 4 loss in London 2013 Leslie Frazier Vikings Fired end of season (team won London game) 2011 Raheem Morris Buccaneers Fired end of season 2010 Josh McDaniels Broncos Fired after Week 13 2010 Mike Singletary 49ers Fired after Week 16 (team won London game) 2007 Cam Cameron Dolphins Fired end of season Source: ESPN Stats & Information
Two seasons ago, the Raiders fired coach Dennis Allen after the team returned from London.
Last season, the Dolphins fired coach Joe Philbin after the team returned from London, and the Lions did the same later in the season with general manager Martin Mayhew and team president Tom Lewand.
And now, the NFL is headed back to London this week, with the 0-3 Jacksonville Jaguars and coach Gus Bradley hosting the Indianapolis Colts on Sunday morning.
Bradley is one of the league's nicest and most respected men. But his team is winless and struggling. The Jaguars are good enough to turn it around, and Bradley is a good enough coach to right this team. But should Jacksonville lose Sunday and fall to 0-4, Bradley could be in as much trouble as Philbin was last year and Allen the year before.
Nobody wants Bradley to lose his job. But for now, he must go to London, which has been a bad omen for the head coaches who have gone before him.
-- Adam Schefter
Pryor's Bolt-like athleticism on full display
Cleveland Browns receiver Terrelle Pryor was the last draft pick made under the regime of the late, great Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis. Even though Pryor was a quarterback, Davis coveted speed and athleticism. In fact, if Olympic gold medalist sprinter Usain Bolt was ever truly tempted to play football, few would doubt that Davis would have provided an opportunity.
Ironically, Pryor's name was privately mentioned in the same sentence with Bolt by then-Raiders legendary strength and conditioning coach Al Miller back in 2013 after Pryor had a 93-yard touchdown run against the Steelers, the longest scoring run ever by an NFL quarterback.
Terrelle Pryor showed off his all-around athleticism in Week 3. Eric Espada/Getty Images
"He had a lot of physical and running attributes similar to Usain Bolt when I watched him," said Miller, who is now enjoying retirement. "Obviously, I'm not saying he would beat Usain Bolt in a race but Pryor's gait and his stride length was unbelievable. He had another gear past that 30- or 40-yard mark. He was strong and rhythmical. He was pliable and had no joint or mobility issues. Fabulous athlete. I'm not surprised what he's doing. If he's embraced [receiver], then he's capable of some pretty remarkable things."
The Raiders used a future 2012 third-round pick in the 2011 supplemental draft on Pryor after the Ohio State quarterback was ruled ineligible for the 2011 college football season. Davis passed away less than two months later on Oct. 8.
As a quarterback, Pryor had accuracy issues, but he flashed his athleticism with the Raiders. He finally focused on his conversion to receiver for the Browns and he caught eight passes for 144 yards this past Sunday against the Dolphins. But with Cleveland's quarterback issues, Browns coach Hue Jackson also gave him some snaps at quarterback. Pryor passed for 35 yards and rushed for 25 yards while spelling rookie QB Cody Kessler.
-- Chris Mortensen
Cowboys' Gregory continues to rehab
Suspended Cowboys defensive end Randy Gregory is out of rehab in Massachusetts, but he's still receiving and will continue to receive regular treatment in Dallas, according to a league source, so his rehab is not over.
But those who know Gregory insist he has been clean for more than four months and is doing as well as he has in recent memory. He has changed his attitude and priorities, added weight, worked out regularly and impressed the people around him, who believe he has turned a corner in his personal life.
They acknowledge that there still is work to do, and it always will be a battle, but with Gregory continuing to address his personal demons with the help he needs, they believe he can be a significant factor for the Cowboys once he is allowed to return to football.
-- Adam Schefter
Randy Gregory is trying to make it back to the field for the Cowboys. AP Photo/James D Smith
Emptying out the notebook
The Packers can get used to being home; their next road game is not until Oct. 30 at Atlanta. So after being home Sunday for the Week 3 win against Detroit and having the bye this week, they get the Giants at home on Sunday night, the Cowboys in Green Bay the week after, and the Bears the week after. Mark down a full month of being at home for the Packers.
Dolphins tight end Jordan Cameron scheduled a visit with Dr. Micky Collins at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, a leading facility for the diagnosis, evaluation and management of brain trauma. Cameron left Sunday's game against the Browns with his fourth known concussion.
Interesting side note to recent Hall of Fame nominee Clark Shaughnessy: His grandson is Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann. There aren't too many men who have been nominated or selected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame who have a relative in the Grateful Dead.
Phil Simms, former Giants QB and Super Bowl MVP, said Broncos QB Trevor Siemian caught his eye just watching practice last season before he was doing a CBS broadcast. Simms: "I said, 'Wow, does he throw it with ease and accuracy, almost a perfect spiral every time.' He's not overpowering but he has plenty of arm. He throws it with anticipation into tight windows. When I heard he would be allowed to compete for the starter's job this offseason, I gave him every bit of a 50-50 chance to win that job."
These are the kind of things that can make a coach feel old: Back in 1993, when Bill Belichick coached the Cleveland Browns, John Derby was one of his linebackers in training camp. John Derby is the father of A.J. Derby, now a tight end for Belichick and the Patriots.
-- Adam Schefter and Chris MortensenIt's that time of year again! What time, you ask? Time for June's annual photo shoot!!
This year, my always-interesting niece has opted for a creepy living-doll shoot. I can’t tell you how fun it is for me to do these shoots with her. Never one to shy away from the bizarre, June was 100% ready to jump into this. She's a natural and so easy to coach and I love that I get to leave her this evolving gallery of moments. Seeing a little girl shocked at her own beauty is something that always makes me smile.
June managed to coax my son Noah into participating this time around. We found a marionette at Goodwill and June suggested that Noah dress up as a doll, too. He had seen the Goosebumps movie recently and was intrigued with the idea of being a ventriloquist’s dummy. Noah is not a huge fan of the whole artistic process, but with a little encouragement and LOTS of giggles I got some great shots of my creepy little angels.
I am so glad June loves this as much as I do. I can’t wait to see what she wants to do next time!Share. Join us on Thursday, May 22 for an hour of exclusive gameplay from Ubisoft's next big adventure. Join us on Thursday, May 22 for an hour of exclusive gameplay from Ubisoft's next big adventure.
Exit Theatre Mode
The long wait for Watch Dogs is almost over. Ever since its reveal at E3 2012, we've been anxious to get our hands on Ubisoft's hacking-infused adventure. In preparation of the game's release on May 27, we're going to be live streaming a full hour of the game later this week.
Come back right here on THURSDAY, MAY 22 at 11am Pacific for an hour-long live stream of Watch Dogs. Join Daemon, Destin, and Marty as they hack their way through Chicago on the PlayStation 4 version of the game. While you're watching the stream, be sure to tweet questions @IGN using #WatchDogs, and we'll try to answer as many of them as possible.
Exit Theatre Mode
What: IGN Live Presents Watch Dogs
Who: Daemon, Destin, Marty
When: Thursday, May 22 at 11am Pacific
Where: Right here on IGN, our YouTube channel, our PlayStation 4 app, and anywhere else you might visit the site!
In the meantime, check out a brief history of our Watch Dogs coverage, as well as our exclusive "Making of" series.Let's go apple picking with Serena Altschul:
In the foothills of North Carolina's Blue Ridge mountains, Lee Calhoun is resurrecting a piece of American history.
"Perhaps 100, 150 years ago there were 6,000 apple varieties that were widely grown," said Calhoun. "And now that's dwindled down to a few hundred."
Calhoun is pruning back the hands of time in an effort to save old Southern apples.
Apples are as American as, well, apple pie.
Brought over by some of the first settlers, apples were a critical part of the early American diet.
They were hardy, nutritious, delicious, and versatile.
"They were fried for breakfast, they were stewed for supper. They were dried on the rooftop to have apples in the wintertime," said Calhoun.
The apple took root particularly in Southern States, sprouting countless varieties with distinctive names like Arkansas Black, Gilmore Winesap, Swiss Limbertwig and Paragon, to name a few.
But as time went on, something happened - and these heirloom varieties started to disappear...
"Well, you blame it on the railroads," said Calhoun. "Apples could be shipped by railroad from distant places. They didn't need to grow apples anymore."
Over 30 years ago, Calhoun decided to bring back lost apples. He's saved over 500 varieties, some of which are the only ones known to exist.
But saving these apples isn't just about history. It's also about flavor.
Apple grower Lee Calhoun. CBS
"We have apples that taste like pineapple," said Calhoun, "some that taste like coconut. Some taste like raspberries."
Sixty miles north, in Dugspur, Va., Diane Flynt of Foggy Ridge Cider, shares Lee Calhoun's passion for apples.
Flynt uses primarily native Virginia apples to make her award-winning ciders, and, she says there's a reason why: "These uncommon or heritage apples have very complex flavors, and just a richness and depth that is essential for making good, hard cider."
She sees her cider as just the latest expression of an American tradition.
"Cider has been made and consumed in this country since our country's founding," said Flynt. "And I like to think that we are reinventing tradition here at Foggy Ridge."
And interest in the old-time beverage is bubbling up, with restaurants across the country quenching thirsts with hard cider.
Recipe: Cider Cocktail, from The Press Lounge, N.Y.C.
Still, to Lee Calhoun, it all comes back to the apple of his eye:
"To find an apple that I thought was extinct, to find it and then to grow it and taste it for the first time, boy, right here - gets ya'!" he exclaimed.
For more recipes from this year's "Food Issue" click here!
For more info:Story highlights Proper hygiene could help save lives, the nonprofit's founder says
His group melts down and sterilizes used soap to ship to places that need it
(CNN) Have you ever thought about what happens to that bar of soap in your hotel room you only used once? Shawn Seipler did while visiting Minneapolis in 2008.
"I called the front desk and asked," he says. "They said they threw it away."
That's when the idea for recycling soap came to him.
Pointing to World Health Organization statistics on childhood mortality, which lists diarrhea among the leading causes of death for children under 5, Seipler argues proper hygiene using soap could help save lives.
"Next thing you know, me and the Puerto Rican half of the family were sitting on upside-down pickle buckets in a garage in Orlando with vegetable peelers, cooking soap," he says.
Read MoreDATE: Feb 15, 2014 | BY: Brent McKnight | Category: Sci-Fi
Well here’s a bit of bad news, if prognostications by industry insiders are correct, one of our most promising new genre shows could be on the chopping block. According to people who have made a livelihood out of predicting such things, Almost Human, Fox’s sci-fi police procedural could be facing cancellation at the end of this, its first season.
In a recent article tracking the most current ratings data, TV By the Numbers has classified the latest endeavor from creators J.J. Abrams and J.H. Wyman as “likely to be cancelled.” While the ratings haven’t been particularly awful, the show, which the network put a lot of hype behind, hasn’t lit the world on fire either.
The article also cites a number of other factors that could play into cancellation. The network ordered 13 episodes, but, at the present time, hasn’t ordered any additional installments. In addition to that, the show is getting bumped from its current time slot in favor of the more highly rated Bones, which, before being moved to make way for Almost Human, had been in the Monday night, 8 pm spot for years. While none of this is definite, moves like this have traditionally been indicators that a series is not long for this world.
If events do transpire like the article predicts, it wouldn’t be the first time a Wyman-Abrams joint has met an untimely early demise. Wyman’s last gig as showrunner of Fringe was prematurely taken away from its rabid fan base. It lasted five seasons and was given a chance to wrap things up, but there were still so many more cases to explore, and it was still gone well before its time.
As fun as Almost Human has been, the show has never really broken out of the standard episodic procedural mode. It’s fine, but even with all the futuristic world building that the series employs, you could be watching any of dozens of cops shows. Karl Urban as detective John Kennex, and Michael Ealy as his android partner Dorian, are good together, and they’ve developed a fantastic chemistry and rapport over the first 9 episodes.
Thus far, Almost Human has been made up of almost entirely self-contained episodes. While Fringe definitely started out this way, where week-to-week each episode didn’t have a huge impact on the one that followed, there was always a larger narrative. Each episode was its own story, but there was also more in play. Interpersonal relationships between characters developed over the course of multiple episodes, even seasons, and story lines played out over a number of weeks. It’s one of those shows that if you missed an episode, or watched them out of order, you skipped over something important. You could still keep pace with the show, but there was something lost.
Even though Almost Human has larger elements, like the Insyndicate, that appear in multiple episodes, it hasn’t really arrived there yet. We’re still feeling the ripple effect of the crew trying to break into the evidence locker at the police station, but aside from that, there haven’t many story lines building up over the season. You keep thinking that something will start brewing between Kennex and Detective Valerie Stahl (Minka Kelly), but that hasn’t materialized.
Basically, Almost Human hasn’t started to live up to its massive potential. I’m all for shows taking the time to ease into it, but with only four episodes left, and with the specter of cancellation now looming large, we have to hope that it doesn’t take much longer.
What do you think? Want to keep Almost Human on the air? Click here to tell Fox NOT to cancel it!On this date in 1974, Richard Nixon resigned as a result of the Watergate scandal, exiting in a spiral of crime, shame and paranoia that no subsequent disgraced president has even come close to matching.
Not that they haven't tried.
Jimmy Carter did his best to top Nixon by running his presidency straight into the ground. But even with the energy crisis, record inflation, a skyrocketing national debt, and one very ugly sweater, Carter's presidency lacked the "evil genius" quality that made Nixon's disgrace so complete. Carter simply went out by going on national TV, babbling something about "malaise," and rubbing his own nipples in a shameful public display of auto-erotic masochism.
Of all disgraced presidents, only George W. Bush has even came close to topping Nixon's mark for 'Worst Performance by a Commander-In-Chief." But Bush's unique mixture of Machiavellianism and pure incompetence was so entrenched in his presidency that the public soon grew numb to it. Katrina, WMD's, Abu Gharib, Scooter Libby, the Attorney General's politicizing of the justice department -- any one of these would have been enough to put any other president right next to Nixon on the first plane out of town.
But with Bush, disgrace became the new normal.
And so it is unlikely that any future president will shock the world by doing anything. A fact that will probably ensure that Richard Nixon's mark for presidential humiliation will stand for centuries to come.Vandroiy
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LegendaryActivity: 1036Merit: 1000 Re: [ANN] Introducing LoveBitcoins.org Driving 1 MILLION Bitcoin Users in 2012 December 04, 2011, 08:17:12 PM #42 A lot of homes may be broken into, but does this exceed the amount of infections of computers? I care a lot for my security, yet it has been breached three times already. The house I live in, though, has never been broken into. I doubt this is a rare and exceptional case.
They may lose their wallet password, but the provider can then go the usual recovery way and silently watch whether nobody else claims to be the owner (or the owner's personal information is known), then refund. On hacked accounts, withdraw limits and sanity checks help prevent disaster. But there is no helping someone whose private keys for BTC have leaked.
I know the "personal identity" thing is not a geek's preferred way, but the average person actually likes this. Sure, everybody should be free to store the coins himself, but I wouldn't try to force it onto people.
BitPay Business Solutions
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Hero MemberActivity: 756Merit: 500 Re: [ANN] Introducing LoveBitcoins.org Driving 1 MILLION Bitcoin Users in 2012 December 04, 2011, 09:34:51 PM
Last edit: December 04, 2011, 10:52:09 PM by Bit-pay Merchant Solutions #47 Quote from: jav on December 04, 2011, 09:17:13 PM Cool project!
So let's go with 1.5%. Keep in mind though, that you probably have to do this on both sides of the transaction: Customer with USD -> Bitcoin -> Bitcoin transfer -> Bitcoin -> Merchant with USD. You are already at 3% there - not a lot of room to work with. Hopefully this can be improved by more competition between exchanges (lower fees) and more day traders (lower spread) over time.
Jan, the problem is the Buyer is always paying this 1.5% fee anyway to pay with bitcoins. He can put $100 into gox, but he will pay the same percentage whether he buys all at once, or in small increments as he needs them. the cost to the buyer is the same. By keeping FIAT, the buyer at least maintains his purchasing power.
I should add that
This will get better as the spreads tighten and volume improves. One thing that is badly needed is a consolidated Level II market depth, to put all the exchanges into one table, and route the order to get the best price.
Jan, the problem is the Buyer is always paying this 1.5% fee anyway to pay with bitcoins. He can put $100 into gox, but he will pay the same percentage whether he buys all at once, or in small increments as he needs them. the cost to the buyer is the same. By keeping FIAT, the buyer at least maintains his purchasing power.I should add that https://intersango.com charges NO fees to buy or sell. ACH and SEPA are also free for deposits and withdrawals.This will get better as the spreads tighten and volume improves. One thing that is badly needed is a consolidated Level II market depth, to put all the exchanges into one table, and route the order to get the best price.
https://bitpay.com
Does your website accept bitcoins? BitPay : The World Leader in Bitcoin Business SolutionsDoeswebsite accept bitcoins?
julz
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LegendaryActivity: 1092Merit: 1000 Re: [ANN] Introducing LoveBitcoins.org Driving 1 MILLION Bitcoin Users in 2012 December 05, 2011, 02:53:21 AM #53 Quote from: Bit-pay Merchant Solutions on December 05, 2011, 02:36:33 AM Quote from: cunicula on December 05, 2011, 02:19:59 AM
Promoting bitcoin meets paypal-wallet services. Yes. Promoting bitcoin itself. Not really.
Millions of people use PayPal. Let's get them to try our thing.
Millions of people use PayPal. Let's get them to try our thing.
I've only dabbled with PayPal a while ago - but as I see it, for the average consumer, Bitcoin can't compete on Fees yet.
(paypal you pay each transaction, but getting your money into paypal is cheap..
whereas bitcoin you easily pay 5% or more depending on where you are to get your money into it in the first place)
Also - I hear paypal allows person to person payments.
So..unless they sell things for bitcoins or earn in bitcoins, they're effectively paying more to use bitcoins than they would using PayPal - so what exactly is the angle here that will sell the idea of Bitcoin to the average person?
That they can send amounts equivalent to a few cents?
The 'political' aspects of avoiding banks or corporations which could freeze your money? (A valid concern - but 'occupy' crowd aside, it's probably not high on the agenda of most people)
edit: It rather seems to me that this is the 'elephant in the room' when it comes to Bitcoin. It's nice and all as far as easy setup for merchants & people who want to set up donations - but the *effective* Fees when you consider getting it in and out of your local currency are very high with Bitcoin.
Sure -if you do a very large deposit via wire-transfer etc, the fee becomes a small percentage - but then you're holding a large amount of BTC and can get screwed by the volatility.
I've only dabbled with PayPal a while ago - but as I see it, for the average consumer, Bitcoin can't compete on Fees yet.(paypal you pay each transaction, but getting your money into paypal is cheap..whereas bitcoin you easily pay 5% or more depending on where you are to get your money into it in the first place)Also - I hear paypal allows person to person payments.So..unless they sell things for bitcoins or earn in bitcoins, they're effectively paying more to use bitcoins than they would using PayPal - so what exactly is the angle here that will sell the idea of Bitcoin to the average person?That they can send amounts equivalent to a few cents?The 'political' aspects of avoiding banks or corporations which could freeze your money? (A valid concern - but 'occupy' crowd aside, it's probably not high on the agenda of most people)edit: It rather seems to me that this is the 'elephant in the room' when it comes to Bitcoin. It's nice and all as far as easy setup for merchants & people who want to set up donations - but the *effective* Fees when you consider getting it in and out of your local currency are very high with Bitcoin.Sure -if you do a very large deposit via wire-transfer etc, the fee becomes a small percentage - but then you're holding a large amount of BTC and can get screwed by the volatility. @electricwings BM-GtyD5exuDJ2kvEbr41XchkC8x9hPxdFd
julz
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LegendaryActivity: 1092Merit: 1000 Re: [ANN] Introducing LoveBitcoins.org Driving 1 MILLION Bitcoin Users in 2012 December 05, 2011, 03:33:41 AM #55 Quote from: edd on December 05, 2011, 03:03:29 AM Quote from: julz on December 05, 2011, 02:53:21 AM Quote from: Bit-pay Merchant Solutions on December 05, 2011, 02:36:33 AM Quote from: cunicula on December 05, 2011, 02:19:59 AM
Promoting bitcoin meets paypal-wallet services. Yes. Promoting bitcoin itself. Not really.
Millions of people use PayPal. Let's get them to try our thing.
Millions of people use PayPal. Let's get them to try our thing.
I've only dabbled with PayPal a while ago - but as I see it, for the average consumer, Bitcoin can't compete on Fees yet.
(paypal you pay each transaction, but getting your money into paypal is cheap..
whereas bitcoin you easily pay 5% or more depending on where you are to get your money into it in the first place)
Also - I hear paypal allows person to person payments.
So..unless they sell things for bitcoins or earn in bitcoins, they're effectively paying more to use bitcoins than they would using PayPal - so what exactly is the angle here that will sell the idea of Bitcoin to the average person?
That they can send amounts equivalent to a few cents?
The 'political' aspects of avoiding banks or corporations which could freeze your money? (A valid concern - but 'occupy' crowd aside, it's probably not high on the agenda of most people)
I've only dabbled with PayPal a while ago - but as I see it, for the average consumer, Bitcoin can't compete on Fees yet.(paypal you pay each transaction, but getting your money into paypal is cheap..whereas bitcoin you easily pay 5% or more depending on where you are to get your money into it in the first place)Also - I hear paypal allows person to person payments.So..unless they sell things for bitcoins or earn in bitcoins, they're effectively paying more to use bitcoins than they would using PayPal - so what exactly is the angle here that will sell the idea of Bitcoin to the average person?That they can send amounts equivalent to a few cents?The 'political' aspects of avoiding banks or corporations which could freeze your money? (A valid concern - but 'occupy' crowd aside, it's probably not high on the agenda of most people)
PayPal's fee structure.
PayPal charges fees for every transaction except deposits into your PayPal account and some withdrawals.
Sending money to anyone via PayPal incurs a fee, the only question is who pays it.
PayPal charges fees fortransaction except deposits into your PayPal account and some withdrawals.Sending money tovia PayPal incurs a fee, the only question is who pays it.
But if I lose 5% for my initial Bitcoin purchase (I've paid more than that in the past by the way!) - what's the difference between being hit up front like that, or getting free initial deposit with PayPal and then hit with a fee for every purchase? Actually.. the difference is you come out ahead with paypal because it's less than 5% right?
I also pay another 5% or more if I want to get my Bitcoins out.
edit: Note, I'm a bitcoin supporter - but let's be honest about it's advantages and not bullshit about it's weaknesses. I'm not saying Bitcoin won't have an advantage over paypal down the track - I just don't see it right now in terms of |
. So after identifying this process of optimisation, I thought “What if we tried to remove as many points as possible while drawing a letter?” To do so, I studied how Bézier curves work, and once I understood, I used this to draw letters using the least number of points.
When I say ‘letters’, what I really mean is ‘letter structures’. The results looked odd at first, but it was all about applying this process and seeing where I could get from there. At that point, what I had were structures but I didn’t have any shapes yet. I asked myself, “What can I do with those structures to get shapes out of them through a simple, mechanical and optimal method?” That’s how I decided to use ‘translation’ to get shapes out of structures, it’s a mathematical process for moving elements on a grid.
In the end, my letters were shaped but not yet legible. And that’s when I made the switch to being an actual type designer – I re-drew them to make the letters more readable. This is what I was talking about: the mechanical process comes first, and then the type designer mindset comes in.
Do you have a preference between the process-driven and design stages of your work?
Coming up with a process is something I really enjoy, because once you have a good method, the shapes come naturally and it’s very satisfying. The drawback is that you’re working in the dark: you don’t know how it’s going to look until the very end. It’s stressful, but also a lot of fun. So then, when I do the job of an actual type designer, it’s a very different task because trying to make the letters more readable and beautiful involves making decisions which are extremely subjective. Anything which influences me can play a part in this stage. I obviously don’t think that it ruins my process, but it can alter the results a bit, so I’m careful not to go too far.
Coming up with a process is something I really enjoy because once you have a good method, the shapes come naturally and it’s very satisfying. The drawback is that [...] you don’t know how it’s going to look until the very end.
Design Ideology
Does your practice change between your type design and the editorial side of your work?
Typefaces are meant to be used by other people – and since it’s a tool that other people will actually use, I feel more responsible for the quality. On the other hand, when I’m working on editorial projects like books, I obviously still have constraints as people are going to use them, but they’re not meant to be as much of a functional tool as fonts are. That’s why I feel like with editorial projects, I have much more freedom to play around, try new things.
It sounds like you enjoy combining the practice of type design with different fields and disciplines. Is that something you value?
I am very interested in bringing back graphic design in an industrial context. I would like to do some work for heavy industry, but also I want to understand the processes they use and apply those to graphic design. Centuries ago, graphic design and manufacturing processes were heavily linked to each other – with modernism, and especially with the work of people like László Moholy-Nagy – there’s a quote I really like from him, saying that “Around 1920 the new artists discovered the esthetics inherent in the work of the engineer.” I like the idea of bringing graphic design back to that.
More recently, at the end of the eighties, there was someone who built bridges between the industrial and design world: Donald Knuth. He was an engineer but he did a lot for typography. Metafont, a language he designed, was a new way to describe typeface shapes based on their structures. He also wrote TeX, a language used to layout scientific documents with a high level of precision and quality. These two tools were big improvements and are still visionary even by today’s standards.
There’s a quote I really like from him [László Moholy-Nagy], saying that “Around 1920 the new artists discovered the esthetics inherent in the work of the engineer.” I like the idea of bringing graphic design back to that.
Inspiration from Japanese Culture
When you’re coming up with a working process, how does your inspiration feed into that?
It depends, some processes are given to me, some come from more in-depth thoughts and others are from my everyday life. For example, the Haneda typeface is one that came up from something I noticed during my stay in Japan. During my internship, I was taking records of everything that involved typography for my university.
What was very interesting for me in Japan was how signage was painted directly onto the road and not on poles, like we have in France. This, combined with how ‘superimposed’ the roads in Tokyo are, gives to the city an extremely unique look and feel. There’s type everywhere you look, and even though I didn’t understand much, I was fascinated by it. It almost felt like I was walking around in a book. So I took loads of pictures and from what I had recorded, I applied the specific letter shapes from Japanese road signage to latin characters. Once I had made it into a typeface, I actually drew some road signage directly onto roads back at home, in Brittany. All that came from a process I thought of by randomly walking around Tokyo.
Why Japan? What interests you about Japanese culture?
We are two kinds of cultures which grew on two different sides of the planet in two very different ways. I have been aware of the differences from a young age, when I used to watch a lot of Miyazaki’s anime. More recently, I’ve been really enjoying the work of Naomi Kawase, I read Haruki Murakami. I’m also a big fan of Takeshi Kitano and Sion Sono. Maybe because of this, I was very interested in going to Japan to see, to learn and to understand how different their culture is from ours and how that affects visuals and graphic elements.
I think my interest in Japan increased a lot during my stay there. It was really frustrating to not be able to understand everything I heard when I was there, so when I came back to France, I started learning Japanese and now I spend a lot of time looking at all the stuff I brought back with me, trying to understand what I might have missed out on and things I did not pay attention to at the time. Luckily, I brought a lot back from Japan, so I can almost go back there just from reading and looking at this material.
The way type is made in the West and in Japan and the rules surrounding this are so different. Did you find it hard to adapt during your internship?
In Japan, everything was under very strict control, so I learnt a lot about how to make professional editorial work but it was extremely different from what I had been doing in France. I was, at the beginning, quite reluctant to adapt. It was a bit hard, and there was some tension between me and my supervisor because I didn’t understand why we had to respect all these rules. That might have been a bit pretentious of me, like this guy coming from France in a Japanese graphic design studio trying to change the rules. When I look back, I think I was overly naive. I should have paid more attention to the fact that the way they are working was heavily linked to their culture. If I go back to Japan now, I will be much more respectful about this. At the end of my time there, I think I grew a little and I adapted to the environment but it was a bit too late.
Future
What plans do you have for the future?
Right now, I’m working on a website to display all my fonts, which is going to be called Bretagne. I’m also setting up a design studio with James Briandt, a close friend of mine. We studied together during my Bachelors course at the École Estienne. He did one year of Interactive Design and then specialised in photography. He’s really interested in images and I’m interested in typefaces, so we work well together. Overall, we work within graphic design in general but we mostly focus on editorial subjects for fashion and industries. It’s going to be called Dreams Office. The studio is slowly getting bigger, we already have three big clients and I’m looking forward to expanding even further. We’re actually preparing our first ever exhibition which will take place at our school, École Estienne, in April 2017.In 2009, a U.S. State Department diplomatic cable gave one of the first glimpses of a burgeoning alliance between Israel and the Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The cable quoted Israeli Foreign Ministry official Yacov Hadas saying, “the Gulf Arabs believe in Israel’s role because of their perception of Israel’s close relationship with the United States,” adding that GCC states “believe Israel can work magic.”
Israel and the Gulf states also shared an interest in countering what they saw as rising Iranian influence in the Middle East. So while the two sides sparred in public — Israel’s “Cast Lead” military operation had just claimed more than 1,400 lives in the Gaza Strip and was condemned by Saudi Arabia, in a letter to the United Nations, as “fierce aggression” — they enjoyed “good personal relations” behind closed doors, Hadas said, according to one cable. Hadas reportedly added that the Gulf Arabs were still “not ready to do publicly what they say in private.”
Fast forward six years, and it seems as though the GCC states have finally readied themselves to go public about their warming relationships with Israel. In an event at the Council on Foreign Relations this week in Washington, reported on by Bloomberg’s Eli Lake, high-ranking former Saudi and Israeli officials not only shared the stage but disclosed that the two countries had been holding a series of high-level meetings to discuss shared strategic goals, particularly around the perceived regional ascendance of Iran. At the event, former Saudi General Anwar Eshki openly called for regime change in Iran, while former Israeli ambassador to the U.N., Dore Gold, once a fierce critic of Saudi Arabia, spoke of his outreach to the country in recent years, and of the possibility of resolving the remaining differences between the two nations, stating, “Our standing today on this stage does not mean we have resolved all the differences that our countries have shared over the years, but our hope is we will be able to address them fully in the years ahead.”
Relations with Israel have long been a third rail for Arab states. Following the creation of Israel in 1948 and the resulting displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, other Middle Eastern countries have maintained a position of public hostility towards Israel, in line with longstanding domestic public opinion. Although countries such as Egypt, under military dictatorship, have concluded formal peace treaties with Israel in defiance of popular sentiment, for the most part Gulf states have remained aloof.
In recent years, however, the dual phenomena of the Arab uprisings and growing Iranian influence have pushed GCC leaders closer to Israel. Last year, Saudi Prince Turki bin Faisal took the unprecedented step of publishing an op-ed in a major Israeli newspaper calling for peace between Israel and GCC nations, as well as for a resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. As the United States under the Obama administration has pursued détente with Iran in recent years, reports have also surfaced suggesting covert security cooperation between Israel and GCC states. The investigative news site Middle East Eye recently documented the existence of regular, secret flights between Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv, despite the ostensible ban on Israeli citizens entering the UAE.
In his 2012 book After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies, Durham University Professor Chris Davidson wrote that Gulf states will continue to seek Israeli support thanks to growing external pressures on Gulf States in the wake of regional upheaval. Even as it describes the GCC countries as consisting of “national populations who for the most part are anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian, with the topics of Israel and Zionism often stirring strong emotions,” the book documents increasing clandestine economic and political coordination by GCC leaders with their Israeli counterparts in recent years.
There are signs, however, that even popular anti-Israeli sentiment within these countries may be shifting. A recent poll of Saudi public opinion conducted by students at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, an Israeli university, found that a minority of the Saudi public viewed Israel as a major threat to their country, and cited instead either Iran or the nascent Islamic State as their primary objects of concern. “What we think here in Israel about the Saudis is not exactly what they are,” said Alex Mintz of IDC Herziliya, who helped oversee the poll. “We assume that we know what people in Iran, Gaza and Saudi Arabia think, [but] nobody that I talked to thought that Saudis would say by a margin of 3-to-1 that Iran scared them more than Israel, nobody predicted that.”
With the Obama administration seeking to conclude a controversial nuclear agreement with Iran next month, it seems likely that Gulf Arab states and Israel, traditional U.S. allies united in their opposition to the deal, will continue to grow their strategic coordination. The recent decision by high-ranking former officials representing both Gulf and Israeli interests to go public with their cooperation is only the latest signal of the strength of this burgeoning alliance. Given that this relationship is flourishing against the backdrop of the still-ongoing Israel-Palestine crisis, as well as the ascendance of far-right political parties within Israel itself, it seems clear that GCC leaders have decided in the wake of the Arab Spring to place their own narrow political interests above any publicly-stated principles about stability in the region.
AP/Saudi Arabian Press AgencyPolice discovered homicide victim Haruka Weiser’s body in a University of Texas creek bed last week, 30 years to the day that Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered in her dorm room at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University.
Three decades and 1,600 miles separate the tragedies, but the legacy of Clery’s death was apparent in Austin last week — and may have played a part in quickly leading investigators to Weiser’s alleged killer.
Weiser, an 18-year-old freshman attending UT on a full dance scholarship, was randomly targeted and killed the evening of April 3 while making the five-minute walk from the drama building to her dorm room on the usually bustling campus, police said.
University of Texas dance student Haruka Weiser was slain April 3. (Family photo) More
The 1990 Clery Act requires colleges and universities to disclose their security policies, keep a public crime log, publish an annual crime report and provide timely warnings to students and campus employees about immediate or ongoing threats.
Slideshow: University of Texas homicide in Austin >>>
The federal law doesn’t dictate safety measures such as emergency call boxes, electronic keycards at residence halls or video surveillance, but the increased scrutiny has led many U.S. colleges to beef up their security presence.
“The type of target hardening that can either prevent crimes from occurring or when a tragic crime does occur, can be used to promptly identify a suspect — that may have not been possible in previous years,” said S. Daniel Carter, a longtime campus safety consultant.
Today, the University of Texas has 617 video surveillance cameras in use on its 431-acre campus. While the technology didn’t prevent Weiser’s death, cameras did capture video of the ballerina passing her alleged attacker near a walking trail close to the UT alumni center and football stadium.
Murder suspect Meechaiel Criner. (Austin Police Department) More
Police used the images to get the public’s help in identifying Meechaiel Criner, a 17-year-old homeless runaway who they said killed the popular dance student sometime between 9:30 and 11:50 p.m. Criner, charged with murder, remains in jail with bail set at $1 million. According to his arrest affidavit, the video shows Criner pulling what appears to be a “shiny rigid object” from his pants as he begins to trail Weiser. When arrested, detectives said Criner was in possession of some of Weiser’s things, including her laptop and duffle bag.Structural changes to government have become a common occurrence in Australia. They are triggered for a range of reasons: political (the will of particular Prime Minister), symbolic (to signal intent about action in a particular area), logistical (to create a more integrated response) or in response to changes to the portfolios of ministers, just to name just a few.
In our research on these so-called machinery of government changes, where structural changes are made to the bureaucracy by merging departments or moving units, we have found that Australia engages an alarming amount of structural change to the public sector.
What is often overlooked when enacting MoG changes is that they tend to be a source of stress. This was shown this week in a story run by the Canberra Times on the first MoG under the current federal government that was said to leave public servants in a state of panic. Our research into recent changes to Prime Minister and Cabinet support this claim. We found that cultural clashes and low morale can be produced by MoG changes.
While MoG changes occur for a wide range of reasons, it is often argued by governments their particular MoGs will create new efficiencies in the public sector.
However, these potential gains can be lost in what one of our research participants called “frictional costs”. By this they meant costs associated with moving people and groups around, including cultural costs, IT costs and industrial relation costs.
The UK government has begun costing MoGs in an effort to reduce their occurrence by showing their high administrative costs. In the UK, some MoGs have been costed as high as £15-30m in extra staffing and building expenditures alone. This does not account for productivity losses or pay increases that often occur due to changes to enterprise bargaining agreements. In 2010, the London School of Economics put the price of creating the Department for Work and Pensions at close to £175m.
At present, even governments with an emphasis on ‘cutting red tape’ have undertaken extreme and costly MoG changes. The Abbott government, for example, undertook one of the largest and most complicated MoGs in the history of Australian government when it moved the Indigenous Affairs function into Prime Minister and Cabinet.
A better way?
Given that governments appear to incur exorbitant financial costs, as well as significant human stress (and associated losses in productivity), machinery of government changes should be used prudently.
“This structure, while creating a heavy workload for ministers, means that the public service does not require structural changes to the bureaucracy.”
Recently, we have expanded our research into MoGs to other Westminster systems. We have found that Canada takes a much more conservative approach to re-shaping the public sector.
High ranking officials in the Canadian government explained that they use Cabinet committees as a coordination tool instead of MoGs. Committees are created around issues of central importance to the government of the day. Currently, the Canadian government has 12 committees. This structure, while creating a heavy workload for ministers, means that the public service does not require structural changes to the bureaucracy. Moreover, by taking responsibility for particular issues (usually a so-called wicked policy problem), committees become a mechanism for integration across government departments.
The other key difference that enables the Canadian government to lean less heavily on structural change is the willingness to locate more than one minister within a department. In Australia, historically each minister is responsible for a portfolio, which is reflected by the structure of a department (which supports that minister).
In contrast, Canadian departments have multiple ministers. We found that they create teams within large departments that answer to a primary minister (though they may brief more than one). In doing so, the Canadian government uses branding instead of re-structuring to put its stamp on the bureaucracy.
If similar approaches were adopted in Australia, we could significantly reduce the administrative costs of government — allowing more public money to be spent on policy delivery.
Gemma Carey also blogs about social policy at The Power to Persuade.The first thing I started building was a city generator. After studying papers online, watching many videos and how Introversion software went about it, I built up an idea of what was needed and what I would avoid. I’m just one guy and my surname isn’t Delay so I kept it real simple. The road system is set to a grid so there are no curves or even diagonals in the city. Keeps all the maths simple.
There are many systems for producing a road system and many factors you can take into account. I ignored most of them mainly to keep the scope small and to keep complexity down. I settled on an incredibly simple algorithm to generate the road structure. It would essentially draw snake roads changing direction perpendicularly based on a seeded random generator. It would spend a lot of time retracing it’s steps to create city blocks. The outcome was pretty good with such a simple system and resembled something of a city.
Modifications to this included using multiple road iterations instead of just one so the road system flowed from the center. Otherwise there was a tendency to create linear city. I also randomly removed roads and modified others to make them alleys to keep it interesting. One final thing to implement will be to remove dead ends to improve gameplay later on. Dead ends are always frustrating unless you want to build a maze.Thousands of critically endangered frogs have been found dead in South America, leaving scientists scrambling to find the cause. The most likely culprit, they say: pollution.
The Titicaca water frog (Telmatobius coleus), one of the largest aquatic frogs in the world, goes by a unique nickname. It has “amazingly baggy skin, which gives it the common name scrotum frog,” says National Geographic explorer Jonathan Kolby, a PhD student who studies frogs in Latin America.
“Their wrinkly skin is an adaptation to help them absorb more oxygen from the water, possibly because they live at such high altitudes”—around Lake Titicaca along the Peru and Bolivia border, says Kolby.
“But they do look pretty funny,” Kolby adds about the large frogs. (The frogs were even nominated as one of the world’s ugliest animals.)
What's happened to the frogs, though, is no laughing matter: an estimated ten thousand were found dead, along 30 miles of the Coata River, a tributary of Lake Titicaca.
Stunning Close-ups: Meet These Frogs Before They Go Extinct
Scientists in the area are working to discover the causes of the die-off, and will be conducting necropsies and water sampling. Until the results are in it’s impossible to know exactly what killed the frogs.
“I would be amazed if it wasn’t human activity that precipitated this,” says Kolby.
Likely causes include human sewage and heavy metal pollution from mining, much of it illegal, reports The Guardian.
IUCN reports that the frog was once common in Lake Titicaca but has declined by 80 percent over the past few years, making it critically endangered. A population estimate isn't currently available, but scientists fear ten thousand deaths could make a big impact.
When Jacques Cousteau studied the Titicaca frogs in the 1970s it was common. He found individuals that stretched out to 20 inches long and weighed 2.2 pounds.
It’s not clear if the frogs have also been weakened by the invasive chytrid fungus, a scourge that has swept around the world over the past several decades and wiped out millions of amphibians. There are no published reports of chytrid infection in the Titicaca water frog, although Kolby says it has been found in closely related species in Peru, not far away.
“It’s very likely this frog is also susceptible to chytrid,” says Kolby. “Further, even in frogs that seem to do relatively well against chytrid, once you start adding additional stresses like pollution and habitat loss that can knock the system out of equilibrium.”Former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili may soon be put on the international wanted list, the country’s justice minister said. Accused of abuse of power, Saakashvili, who now lives in the US, was arrested in absentia on August 2.
“The court has ordered the pre-trial detention of [Saakashvili] and he has an obligation to face the trial. And all the measures prescribed by the law, including international ones, can be used to make this person appear before the court,” the country’s justice minister, Tea Tsulukiani, said, adding that “Mikhail Saakashvili is an ordinary defendant.”
On August 2, the Tbilisi City Court ordered the pre-trial detention of Saakashvili, former Justice Minister Zurab Adeishvili and former Defense Minister Davit Kezerashvili. All three were arrested in absentia after ignoring the Prosecutor General's Office summonses.
“In recent months Saakashvili repeatedly refused to appear for an interrogation as a witness on a number of criminal cases, and then he refused to be questioned remotely via Skype,” the court said over the weekend. “In such cases, under Georgia’s legislation, the Prosecutor General's Office has a right to seek a preventive punishment for persons who evade participation in the interrogation, which was done."
The Prosecutor General’s Office launched a criminal case against Saakashvili after he failed to appear before investigators for questioning July 28.
"I will obviously not take part in this farce," Saakashvili, who became president in 2004 after the virtually bloodless "Rose Revolution," wrote on his Facebook page.
Charges against Saakashvili, officially brought July 29, include dispersal of a peaceful rally on November 7, 2007, an illegal raid on local Imedi TV on the same day and seizing the property of businessman Badri Patarkatsishvili.
Defense lawyers for the former politician have already submitted an appeal to the Tbilisi Appeals Court demanding a reversal of the decision.
"There was no evidence for the charging of the ex-president,” Saakashvili’s lawyer Otar Kahidze said earlier. “A criminal case was started to be fabricated later. Of course, we intend to appeal this unfair decision of the court in all instances after we get a documented decision of the Tbilisi City Court."
In March, the Prosecutor General's Office of Georgia summoned Saakashvili to come for questioning “as a witness” in “a number of criminal cases.” The former Georgian leader, however, ignored the summons.
Saakashvili was Georgian president for nearly a decade, from January 2004 to November 2013. His successor, Georgy Margvelashvili, the head of the Georgian Dream coalition and a political protégé of Saakashvili’s principal foe, billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, won the presidency in elections.
Saakashvili now lectures at Boston's Tufts University.
On Sunday, Saakashvili told Tbilisi-based Rustavi-2 television that he will not seek asylum in any country because there is no need for him to do that.
He also called that charges against him “groundless” and said he believes the Tbilisi court ruling will not prevent his “movements around the world.”
“I have recently been to Albania. On July 30, I was in Budapest at the invitation of my friend, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. I am planning to visit some other countries soon,” Saakashvili said. He added that Georgia and Russia were the only two countries which he could not visit for the moment.31 miles is a long way to run, no matter how you slice it. But as my first ultra marathon, I was really lucky that everything about this run went right. Big Basin 50K, also known as the Skyline to Sea 50K – this was the run that made me dream of trail running. Single track trails through redwood groves, dew covered ferns, oak groves, monster technical descents, creek crossings and a run towards the sea. I had been obsessing over the route, aid-stations, weather, food, hydration, what to pack, etc. over the last couple of weeks that my wife thought I had PRS. Yeah, that would be Pre Race Stress. Here’s my cheat sheet of the elevation profile, with aid stations and distances marked over them.
Not exactly to scale, but was my way of breaking down the 31 miles of the Big Basin 50K into smaller manageable segments. Yeah, yeah, old school, blah, blah. Whatever works to get you through the 31 miles, right? The Big Basin 50K has about 3,190 ft elevation gain and a 5,790 ft elevation loss. Also known as the quad-killer.
Big Basin 50K
First on the lucky list was the weather. Compared to the day before it had cooled down by 10°F and was in the high 60’s to low 70’s with overcast. Couldn’t have ask for a better day. For the gear and food, I erred on the side of comfort instead of going light since it was my first 50K. I had Sandwiches, Clif Shots, Succeed! Caps and Onigiri packed into my SJ Ultra Vest. I carpooled to the starting line with fellow runners Monica and Adila which meant I could get an extra hour of sleep! Monica was also the one that inspired me to register for this race. Got there around 8:15 for the bib pickup and the mood was generally up beat and got to see some familiar faces.
I figured I could make time on the first 6.5 mile mostly downhill run to Waterman Gap. We left at 9am sharp and I took off keeping a good pace and stayed with the leading pack. The single track trails and the shaded fire trails weren’t too technical and I could just let go and flow with the gravity. We had to cross Hwy 9 a few times and I got to the first aid station around 50 minutes, but didn’t bother to stop. The cool weather meant that I wasn’t sweating as much. I figured I’ll make it to China Grade before the snacking started in earnest. The 4.6 mile climb was amazing. The fog had moved in making the trails a little damp with a cool mist in the air. The ferns glistened with the moisture and the trail was soft. I reached the top of China Grade at 1:45. About 11 miles done, 19 to go. There was a small nagging tightness on my right calf, but I was feeling chirpy otherwise. Tore into my ½ Almond Butter & Jelly sandwich and started on the pretty technical 4.6 mile descent.
Lots of rocks, roots, stumps and had to watch my footfall carefully. Amazing sweeping vistas too, though didn’t linger too much to take it all in. About half way I saw a runner stretching out his calves and he had a bloody nose. Looked like a crash and burn. Three times before the next aid station, I caught my right ankle rolling on something and a sharp pain from the partially torn ligament reminding me to be more careful.
When I got to Gazos Creek, I chucked my SJ Ultra Vest and just grabbed a water bottle and a Clif Shot to head up the 4.6 mile loop. From what I had read, this was pretty exposed and I wanted to carry as little weight as possible for the last big climb. And it paid off, though the weather continued to amaze me. When I got back to the aid station after the loop, the place was buzzing with runners, both marathoners and the ultra runners all stocking up for the home stretch. I was roughly 20 miles in and I had done it in less than 3:30. Perfect time for my Onigiri. I had made this last night with sushi rice, miso and wrapped them with a sheet of Nori and it was the most delicious thing I’ve ever had on a run, especially right around the wall. The Marathon Monks of Mt. Hiei are known to use this and I read about it in Scott Jurek’s book Eat and Run. Hey, I have no shame in running on the shoulders of giants. At this point, I figured that even if I took it easy I would make a sub 6-hour run, which was kinda what I was shooting for.
Restocked with water and wolfing down on my Onigiri, I left the Gazos Creek aid station for a short climb and the final descent. I remembered this stretch from last summer when I ran a 10-mile loop to Berry Creek Falls and back. Once I hit Berry Creek Falls, the descent got a whole lot technical. Lots of steep steps, rocks, boulders and still more roots and stumps. Worked my way down, remembering to breathe and enjoying the cool breeze until the trail started hugging the Waddell creek taking us down to the sea. Passed a few marathoners along the way (including Monica) and this was the longest 8.6 miles I’ve ran. Every runner I passed by was wondering where the *#$? the aid station was. Ran into what seemed like an aid station, but turned out to be a couple of backpackers. Kept inching with a little walk, a little run to the next tree ahead until I reached the Twin Redwoods aid station at 5:10. Surprisingly I was still feeling pretty good and strong.
With 1.6 miles to go, I figured I had a fair chance now of getting to the finish line before 5:30. I took off from the aid station and started up the little climb and paused half way through the trail to soak up the view of the ocean. I could hear the bells, the horns and the cheering at the finish line and knew that I was almost there. As I came down the last hill, I saw my wife and my younger son. I waved at them happily and then looked at my watch. It was 5:28 and I sprinted towards the finish line crossing at 5:29! I finished 16th in my age group and 52nd overall. But hey, who’s counting. This was a huge personal milestone for me, having run my first ultra just 18 months after I started to run.
We hung out at the finish line for a while, drinking beer, making new friends and chatting up with other runners. Monica and Adila both made it to the finish line shortly after with big smiles. Got to meet Les Waddell, 60 years young and maker of the Barefoot Training Sandals. I think it was just the two of us that ran the whole way in sandals. His daughter Alexis was the 2nd female finisher. We celebrated the run with an awesome dinner with all three families at Davenport before heading back home. I woke up the next day still in one piece, but my quads and calves were completely trashed and sore. I suppose the 5,790 ft descent does that to you. That’s one area I could use a lot more improvement.
What was your first ultramarathon? How would you describe that experience?According to YouTube, “if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million”. I’ve therefore been creating some animated gif images with a view to illustrating something better than one of my in-depth articles could.
Today, we’ll be looking at the next generation of elite run-stopping nose tackles in green and white because, after the jump, you’ll see a couple of clips that illustrate the similarities between Damon Harrison and his former teammate Sione Po'uha.
Note: if the animated images take a long time to load, then you can click on each one separately to load them one at a time.
As regular readers of BGA will recall, I was a big fan of Sione Po'uha, talking up his performances long before he'd established himself as an elite run stuffing nose tackle. As I've been witnessing the incredible rise of Damon Harrison from undrafted bit-player to on the brink of becoming a household name, Harrison has constantly been making plays that reminded me of Po'uha. The bye week affords us an ideal opportunity to make a direct comparison.
While you should never judge nose tackles on their statistical productivity alone, it's worth noting that Harrison is on course for 57 tackles this season, right in line with the numbers Po'uha put up at his peak. (He had 59 in 15 games in 2010 and 58 in 2011). A higher proportion of Po'uha's tackles were solo tackles, but at the same time, he did average slightly more reps than Harrison in those seasons. As a better indicator of his overall impact, Harrison is currently grading out as the number six overall NT/DT on PFF (and #1 against the run), which nicely emulates Po'uha's 2011 season where he was number one overall and number two against the run.
https://twitter.com/BigDame900/statuses/374335215445221376
Harrison obviously looks up to Po'uha, as shown by the tweet above, but - as we'll see in some of the gifs below - he's also learned many of the same techniques. This has enabled him to replace Po'uha in this defense and he's doing a stellar job so far. Po'uha suffered through an injury plagued 2012 season, but Harrison has remained healthy so far. He does have some knee issues in his past, but right now seems to be holding up well to his workload, perhaps helped by the fact he reportedly lost 15-20 pounds since last season.
Let's get a look at these two going to work...
Keeping the play in front
Po'uha and Harrison employ different techniques here, but the principle is the same. Clogging up one lane, but maintaining sufficient leverage to fill the cutback lane. Po'uha achieves this by staying light and nimble on his feet and preventing the offensive lineman from being able to seal him in either direction by refusing to commit - classic two-gapping, which has been required of him since before Rex Ryan even arrived. Harrison, on the other hand, drives his man into the runner's path and disengages from the block to fill the cutback lane. If he loses the leverage battle or comes up against a more powerful guard, then he's at risk of being knocked off balance because his feet cross over, whereas Po'uha's do not. However, he gets sufficient momentum and such a powerful surge that there's no danger of this.
Fighting off the initial block
A nose tackle will often lose the initial battle at the point of attack and get blocked off the line. However, both Po'uha and Harrison have an inate ability to keep fighting and continue to leverage their way into the path of the ball carrier, so that they can disengage at the last minute and limit the gain to a short one. I've noticed that Harrison does this a lot, re-anchoring himself after initially being blocked off the line and then getting back into the play to bottle up runs for 3-5 yards.
Rolling downhill
Downhill pursuit is always somewhere that the elite nose tackles will stand out, whereas their work inside in terms of bottling up or redirecting runs often goes unheralded. Po'uha possesses terrific quickness for a man his size, but I honestly think that Harrison might be faster. Note how Po |
to confirm a cause of death. But it still acts as a warning of how rampant and deadly the disease can be. Q&A: Measles and MMR
'Disappointing'
There have been 808 cases of measles confirmed so far in the Swansea epidemic, which also includes the neighbouring Neath Port Talbot and Bridgend areas, and further into mid and west Wales.
MMR jabs are being offered in schools although initial take-up was said to be "disappointing" by Abertawe Bro Morgannwg health board.
There will also be drop-in sessions for the third Saturday in a row at Morriston and Singleton Hospitals in Swansea, the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend and Neath Port Talbot Hospital.
Last weekend around 2,500 people received the MMR vaccination at special clinics held across south Wales.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Dr Marion Lyons, of Public Health Wales, says a death would not be a surprise
Dr Brendan Mason, a consultant epidemiologist with PHW, said he could not comment on Gareth Williams' death as it was still being investigated.
He told BBC Radio Wales that there was a "real possibility" that every measles case could end up in hospital, in intensive care, or have a worse outcome.
"Anyone born after 1970 should make sure they are immunised, especially those in the 10-18 year-old age group," he said.
"Lots of people are not taking it seriously and we have to continue to promote immunisation, not just to protect individuals but also their families and the wider community."
Dr Lyons added: "Measles is a potentially fatal disease and around one in every 1,000 people who contracts measles in developed countries will die.
"Those not fully vaccinated with two doses of MMR are highly likely to catch measles, which is highly contagious."
Symptoms of measles include fever, cold-like symptoms, fatigue, conjunctivitis and a distinctive red-brown rash that appears a few days into the illness.
A Welsh government spokesman added that it was aware of a possible death from measles and extended "deepest sympathies to the family and friends at this difficult time".
He added: "We continue to be in close contact with Public Health Wales and to stress the importance of vaccination as the most effective way to protect against measles."
Although the outbreak was at present affecting the Abertawe Bro Morgannwg, Powys and Hywel Dda health board areas, there have been cases of measles in every health board area in Wales.
On Friday, Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board in north Wales urged parents to get their children vaccinated, reminding people of an outbreak in Porthmadog which resulted in more than 60 people contracting measles in 2012.Image caption Playing for Killinkere: will Garth Brooks take up the offer of a big green pitch in Cavan?
There is a green field in the Republic of Ireland with Garth Brooks' name on it.
A gaelic football club in County Cavan has offered the big US country star an alternative venue in a patch of their home county.
"Come and play for Killinkere," they said, after plans for two of his Dublin concerts fell through.
The Cavan club is out to shower him with kindness.
There will be fields aplenty for parking because it will be just after the second cut of silage and the club would come to some agreement over the number of raffles during the show, they said.
"If it can't be Croke Park, why not Killinkere?" said the Killinkere's public relations officer Mark Farrelly who extended the invitation in an open letter on Twitter.
Our facilities have been upgraded no end in recent years and we have recently built a new stand and installed a toilet. There's ample parking as it will coincide with the second cut of silage and there'll be fields aplenty to abandon cars in Mark Farrelly, Killinkere GFC
Brooks is supposed to play five concerts at Croke Park in Dublin at the end of July, but he ran into difficulties after he was told there was a licence for just three of them.
Residents living close to the stadium had complained about the disruption caused by such events.
Thousands of fans could be disappointed if he does not show.
So Mr Farrelly penned a tongue-in-cheek letter, he wrote: "Our facilities have been upgraded no end in recent years and we have recently built a new stand and installed a toilet.
"There's ample parking as it will coincide with the second cut of silage and there'll be fields aplenty to abandon cars in.
"Support acts could be provided and the number of raffles held during the gig would be negotiable," he wrote.
His joke was taken up on Twitter and raised plenty of smiles. Although some people thought he was serious.
"Killinkere is between Baillieboro and Virginia. It is a big rural area - he would have no problem with residents around here because there are none," said Mark.
The toilet beside the stand would also be convenient for Garth in between zip wiring onto the stage.
"People can see you going in there as it is right beside the stand, but it is good and private inside," he pointed out.
Sadly, he said, although Twitter has lit up with banter, the star himself has not come forward with a reply... maybe he's just mulling it over 'til tomorrow - if that ever comes.Photo by Marshall Astor via Flickr
Every so often, we get e-mails in the middle of the night asking why an LAPD helicopter is circling above and shining a light down on their street. If you've lived here long enough, we all know this is a common experience. After all, the LAPD, who boasts that they have the "largest municipal airborne law enforcement operation in the world," has 17 helicopters and one twin engine plane (unconfirmed, but we heard they may actually have just bought a new helicopter, making that 18).
With that said, helicopter noise is an ubiquitous aural sensation that's here to stay. So if a helicopter is circling around your home or work for a good period of time, they are happy to take your call at 213-485-2600 and let you know.
Of course, it would be much more efficient if they just used Twitter or some broadcast method to inform the public when one is circling for ten or more minutes. And it's good time for that considering Captain James Miller from the Van Nuys Division just took over the Air Support Division and that the City Council this week mandated departments to look into using Twitter. In fact, one of the reasons the LA Fire Department alerts the public when their helicopters are being used for a hoist or lost hiker search is to avoid a mass of phone calls asking why one is circling above their home. And it works.Effects of Pranayama on the Brain Sannyasi Sivagyana, Australia Pranayama, or expansion of the prana or vital energy, occurs through the practices of prana nigraha, or control of the prana.(1) This paper examines various prana nigraha practices which contribute initially to changing the physiological state of the brain and are said to awaken prana in the realm of the chakras, or psychic centres, within the human body. A comment is made on the effect that prana nigraha practices have had on the writer. A review of a medical examination of a yogic adept is included, which confirms the ability of pranayama to influence an indivdual's brain activity. The conclusion is drawn that extensive prana nigraha practices leading into pranayama can significantly influence the physical, pranic, mental and psychic aspects of the human brain. Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati defines prana or vital energy as: The essence of all created, manifest forms whether animate or inanimate, the force which determines the existence of matter and the elements.(2) Prana nigraha is the manipulation of the breath to control prana. When practised regularly, prana nigraha leads to pranayama or expansion of the vital energy. Pranayama is the control of the upa pranas (sub pranas) which achieves harmonization of the physiological body and leads to awakening of prana in the chakras or psychic body. Once the prana is awakened in the chakras, pranayama begins. The culmination is the merging of apana, prana and samana forces at manipura chakra which, in turn, leads to the activation of udana and vyana pranas. When the five pranas are operating simultaneously, the kundalini (spiritual energy or evolutionary potential) (3) is awakened and the process of self-realization begins.(4) Pranayama is divided into three stages: (i) awareness of prana, (ii) prana nigraha, and (iii) expansion of prana. Prana itself has two aspects. One is prana shakti, which is the vital force and consists of the five minor pranas.(5) The other is manas or chit shakti, the mental or conscious force, centred in the brain. Without prana, the body and mind are dead. Modern science states that there are ten areas of the brain of which we are using only one at our present stage of evolution. To use the other 90% involves the distribution of prana to awaken these areas. The subconscious mind and its relationship to the conscious mind are dealt with in pranayama by the establishment of an interface between the conscious and the subconscious minds in the area of the brain called the reticular activating system (RAS).(6) The RAS is the trigger for other parts of the brain. Man is able to affect the RAS through the breath only. No other function of the autonomic nervous system can be controlled by conscious human activity. Control of the brain through the RAS by means of conscious breathing is a method by which other functions of the body may be controlled, for example, heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, excretion and absorption. Therefore, control of the subconscious is achieved through conscious activity of prana nigraha and then pranayama.(7) Four pranayama practices are examined for their effects on the brain or other parts of the human body. These practices are selected on the basis of their importance in the practice of yoga and their stated influence on the physiological and psychic bodies. Kapalbhati Van Lysbeth states that kapalbhati influences the circulation of blood within the brain. Kapalbhati changes the volume of the brain according to the respiratory rhythm and, therefore, increases the irrigation of the brain matter. Normal respiration consists of 12-18 massages per minute, whereas kaplbhati can involve up to 120 massages per minute, which leads to a significant increase in blood volume throughout and thereby improves irrigation of the brain. The capillaries are opened up and the brain cells related to the pineal and pituitary glands receive significant stimulation.(8) It is logical to conclude that increased brain irrigation with blood is accompanied by elevated pranic levels and ensures even and harmonious distribution of prana throughout the body. Van Lysbeth supports this conclusion as follows: Together with the acceleration of the blood circulation in the whole body, this stimulation of the brain and thereby of the central nervous system produces the special'relation' of the body that invigorates and tonifies each cell.(9) Kapalbhati reduces the ratio of the outward breath to the inward breath in kundalini yoga to one quarter. This in turn increases the breath control, stretching it to the limit, and dramatically effects the carbon dioxide, chemical, acid and alkalis in the blood.(10) Carbon dioxide is the trigger for inhalation of breath into the lungs and the body and, therefore, the body is very sensitive to carbon dioxide levels. Kumbhaka In the practice of kumbhaka, or breath retention, which may be antar (internal) or bahir (external), tolerance to starvation of oxygen and buildup of carbon dioxide is achieved. Kumbhaka, practised over a duration of time, will allow the body to retain carbon dioxide and become accustomed to reduced oxygen levels to achieve hypometabolism, that is, a slowing down of the metabolic rate. The production rate of carbon dioxide is thereby reduced which causes a subtle effect to take place with conscious control of breathing. This effect influences the brain and body chemistry and reduces the need to breathe when carbon dioxide buildup is experienced.(11) External kumbhaka also affects the body physiologically by causing the mental process to stop, because of the vacuum created inside the body. This action is very useful in the practice of pratyahara, sense withdrawl, and dharana, concen-tration, as a prerequisite to achieve the state of meditation. Kumbhaka stops vital body rhythms and affects the brain waves. Control of the brain waves is the key to conrolling all brain rhythms.(12) While the effects of bahir kumbhaka are many, in broad terms, the body and mind learn to stay calm under stress. Nadi shodhana Kumbhaka is used in the practice of nadi shodhana or alternate nostril breathing. Nadi shodhana is the 'perfect balancing practice' (13) which stimulates equally the left and right sides of the brain and body. Ida and pingala, the major nadis, or pranic channels, are balanced which, in turn, modifies the human thinking process to balance introversion and extro-version. The ancient yogis have recorded that once ida and pingala are balanced and purified, the central nadi, sushumna, begins to flow, leading to increased awareness and the state of meditation.(14) Nadi shodhana imposes a rhythm on the brain and the nadis, over the irregular state that normally exists. Modern living has removed the regular rhythms of nature from the human body and nadi shodhana assists in bringing the body, prana and mental activity into balance. Research has shown that nadi shodhana affects the brainwaves by superimposing a regular sine wave over the normal irregular brain activity, imposing a discipline on the irregularities of the mental process and, eventually, the autonomous body rhythms. Kumbhaka in nadi shodhana places a momentary block on the body rhythms, changing the usual carbon dioxide/oxygen relationship, thereby affecting the whole system. Antar kumbhaka emphasizes the oxygen content and bahir kumbhaka emphasizes the carbon dioxide phase.(15) Ujjayi Ujjayi, or the psychic breath, produced by a slight contraction of the throat, has a subtle effect on brain activity via four processes: (i) Ujjayi increases the pressure of air in the lungs and expands the effective use of the lungs. This ensures transfer of oxygen to each cell within the lungs, rather than a significantly smaller percentage used during normal respiration.
(ii) Increased oxygen transfer in the lungs enhances blood flow throughout the body, while the body is in a relaxed state. The effect is similar to that achieved when the body is physically active, with the advantage of the whole body being in a relaxed state.(16)
(iii) Conscious awareness is transferred into the unconscious mind which affects the nervous system governing respiration. A smooth rhythm is exerted on the nervous system that has a profound effect at the psychic level of the mind.
(iv) The contraction of the throat caused by ujjayi affects the carotid sinuses which regulate blood pressure in the arteries. Ujjayi exerts a slight pressure on the carotid sinuses which, over time, lowers the blood pressure, which leads to reduced tension and slows the thought processes of the mind.(17) Examination of a yogic adept The effect of the practices of prana nigraha outlined above have been substantiated in part through work carried out at the 5th annual convention of the International Association for Religion and Parapsychology in 1977. The research revealed that Ramananda Yogi, who had practised pranayama for many years, had the abilty to control the heart muscle itself and was, therefore, able to control his heart function. During pranayama, Ramananda Yogi was able to reduce his pulse rate from 100 per minute to 65-80 per minute, although such changes would be dangerous for persons who had not practised pranayama.(18) It was also concluded at the confer-ence through biological tests that Ramananda Yogi was able to control his basal metabolic rate through pranayama.(19) The effects of pranayama on the brain as detailed by Swami Niranjanananda, and the results of clinical trials carried out by the International Association for Research for Religion and Parapsychology, substantiate the profound effects of pranayama on the physical and mental human body. Experiences of the writer While extensive pranayama leads to significant control over the brain, prana nigraha practices carried out by the writer have affected subtle changes in ability to control both the breath and energy within the body. It is more difficult to detect any major effects on body physiology, but there has been a definite change in the state of one-pointedness and calmness of the mind over the past two years as result of the practices of kapalbhati, nadi shodhana, bhastrika and ujjayi breathing. The ancient yogic texts speak of the ability of pranayama to control the mind. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika by Yogi Swatmarama states that pranic constraint can control the mind: When prana moves, chitta (the mental force) moves; when prana is without movement, chitta is without movement. By this (steadiness of prana), the yogi attains steadiness of mind and this restrains the vayu (air).(20) In conclusion, current writings by recognized yogis and research into the effects of the practices of pranayama support the ancient yogic view that pranayama exerts profound effects on the human brain. The limited experience of the writer also supports the view that the practices of pranayama can have subtle effects on the brain, human well-being and influence the individual's level of spirituality. Bibliography (1) Saraswati, Swami Niranjanananda, Yoga Darshan, Sri Panchdashnam Paramahamsa Alakh Bara, Deoghar, 1993, p.134.
(2) ibid.
(3) ibid. p.463.
(4) ibid. p.150.
(5) ibid. p.308.
(6) ibid. p.309.
(7) ibid.
(8) Van Lysbeth, Andre. Pranayama: The Yoga of Breathng, Union Paperback, London, 1979, pp.155-7.
(9) ibid.
(10) Saraswati, op cit. pp.342-3.
(11) ibid. pp.323-4.
(12) ibid. p.331.
(13) ibid. p.333.
(14) ibid.
(15) ibid. pp.332-3.
(16) ibid. pp.336-7.
(17) ibid. pp.337-8.
(18) Motoyama, Hiroshi (ed), Western and Eastern Medical Studies of Pranayama and Heat Control, in Research for Religion and Parapsychology, The International Association for Research for Religion and Parapsychology, Tokyo, 1977 pp.23-4.
(19) ibid. p.42.
(20) Swatmarama, Yogi, Hatha Yoga Pradipika, 2nd edition, Bihar School of Yoga, Munger, 1993 p.134.
(21) Saraswati, Swami Niranjanananda, Prana Pranayama and Prana Vidya, Bihar School of Yoga, Sri Panchdashnam Paramahamsa Alakh Bara, Deoghar, 1993. [top]A desperate search for missing RAF gunner Corrie McKeague was today extended for another three weeks.
The 23-year-old vanished after a night out with his friends in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, on September 24 last year.
His mother has now vowed to hire a private investigator if police fail to find her son who has been missing for more than seven months.
Nicola Urquhart, 47, spoke of her grief on ITV's Good Morning Britain and fears someone has lied to police.
Suffolk Police are continuing to search for missing gunner Corrie McKeague at the Milton landfill site near Cambridge
Officers are still at the site and continue to search in the hunt which was originally estimated to take up to 10 weeks
Nicola Urquhart, 47, told of her grief eight months after her 23-year-old RAF gunner son went missing after a night out with friends in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
She added that she had heard some 'ridiculous' theories about her son's disappearance.
And hours after her appearance on the show, Suffolk Police revealed that they will continue their search on the landfill site at Milton in Cambridgeshire.
More than 3,500 tonnes of waste has been searched but no trace of the young airman has been found.
The hunt, originally estimated to take up to 10 weeks, is now in its 11th week.
Ms Urquhart told the show: 'I've always tried to say that unless Corrie's physically found, I'm not going to let my own head go to the police that he may be dead.
'But I think it's completely unrealistic now to think anything other than that. So all I can do is just keep trying to find him.
'There are loads of theories out there and some of them are ridiculous, but this is ridiculous. He's walked into a dead end - he's not come back out again on camera.
'Only four vehicles go in there. He's left in one of those vehicles, so either somebody's not telling the truth or he's ended up at the landfill.'
Police have spent thousands of hours and £1million looking for Mr McKeague, who was at first thought to have tried walking back to his base at RAF Honington.
Volunteers have also taken part in searches organised by his family, but no evidence of his whereabouts has been found.
Ms Urquhart told ITV's Good Morning Britain presenters Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid that she fears someone has lied to police and that she had heard some 'ridiculous' theories
Police have spent thousands of hours and £1million looking for Mr McKeague (pictured), who was at first thought to have tried walking back to his base at RAF Honington
A search team is pictured combing through a landfill site in Milton, near Cambridge, in March
A Suffolk Police spokesman said on Wednesday: 'The search has been expanded after waste linked to both the right dates and the right location were found outside the initial cell area identified.
'As this type of search is so unusual, it was not known how the waste would have moved and as the work has progressed officers have gained a greater understanding of both how the waste is deposited and spread out, and the nature and construction of the site.
'Officers continue to take all of this into account as the search continues.
Mr McKeague is pictured with his girlfriend April Oliver, 21, who is expecting his child
'The work is under constant review and now, in week 11, in view of the dates on items still being found and advice from officers on the ground and the site team, it is likely the search will continue for at least three further weeks to ensure that the area holding waste from the relevant period is comprehensively examined.'
Ms Urquhart added: 'The search that they've been carrying out, they have found things as small as mobile phones - it really is a thorough search. I have no doubt from the way that the police have described it to me that if Corrie were there they would have found him.
'So it's not the case that they'll get to the end of this search of this cell and say 'he might still be in there'. I don't believe that. If they don't find him in there, it's because he's not in that cell.'
More recently, police officers have been combing through a landfill site in Milton, near Cambridge.
A bin lorry collected rubbish in an area behind some shops where Mr McKeague was last seen on CCTV.
It is now thought he may have crawled into a commercial bin for shelter and was accidentally crushed before the load was taken to the tip.
His mobile phone signal followed the route of the lorry on the night. The evidence was initially dismissed because the refuse firm wrongly recorded the weight of the load it picked up as 11kg.
Ms Urquhart retraced Mr McKeague's steps on the night he went missing in September
A bin lorry collected rubbish behind some shops where Mr McKeague was last seen on CCTV
It was later corrected to more than 100kg. Two months into the search at Milton, however, no trace of him has been found.
Speaking to presenters Susanna Reid and DailyMail.com U.S. Editor-at-Large Piers Morgan, Ms Urquhart said: 'I can't even begin to describe what it's like.
'I know millions of people go missing every year, and my son's no different to anybody else that goes missing, but the circumstances surrounding Corrie's disappearance are just so bizarre. I suppose that's just what keeps me going.'
She continued: 'I think exactly as the police have been saying to me, just now we still have the rest of this week, I could get a phone call this week saying that they've found him.
'As the DI said to me, if they keep finding rubbish that is that date, that place, then they will keep looking in those areas.
Last week, Mr McKeague's girlfriend April Oliver (pictured) shared a poignant black and white first image of her baby bump as she prepares to give birth to his child
Mr McKeague was last seen on CCTV walking on a street in Bury St Edmunds in the early hours
'It's not time constraints that are stopping it – it's where the search will naturally end. But if there is only one other cell right beside it, and Corrie's not found, I think the police would just naturally start to search that – it wouldn't be a case of me trying to urge them to do anything.'
Last week, Mr McKeague's girlfriend April Oliver shared a poignant black and white first image of her baby bump as she prepares to give birth to his child.
Clutched in her left hand was a tiny pair of boots similar to the Timberlands Mr McKeague was wearing when he was last seen in September.
April Oliver posted the photo on Facebook, where she wrote: 'I miss and love Corrie with every part of my body and little things set off different emotions.
'I can't help but be truly unconditionally in love with my baby and you're not here yet.
Ms Urquhart is pictured during the search for her missing 23-year-old son last December
Ms Urquhart joins search and rescue volunteers near his base at RAF Honnington in Suffolk
'You bring so much pain yet just as much joy and your daddy would be proud of you my little one and would love you as much as I do.
'Corrie will be a part of both of us forever and no one can take that away.'
A Suffolk Police spokesman said last week: 'Throughout the search officers have found material that have indicated they are in the right area – finding waste that was clearly identifiable as being from Bury St Edmunds and within the right time frame.
'The work being completed is continually being reviewed, with daily updates being passed to senior officers overseeing the investigation.
'In view of the dates on items still being found and advice from officers on the ground and the site team, the search will continue.'WASHINGTON — A Justice Department lawyer on Tuesday said courts should not second-guess President Trump’s targeted travel ban, drawing skepticism from a three-judge federal appeals panel weighing the limits of executive authority in cases of national security.
But even August E. Flentje, the Justice Department’s lawyer, sensed he was not gaining ground with that line of argument. “I’m not sure I’m convincing the court,” Mr. Flentje said.
It was a lively but technical hearing on an issue that has gripped much of the country’s attention — and that of foreign allies and Middle East nations — for the past week. Issued without warning on Jan. 27, just a week after Mr. Trump took office, the executive order disrupted travel and drew protests at the nation’s airports by suspending entry for people from seven predominantly Muslim countries and limiting the nation’s refugee program.
No matter how the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rules — in a decision that is expected within days — an appeal to the United States Supreme Court is likely. That court remains short-handed and could deadlock. A 4-to-4 tie in the Supreme Court would leave the appeals court’s ruling in place.MARIN (CBS SF) — Decades after the U.S. Federal Government banned the drug ecstasy — which in turn went underground, gaining notoriety as a party drug — a Bay Area medical team got special permission to study its therapeutic use in patients with life-threatening illness.
Now only on KPIX News, some of these patients talked about their experience.
We found them in Marin County. In the shadow of Mount Tamalpais, in a remote location, near the prayer flags, they met each other for the first time. It was like they were old friends.
“It’s wonderful, it’s really wonderful.” explained Wendy Donner.
In the living room, Donner joined two others: Andy Gold, and John Saul. They were all involved in a groundbreaking study.
“For me, I was thrilled because – I just – I couldn’t wait,” said Saul of the study.
Each one was legally given what’s still an illegal drug, and more than once.
“I had a little bit of trepidation taking it the first time,” said Gold.
“I went into that first real session and it like — blew me away,” said Donner.
The goal of the trial is to see whether a pure dose of the compound MDMA, also known as ecstasy, can be pure medicine: could it ease the crippling anxiety, fear, or depression felt by those suffering from a life-threatening disease? This is one of the studies now underway that’s overseen by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS for short.
All three of these individuals qualified by their misfortune of experiencing a traumatic diagnosis.
“In June 2014, I was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer,” explained Donner, who is married and the mother of two children. Donner endured a year of treatment that involved chemotherapy, surgery, and then reconstructive surgery.
Saul suffers from systemic sclerosis, or scleroderma. It’s a chronic autoimmune disease. The hardening of the skin is the most visible manifestation and there is no cure. It’s also very painful.
“It beats me up every day,” said Saul.
As for Gold, he was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2004.
“It’s a phone call you never forget,” said Gold, “when someone says you have cancer.” Gold also endured grueling treatments. At one point, he was told his cancer had recurred, but it was a false positive. The emotional roller coaster for all is excruciating.
They all heard about this trial and decided to give it a try.
“We see them probably like nobody else sees them,” explained psychotherapist and researcher Julane Andries.
“They know what they’re doing is not working… and they want to find something that will,” explained study coordinator Libby Heimler.
The lead investigator for this study is psychiatrist Phil Wolfson.
The medical doctor has permission from the U.S. FDA to conduct the study, and legally administer the drug.
“The FDA approved so the DEA had to follow suit,” explained Wolfson.
Before the DEA declared MDMA illegal in 1985, Doctor Wolfson used it medicinally in his own practice and saw a tremendous benefit for patients..
He also took it himself during psychotherapy to help cope with the death and crushing loss of his son Noah.
Noah died of leukemia at the age of 17.
“So I knew personally its potential and I knew it as a therapist,” said Wolfson.
In the study, MDMA is not used alone. The use of the compound is combined with psychotherapy sessions that can last five hours or longer.
“It’s not this 50 minutes in and out, it’s these extended periods of real interactive exchange, “explained Gold.
“This was work, this was not partying,” added Donner.
Everyone experienced a profound benefit.
“With the MDMA, everything opened up,” recalled Donner.
“You start seeing things very, very clearly and at a nice slow pace, truths in your life are bubbling up. And revealed to you piece by piece,” explained Saul.
“It opens you up to yourself and in the right conditions, in a protected environment with supportive people in a safe place, I think it’s a tremendous tool,” concluded Gold.
The participants all say they’ve changed and are better able to face the future, and they have no regrets.
Wolfson hopes the drug may one day be available to other patients as a legally accepted remedy.
The researchers are now screening for new study participants with about a dozen spots to fill. Everyone is carefully screened.
For info on new study participants in the Bay Area, contact Wolfson via email sf@mdmasites.org or call (877) 372-2692.Champions for America's Future releases the report, "Quality PE Puts Kids on the Inside Track to Achieving a Healthy Life during a news conference at Woodland Elementary School in Oak Ridge, TN., Monday, December 8, 2015. One of the speakers was WNBA All-Star and former Lady Vol Tamika Catchings. (SAUL YOUNG/NEWS SENTINEL)
SHARE LOS ANGELES, CA - JULY 6: Candace Parker #3 of the Los Angeles Sparks smiles during the game against the San Antonio Silver Stars at Staples Center on July 6, 2013 in Los Angeles, California. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and/or using this Photograph, user is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. Mandatory Copyright Notice: Copyright 2013 NBAE (Photo by Noah Graham/NBAE via Getty Images)
By News Sentinel Staff
In celebration of the WNBA's landmark 20th season, the league unveiled the 20 greatest and most influential players in its history on Tuesday, and Tennessee alums Tamika Catchings and Candace Parker made the list.
The announcement of the WNBA Top 20@20 presented by Verizon was made on ESPN's SportsCenter: Face-to-Face with Hannah Storm.
The announcement was made Tuesday to honor the date of the league's inaugural regular-season game played on June 21, 1997, when the New York Liberty defeated the Los Angeles Sparks, 67-57, at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, Ca.
"The 20 women honored today are an extraordinarily accomplished group both on and off the basketball court," WNBA President Lisa Borders said in a release. "On the court, they represent the absolute best in women's professional basketball and are in so many ways larger than life. Off the court, they represent their teams, hometowns and communities in which they live and work with the utmost professionalism. And most importantly, they represent the hopes and dreams of generations of young girls all over the world — the future of the WNBA."
There were seven other current players picked: Seimone Augustus, Sue Bird, Swin Cash, Maya Moore, Cappie Pondexter, Diana Taurasi and Lindsay Whalen.
Eleven former players are also among the honorees: Cynthia Cooper, Yolanda Griffith, Becky Hammon, Lauren Jackson, Lisa Leslie, Deanna Nolan, Ticha Penicheiro, Katie Smith, Sheryl Swoopes, Tina Thompson and Teresa Weatherspoon.
Parker has played in 206 career WNBA games in nine seasons. She has averaged 17.8 points per game and 9 rebounds per game.
Catchings is in her 15th season and has played in 436 career games, averaging 16.3 points, 7.4 rebounds and 3.3 assists.(Natural News) The insidious assumption behind the “fake news” accusations being flung far and wide by the fakestream media (CNN, NPR, WashPost, NYT, MSNBC, etc.) is that somehow the corporate media has a divine monopoly on “facts.”
The assumption is ludicrously demonstrated when MSNBC rolls out “convicted” liar Brian Williams to decry “fake news.” You’d be hard pressed to find any fake news propagandist who churned out more fake news than Brian Williams… and he’s still working at MSNBC! “[B]ack in early 2015, Breitbart News presented a list of at least 32 times that NBC News let Williams present such fake news to the American people — lies and disputed stories — including his false claims about being in a helicopter that was hit by an RPG,” reports Breitbart.com, one of the new media giants accused of publishing “fake news” by the collapsing lamestream media.
“Williams also made up stories about Seal Team 6, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Pope, Hurricane Katrina, quitting college, rescuing a puppy from a house fire, and more,” Breitbart continues.
If the media establishment only tells the truth, why are so many of their news reports obviously faked?
If the corporate-run media really had some sort of divine monopoly on “facts,” then none of us would be able to find examples of laughably fake news on their websites, would we? Yet even the Washington Post has now been exposed for, if you can believe it, faking a news story about fake news!
Any honest investigation can go right down the list: CNN, NYT, WashPost, HuffPost, LA Times, USA Today, NPR, MSNBC, Fox News and so on… every one of these “news” organizations has run genuinely fake news while claiming it was “fact.”
It’s not even difficult to find examples of these organizations deliberately fabricating fake news in order to alter the outcome of the recent election. Nearly all of them reported, for example, some variation of the absurd claim that “Donald Trump can’t win the election.”
These are also the same fake news organizations that obediently and enthusiastically repeated Obama’s fabricated claims about Obamacare. Remember “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor?” Or how about the claim that “Obamacare will save American families $2500 a year, on average?” Not only were these glaring examples of “fake news,” they were known |
when released fly together to a particular destination. And the butterflies were a sign of good fortune and that when people got married they were traveling together to a set destination. And hopefully they would enjoy good fortune and success on their journey. When he told me the story I researched it. I found out what it was all about, and we did it one time at George Mason and the players loved it. And we did it last season as well here at Miami, where we had a lot of new guys, and we wanted them to bond. The reason we did it was to tell them that they were on a journey together, and we wanted them to have a good time together.
SOTU: Can you please talk about some of the staff changes that the program has undergone this offseason? Can you talk about who you've lost, what it means, and who is replacing them?
Coach L: Well first of all, what we tell our players and coaches all the time is, my job as the Head Coach at the University of Miami is to help my assistant coaches and to help my players achieve their goals. And their job is to help the me and our program achieve our goals. And one of the goals of every assistant is to become head coach one day. Michael Huger who was one of my former players, and an assistant with me for many years, was given a chance to go back to his alma mater Bowling Green. He was thrilled and it is a great opportunity. A month later Coach Erik Konkol who had been with me for 11 years, got the Head Coaching job at Louisiana Tech.Louisiana Tech is a program that has been at the top of Conference USA for a number of years. So those opportunities do not come along very often. What we did was we elevated Coach Chris Caputo, who has been with me 14 years, to associate Head Coach. That gives him a little more responsibility. We also hired Jamal Brunt, who was an assistant coach at the University of Richmond, to replace Coach Huger. Jamal is someone who did a fantastic job at Richmond and is someone I have gotten to know over the past 7-10 years, and I think he is going to be a great addition and a great role model for our young players. We then elevated Adam Fisher, who had been our director of basketball operations, to take Coach Konkol's position. Adam did a great job in the Ops spot, and now is getting a chance to help us full time in recruiting and on the court coaching for the first time in his career. He was replaced in the Ops spot by James Johnson, who was a former assistant of mine at George Mason, and also the Head Coach at Virginia Tech for two years. He brings wealth of experience to our program.
SOTU: Angel Rodriguez did some incredible things in his first year in Miami, but was also up and down. What do you think Angel needs to do this coming season to help the program?
Coach L: Angel impacts the game in so many ways. He is a terrific leader on and off the court. He's an outstanding shooter when he is on, and has the capability of scoring in the 20's. Angel also can shoot the ball from long range, has great moves to the basket, and can find the open man very well. He's a great on the ball defender as well. His only issues this past season were two things. One he was a little inconsistent at the times where I thought he was trying to do too much, and two he got hurt toward the end of the season when he injured his wrist against FSU. If he did not sustain the injury, our season might have ended up even better. I think what he needs to be is just focused. I think again that sometimes he put so much pressure on himself that at times he did not make the same decisions as when he was really sharp. Players don't play the same way every time out. If you watched the NBA Finals you saw a guy like Timothy Mozgov went for 28 one night and only played 9 minutes the next. Even Steph Curry went like 4-16 in game 2 and then in game 5 goes for 37 points. Players don't always play the exact same way. What we need is for our players to play a little more consistently. And that's what we need Angel to do, make consistently good decisions.
SOTU: Tell me about Davon Reed. By season's end he seemed way more aggressive. What can we expect from him this coming season?
Coach L: I think Davon has an outstanding sophomore season. And the incredible thing about it he injured his knee in September and the Doctor said he would miss 4-5 months. He was able to come back in December, and he was a little rusty. It took him maybe 4 weeks to shed the rust, but he had a heck of an ACC campaign and he just keeps getting better.
SOTU: Can you talk about Oklahoma State transfer Kamari Murphy, who after a year with the team practicing will be eligible this year?
Coach L: Kamari is very athletic. He's about 6'8 and can run the floor extremely well, and can jump extremely well. He's a very good rebounder at both ends of the court. He has the potential to be an outstanding defender, and he's going to add a lot of athleticism to our front court.
SOTU: How about incoming freshman Anthony Lawrence Jr.?
Coach L: Anthony goes by the name "Little Amp" or just "Amp." He is a very versatile player. His dad, who played for the University of Miami, was also his high school coach. His dad is about 6'9 and Amp is about 6'6 or 6'7 and about 200 pounds, but he may grow a little more. We're not sure exactly what position he's going to play. He might be a three, he might be a four. But he handles the ball very well, so eventually he might end up in our back court. He played point guard in high school. I don't think he will play PG for us initially because a lot of times when you play point you match-up with point guards on defense. He'll handle the ball a lot because of his skills, but he'll likely guard the 3 position on defense.
SOTU: What can we expect from sophomores to be JaQuan Newton, Omar Sherman, and James Palmer?
Coach L: I think JaQuan Newton took a major step forward during his freshman year. We do want him to become a better three point shooter though, and he is working on that during the off season. James Palmer is a very versatile player, and a very smart player. He can shoot, handle, and pass, but we need him to be a better and more focused defender. Omar Sherman can really shoot the three and has a nice post up game. A guy of his size at 6'8 260 pounds, really needs to focus on rebounding and defense though. If Omar can become better at defending, especially the ball screens, and rebounding his position he could have a tremendous sophomore campaign.
SOTU: Flat out, is Tonye Jekiri the most underrated player not only in the ACC but maybe the country?
Coach L: Tonye has improved dramatically over the course of his career here. And hopefully he will take another major step forward this coming year. He is going to be a senior and he led the conference in rebounding last season. We are trying to get him to become more of an offensive threat. He has a very nice shooting touch, and he has gained more and more confidence in that. Now he has to find ways to free himself inside to make more shots. If he does that he should have a sensational senior campaign, and average a double-double.
SOTU: How important will it be to have Tonye around for incoming big man Ebuka Izundu's first year in the program?
Coach L: Ebuka will make a very nice transition primarily because Tonye's a great role model and they will get along well, and he will learn a lot from Tonye. But he will also have guys like Kamari Murphy, to show him some things defensively, and Omar Sherman who can help him with his shot especially given they are both left-handed. He's going to have very good role models to work with.
SOTU: Sheldon McClellan have a fantastic first year in Coral Gables. Can we expect even more from him this coming season?
Coach L: I am going to expect more from Sheldon. He got very, very good by the end of the year just by believing in himself. The coaches always had tremendous confidence in him. He is a great athlete, incredibly skilled, and a wonderful young man. We just need him to be as aggressive as possible. There were games where he wasn't quite as aggressive as we'd like last year. He's at his best when he is attacking and looking to score in double figures.
SOTU: Coach, what do you think the identity of this team will be in terms of style of play?
Coach L: We are going to want to run more than we have at any point in our first four seasons, primarily because our team is built that way. But also with the shot clock now at 30 seconds, it will dictate a faster game for us naturally. We are going to have a quicker front court. When you add guys like Kamari, Ebuka, and Amp, you add three very good athletes to the program. They can all run and they can all jump. We expect to be better defensively. Defense was an area of weakness last year. We were in the top 75 teams defensively, but to accomplish our goals we need to be in the top 25 defensively.
SOTU: How satisfying was it to watch Duke cut down the nets? Did it prove that Miami should have been in the NCAA Tournament given that UM defeated Duke at Cameron?
Coach L: Well I definitely think we deserved to be part of the field. I was very impressed by the job Coach Mike Krzyzewski did, because when we played them I think we exposed some things that they needed to adjust to improve as a team. And Coach K made those adjustments. His team dramatically improved, and he was playing with 4 freshman, who were key to their run. The way they played offensively and defensively in March and April was very, very impressive.
SOTU: What is the focus for recruiting this coming year given the program will lose Angel, Sheldon, Tonye, and Ivan Cruz Uceda as well?
Coach L: Well recruiting is like breathing, you have to do it everyday and you have to do it a lot. So my coaching staff has been very busy. But we've gotten great response from the young men that we've talked to. They seem to have a great deal of interest in the University of Miami. We won't really know anything before September. I know a lot of teams in the ACC are getting commitments now, but we do not anticipate anything like that. But we do think we are in good enough shape we should get some in September.
SOTU: Last but certainly not least, how important it is in this coming year with the team looking to have everything in place for a big year, for the fans to come out and fill the Bank United Center consistently?
Coach L: I think the Bank United Center is a fantastic home court, when the arena is packed. When our pep band is playing, and the student section is waiting on line to get to best seats, it's incredible. Every time we have sold out the BUC, our team has responded and had a great performance. So it is very, very important that we get that consistent support. Starting in non conference, we are playing some great opponents, including our game against Florida. We need our students and our community to get behind this team, because we feel like this can be a very special season.
Thanks again to Coach Larranaga for giving us the chance to get to know him and the team a little better.
Stay tuned for much, much more coverage of Miami Basketball right here on State of the U.The forthcoming quarterly report from the IAEA confirms that Iran is complying with the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA):
Iran is operating within the essential limits on its nuclear activities imposed by the 2015 nuclear deal with six world powers, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says in a new report. The confidential quarterly IAEA report, seen by several Western news agencies on November 12, said Iran “has not enriched” uranium above low levels and that its stockpile of enriched uranium was under the agreed limit of 300 kilograms.
Iran has been in compliance with the requirements of the nuclear deal in nine consecutive reports issued by the IAEA. Reports of Iranian compliance have become so predictable by now that they scarcely seem newsworthy, but it is worth remembering how certain opponents of the deal were that this would not happen. Opponents of the agreement were sure that Iran would cheat and fail to meet its obligations, and they insisted again and again that there was no point in making a deal with a regime that wouldn’t honor its commitments. For the ninth time in a row, the deal’s opponents have been proved completely wrong on this point.
Iran has been consistently adhering to the restrictions imposed by the JCPOA, so now we hear from critics of the deal that their compliance isn’t enough. Iran hawks no longer claim to care about cheating by Tehran, and instead express their horror that Iran is abiding by the terms of the agreement. These complaints serve as a reminder that no deal will ever satisfy these critics, because they are opposed to any agreement that reduces tensions with Iran and removes a pretext for war. That is why they have fought it tooth and nail for the last two years, and it is why they keep trying to sabotage it now.Colton Haynes' Roy Harper has role in changes in Arrow season 4 premiere(Photo : Astrid Stawiarz | Getty Images Entertainment)
It is an open secret that "Arrow" season 4 premiere will introduce the "real" Emerald Archer of Star City.
Cast and executive producers of the CW Network TV series confirmed in earlier interviews that Stephen Amell's Oliver Queen will no longer be the Arrow that he is in the first three seasons.
He will now be called the Green Arrow, his original nickname in the DC comics where the show's characters were based from.
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What prompted the show to embrace such change in the upcoming "Arrow" season 4 premiere episode? Executive producer Marc Guggenheim it is the event in third season involving Roy Harper (Colton Haynes).
"That's definitely the thesis statement of episode 401, the season premiere," Guggenheim told Green Arrow TV when asked about the major shift in fourth season of "Arrow."
"He can't be the Arrow anymore, because everyone believes that Roy Harper was the Arrow, and Roy Harper is dead, at least as far as everyone believes. So, he had to adopt a new identity. All of this is explained in the season premiere; we come straight out with it."
During the San Diego Comic-Con last month, Stephen Amell confirmed he will be wearing a green suit with lighter shade in "Arrow" season 4 premiere.
Aside from new identity, other things Oliver Queen will have to deal with in the pilot episode is his issues with other members of Team Arrow. The biggest is the hate Diggle (David Ramsey) feels towards him because of what he did to Lyla.
"Dig has a huge bone to pick with Oliver when they see each other again, at the top of Season 4," executive producer Wendy Mericle said in an interview with Collider.
"We're gonna work that out. It's not gonna be easy. With what happened to Dig's family, it's really tough to buy that back, and Oliver is not gonna to be able to. Obviously, they can't be mad at each other forever, or what are we doing? But also, in the intervening months while Oliver has been gone, Dig has, more or less, been leading the team. It's a little bit more democratic, Speedy and Black Canary are both super bad-ass and kicking butt. He's not happy, when he and Oliver meet again. It's not an open-armed, "Hey, buddy, all is forgiven," reunion."
"Arrow" season 4 premiere is on Oct. 7.A new report proposes investing $25 billion per year in clean energy technologies. Think tanks' new energy plan
With energy legislation left in tatters this year, experts from both sides of the climate debate have some advice for lawmakers: ditch cap and trade.
Extreme political polarization on energy and climate has stalled long-term action on the issues for decades, according to a new report from major liberal and conservative think tanks. The study calls for a “post-partisan” plan that nixes controversial cap-and-trade programs and backs away from dirty fossil fuels in favor of clean energy technology incentives.
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“The entire climate and energy agenda that we’ve been talking about for several years now has hit a dead end, to it’s time to hit the reset button,” said Steven Hayward, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a co-author of the study.
AEI will release the report Wednesday along with the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution and the Breakthrough Institute.
The authors blame lawmakers on the left and right for getting wrapped up in the “climate wars” of the last decade while doing little to advance clean energy.
“The choice is not, as liberals often maintain, between global warming apocalypse or mandating the widespread adoption of today’s solar, wind, and electric car technologies,” they write. “Nor is the choice, as conservatives have argued, between an economy wrecked by liberal global warming policies or expanding drilling and nuclear power.”
Instead, they’re proposing a middle ground. And they think the country might have a bigger appetite for compromise after the demise of energy and climate legislation this year.
Their vision: to accelerate energy innovation by investing $25 billion per year in clean energy technologies. The proposal advocates funneling cash into the Energy Department’s science funding, energy education, and the Defense Department’s energy innovation efforts. The authors also advocate a new generation of small nuclear reactors as part of a larger clean energy portfolio.
Federal energy subsidies ought to be overhauled, they say, to reward innovation.
“What we do now is we subsidize existing technologies and we hope that they improve. And sometimes they do, but it’s not disciplined around that,” said Michael Shellenberger, one of the authors and co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute. Under their proposal, he said, technologies that don’t improve would stop getting public investment.
To ensure that the investments don’t add to the deficit, the authors propose a range of financing options, including cutting existing energy subsidies, new royalties for oil drilling, small surcharges on oil imports and a low carbon price.
The authors see politics turning in their favor after election season winds down and lawmakers begin to look for policies that can win bipartisan support.
“I think that forward looking Republicans and Democrats will see this as a top contender for an economic growth strategy,” Shellenberger said.
Even President Obama, who has long advocated cap-and-trade climate legislation, said recently that he’d be open to looking at energy policy that’s done in “chunks.”
The policies laid out in the report “are broadly popular, provide a very broad and appealing American vision of economic transformation and are certainly far more doable than a global pricing system at this point,” said co-author Mark Muro, co-author of the report and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
“I think you hear the president beginning to move in this direction too,” Muro said, adding he sees promise in the fact that Obama is “already talking about chunking.”Many yoga teachers and members of the yoga community breathed a sigh of relief last week, when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California affirmed a previous ruling by a federal district court that Bikram Choudhury’s sequence of 26 yoga poses and two breathing exercises is not entitled to copyright protection.
"Because copyright protection is limited to the expression of ideas, and does not extend to the ideas themselves, the Bikram Yoga Sequence is not a proper subject of copyright protection," Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel.
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See alsoStudy Finds Bikram Yoga Raises Body Temps to 103+ Degrees
The Backstory on the Bikram Copyright Lawsuit
The legal saga began in 2011, when Mark Drost, co-founder of Evolation Yoga, received a complaint from Choudhury accusing him of copyright infringement among other allegations. Drost had spent six years as a senior member of the Bikram training staff, working closely with Choudhury, but he left in 2008 to start Evolation studios and lead teacher trainings, instructing students in the Primary Hot Series as originally popularized by Choudhury. Drost says he knew that copyright law was on his side, so he decided to fight back, winning a summary judgment in 2012. "We knew this was way bigger than us or Bikram," Drost tells Yoga Journal. (Choudhury and Bikram's Yoga College of India did not return requests for comment.)
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When Choudhury appealed, yoga nonprofit Yoga Alliance stepped up to support Drost through its counsel Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, which provided copyright expertise and filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit arguing that a sequence of yoga poses is not protectable by copyright.
"Copyright law only protects original expression. It does not protect ideas or facts including systems, methods, and processes," says Cydney A. Tune, senior counsel at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP. "Bikram has referred to his sequence numerous times over the years as a system and as a method. Copyright law also does not protect something that is functional, and again we can point to Bikram's own words as he talks about all of the ways that doing his sequence of yoga poses enhances of the functioning of your body. He also argued that [the sequence] is choreography, which can be protected under copyright law. We argued that the sequence is not choreography and the court agreed, finding that the sequence is not choreography because the sequence is 'an idea, process, or system to which no copyright protection can extend.' Yoga is different from choreography—you are not doing this as creative expression. According to Bikram, you are are doing it to enhance your health and physical well-being."
In other words, a yoga pose or sequence is akin to an "idea" or a fact, and you cannot copyright an idea or a fact. You can certainly copyright the "expression" of an idea, which is why Choudhury’s 1979 book about his sequence, Bikram’s Beginning Yoga Class, does have copyright protection. But Choudhury does not have a copyright on the sequence of poses itself, and therefore cannot stop others from teaching the sequence or any part of it.
See alsoAfter the Fall: The Ripple Effect from the Sexual Harrassment and Rape Accusations Against Bikram and Friend
What This Means for the Future of Yoga
"Anyone I know who teaches yoga does not think you should be able to copyright your own yoga poses," says Drost. "This was the main reason we fought. It goes against everything we teach in yoga. It's morally wrong. Yoga is for everyone. It's been in the public domain for thousands of years."
Now that the court has affirmed that Bikram’s yoga sequence is not copyrightable, and by extension that a yoga sequence in general is not copyrightable, yoga teachers can feel free to put together sequences without fear of infringing copyrights. And that is the real victory here.
"Bikram is the only person I’ve heard of in the history of yoga who [suggested], 'I’m going to teach you this and tell you that you can’t go teach it,'" says Drost. "He popularized this sequence and he should get credit for that. But the fundamental thing we teach in teacher trainings is that it's not about the teacher, it's about empowering students, sharing knowledge, and sharing experience. I think this decision helps people get back to the spirit of what yoga is."
See alsoWill Bikram Yoga Survive?At 40, Francesco Totti may not be Roma’s ‘Golden Boy’ anymore, but he is still very much ‘the King of Rome.’
Totti celebrates his 40th birthday on Tuesday but the Champions League’s oldest scorer is showing no signs of slowing down and indeed seems to have found a new lease of life.
There was speculation last season that maybe the time had come for Il Capitano to hang up his boots and move into the boardroom but, with six goals in his past 11 league matches and several assists, Totti is proving his doubters wrong.
Totti marked the final match of his 30s on Sunday by becoming only the second player to score 250 Serie A goals, reaching that mark with a penalty kick in Roma’s 3-1 loss at Torino.
The man who upset Totti’s pre-birthday celebrations, Torino coach Sinisa Mihajlovic, helped persuade then Roma coach Vujadin Boskov to hand a 16-year-old Totti his debut.
Mihajlovic had been amazed by the precocious youngster, who was giving him and his fellow first-team defenders trouble in training as well as racking up goals for the youth team.
On March 28, 1993, with Roma winning 2-0 at Brescia, Mihajlovic ran up to Boskov and said ‘‘come on, bring the kid on...’’ The rest is history.
Mihajlovic joked at the weekend that Totti owes him a dinner for that, and ‘‘it can’t be at a pizzeria, it has to be oysters and champagne’’ before adding ‘‘he is the best player in Italy since I’ve been here.’’
And for nearly a quarter of a century Totti has been living up to those expectations. With his stunning goals and defense-splitting passes, Totti is, for many Roma fans, the epitomy of the Roman gladiator that he has tattooed on his right shoulder.
If Rome is the Eternal City, Totti is Roma’s eternal leader and has been since he was first made captain in 1998, at the age of just 22.
Zdenek Zeman, who promoted Totti to the captaincy, was such an ardent admirer that he once said: ‘‘Who are the best five Italian players? Totti, Totti, Totti, Totti, Totti.’’
Several teammates and coaches have compared Totti with a famous Roman monument, with Claudio Ranieri saying the star player is ‘‘as important as the Colosseum is to Rome.’’
He has been just as immovable.
Totti has spent his entire career at Roma and when his current contract expires, he will have had 25 years in its first team - remarkably more than 28 percent of the club’s existence.
Totti could have won more than the solitary Serie A title, two Italian Cups and two national Super Cups he lifted with Roma, but he rejected offers of more money and glory to remain with his childhood club.
‘‘I grew up playing for Roma and I want to die playing for Roma... I have always been a Roma fan,’’ said Totti, who was raised in the Porta Metronia area of the city.
Totti’s face adorns murals and posters across Italy’s capital, where he is loved by Roma fans and respected by supporters of bitter rival Lazio, despite his antics against them.
Totti has scored 11 times against Lazio and often celebrates these extra-special goals with t-shirts made for the occasion. One famously said ‘‘I have purged you again,’’ while he revealed another reading simply ‘‘Game Over’’ after a victory in May 2015.
He hit the headlines in January of that year when he scored the second of two goals against Lazio and, in a pre-planned celebration for becoming the all-time leading scorer in the derby, grabbed his phone off Roma’s goalkeeping coach and took a selfie under the Curva Sud with thousands of adoring fans in the background.
Totti has also been a star for Italy and he helped the Azzurri to the European Championship final in 2000 as well as the World Cup trophy in 2006.
He grabbed global attention at Euro 2000 with one of the moments of the tournament, in the semifinals against the Netherlands. In the tense penalty shootout, the 23-year-old Totti kept his cool to cheekily chip Edwin van der Sar with his spot-kick.
Totti was named man of the match in the final, despite Italy losing 2-1 to France.
Totti played in all seven of Italy’s World Cup matches in 2006 and his last match for the Azzurri was the final against France, concluding his international career with 58 caps and nine goals.
Asked what gift Totti should get for his 40th birthday, Roma coach Luciano Spalletti was among the people who suggested a time machine.
Last Update: Tuesday, 27 September 2016 KSA 10:52 - GMT 07:52The Agriculture Department is allowing factory egg farms, some with 100,000 hens to a barn, to earn an organic imprimatur without much more than a nod to letting chickens leave their coop.
NEUVO, Calif. — Strolling through a flock of free-roaming rust-colored hens, Christopher Nichols admits that no one truly knows whether his chickens are happier because they can strut around and wander outside.
But consumers are happier, and that matters a lot to the third-generation egg farmer and a slew of other egg producers who charge a premium price for eggs bearing the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s organic certification, which governs not only what hens eat, but nearly everything about how they live their lives.
“The consumers have an idea of what this sort of operation looks like,” Nichols said, raising his voice above the chorus of clucks emanating from more than 7,000 Rhode Island Red hybrids at a Nuevo, California, ranch that supplies his family company, Chino Valley Ranchers.
“When you give them a building with no windows, no natural light and a screened porch and label it as ‘organic,’ I think they’re going to be a little bit ticked off.”
Those consumers will have to be ticked off for at least another six months. In early November, the USDA quietly shelved a rule that would have given consumers a bit more of what they assume is part of organic eggs — open air.
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue (who is not related to the chicken-raising family) left open a loophole in organic regulations that has allowed factory egg farms, some with 100,000 hens to a barn, to earn an organic imprimatur without much more than a nod to letting chickens leave their coop — that is, attaching a gated, screened porch to their barns.
It was the third delay for the obscure but highly contentious rule, which had made it into the Federal Register on the day before President Donald Trump took the oath of office, only to fall victim to his “regulatory freeze” executive order.
The well-being of a laying hen may seem an esoteric concern to the average consumer confronted with a slew of labels that grade eggs and purport to explain how they were laid — free-range, cage-free or pasture-raised, for instance.
But how much space, and what kind, each hen gets is crucial to the $5.5 billion egg industry.
Producers owe a good deal of their growth to organic, free-range, cage-free and other marketing labels — more than 13 percent of the flock is in those niches now, according to the American Egg Board.
Less than a third of those, or about 14.6 million hens, are certified organic — roaming free, with some access to the outdoors, and fed only on grains raised without conventional pesticides or fertilizers.
Organic eggs now fill the refrigerators of big-box stores such as Costco and Wal-Mart. Most of those eggs come from the titans of the egg industry, such as Herbruck’s Poultry Ranch in Michigan and Mississippi-based Cal-Maine.
Those and other egg farms have built their facilities around a 2002 ruling by USDA that allowed farms to attach a screened porch to a chicken barn and qualify it as “outdoor space” under the organic rules. At least a third of organic egg producers operate under that model, according to the USDA.
Big egg farms would like to keep it that way, saying any change would drive nearly half of them out of the market and expose birds to disease from wild birds and rodents.
“We are pleased implementation of the rule has been delayed, allowing for more detailed and accurate evaluation of the economic impact of the proposed regulation,” said Oscar Garrison, vice president for food safety and regulatory affairs for United Egg Producers, an industry advocacy group whose members sell about 97 percent of the eggs in the country.
USDA has said it would cost the industry $8 million to $30 million over about 15 years to comply with the revised organic rules. Consumers would pay an additional 21 to 50 cents per dozen eggs, the agency estimated. (The agency said benefits of the change, including increasing the willingness of consumers to pay more for the certified eggs, are worth $4 million to $50 million.)
But United Egg Producers contends that nearly half the organic producers will simply leave the market, leaving shortages that will drive up prices.
Nichols, who is vice president of Chino Valley Ranchers, isn’t buying it.
“Don’t let them fool you,” he said. “They knew darn well that they were building these buildings out of compliance. And they knew that when this day came, that they were going to have to face this decision. But they probably figured that they had the money and the political muscle to overrule it.”
Smaller producers, he said, “just don’t have that.”
Under the new rules, even Nichols will have to expand some open areas shared by his barns. “We’re OK with that,” he said. “It’s a small price to pay in order to preserve consumer confidence.”
The egg industry has a longer-term strategy in mind when it fights stricter organic-egg rules. Even as scores of restaurants and food companies, including McDonald’s, have pledged to switch to cage-free eggs, the industry is using the federal farm bill process to pre-empt state efforts to ban cages.
Virtually no one in the organic industry expects the Trump administration to side with the smaller producers six months from now, when USDA must again decide whether to enforce the rule.
As a pre-emptive move, the Organic Trade Assn. sued USDA in September over its previous delays — making it difficult for the agency to bow to industry pressure and withdraw the rule while a federal court case is pending.
“It’s not just the egg industry, but commodity livestock interests,” said Laura Batcha, CEO and director of the Organic Trade Assn. “We believe they don’t want to see this go forward, despite the overwhelming majority that supports it.”
More than 40,000 comments were sent to USDA during the rulemaking process, the group noted. The vast majority favored passing it — in part due to consumer form-letter campaigns. Just one comment, from a consumer in Florida, suggested postponement.
Matt Bershadker, president and CEO of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said Perdue’s stall was “another example of powerful agribusiness entities trampling vital animal welfare protections.”
Agribusiness, so far, has won important concessions from the Trump administration in its first year in office.
The USDA killed an Obama rule that would have lowered the legal requirements for poultry farms to win legal claims against the large meat companies that contract them to raise chickens.
That angered rural farm groups, which noted that the farm belt heavily supported Trump. The major meat lobbying groups, meanwhile, applauded the move.
Nichols, who tends to stay out of politics, is no fan of regulation. But organic certification is voluntary — farmers opt in because they want the label to mean something to consumers, he said.
“Happy is a relative term,” he said of the hens. “We just say content. Their needs are met.”
Whether consumers’ needs are met, he added, is an entirely different matter.OTTAWA -- Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared to grumble about NDP Leader Tom Mulcair in question period Monday, muttering about the NDP rejecting Mulcair and wondering whether he is the interim or outgoing party leader.
The grousing came at the end of the first question period after a two-week break, in which the opposition unrelentingly attacked the government over proposed changes to House of Commons rules and a controversy over Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan.
Mulcair took all the questions allotted to the NDP on Monday, rather than letting other New Democrat MPs pose any. Prime ministers sometimes respond to all questions from party leaders, but on Monday Trudeau responded to Mulcair's queries only in the leaders' round - the first set of questions posted by the opposition party leaders.
That led Mulcair to complain toward the end of the hour that Trudeau was breaching parliamentary tradition.
"Stephen Harper took all questions every day during the Senate scandal," Mulcair said, to loud applause from the opposition benches.
"The prime minister wants to change the fundamental rules of Parliament in order to help himself. And why all of this? Well, because he says he values question period and accountability. That's why he wants to scrap it. If that's true, why doesn't he stand and ask Canadians to listen to answers to some of our questions for once instead of his usual platitudes or non-answers?"
When Government House Leader Bardish Chagger rose to answer, Trudeau quietly heckled Mulcair, who last year lost a party confidence vote but is remaining NDP leader until the fall.
"It's amazing the NDP rejected him," says a voice that sounds like Trudeau (about 47 seconds into the video above).
Then, a few seconds later, he joked about Mulcair's position since the confidence vote.
"The outgoing leader? The interim leader?"
The Prime Minister's Office didn't deny he made the remarks and wouldn't say whether he was being sarcastic.
Asked about Trudeau's comments, Mulcair told CTV News that "today was not a good day" for the government.
"What you saw today was essentially that Justin Trudeau believes in transparency only when it suits his purpose," he added.
Trudeau has promised improved civility in the House, including discouraging Liberal MPs from heckling, as part of his "sunny ways" approach to government.
Even aside from Monday, the prime minister hasn't been immune to the desire to give voice to his frustration.
In 2011, the then-opposition MP referred to Conservative Peter Kent as a "piece of s---." Kent was then the environment minister and Trudeau said he was frustrated with Kent's "patronizing condescension" to opposition MPs.
Nearly a year ago, the prime minister inadvertently elbowed a New Democrat MP when he grabbed Conservative whip Gord Brown to drag him to his seat. |
even know he would get it."
***
Kari got the call. That you had read her letter and wanted to meet her.
"I kind of stammered and stuttered around," Kari said. "And then I said, 'Are you kidding me?' "
It was no joke. This past weekend, Kari was treated to two days at Mile High Stadium in Denver, where she watched Broncos players get their team photos taken Saturday, sat in on walk-through practices, took a tour of the facility.
She was given tickets to the Broncos vs. Ravens game Sunday and sideline passes for before the game — all left for her by you. Your name is right there on the envelope; never mind an "l" is missing from her last name.
Because when she met you, well, her heart melted.
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"He walked right over after he got his picture taken," Kari said. "It was so sweet because he shakes my hand and says, 'I'm Peyton Manning.' It was cute. It was kind of like, 'I know who you are Peyton.' "
You spent 10 minutes with Kari and her husband of 12 years, Ed (who, in a tragic twist, lost his first wife to breast cancer). You talked to her. You took her mind off of cancer, just for a bit.
"It was real easy and laid back, not at all nervewracking," she said. "He's welcoming. He's like a gentle giant. It was such a personal moment. It was a once in a lifetime thing."
***
Star reporter Dana Benbow, bottom right, looked up to her sister, Lisa Bauer (upper right) and her best friend Kari Bollig (upper left). (Photo: Photo provided by Dana Benbow)
Kari grew up in Greenfield right across the street from my family. She was best friends with my older sister, Lisa Bauer. By association, she became my best friend, too, or at least I wanted her to be.
We played croquet on warm summer nights, we swam in her above-ground pool that I was wildly jealous of, we went to church together.
I would sit on my front porch and watch Kari chase her cute little beagle, Dinky, around her yard. Our parents had joint garage sales, shared the bounty from their gardens.
And then, with her athletic training dreams in front of her, Kari left for Northern Arizona University. Years later, I left for Butler University. And as happens, neighbors lose touch, and I never saw her again.
But we stayed in touch on Facebook. And that's when the posts started coming. Something wasn't right with Kari. Though, at first, it seemed like she would be fine.
As breast cancer goes, Kari's was the kind you wanted to get if you had to get the dreaded disease.
She was 40 years old when she found a lump in her left breast. She was diagnosed in April 2011 with stage 2. She got a lumpectomy, went through chemotherapy and radiation.
"Everything looked really good until 2013, when I thought I had pulled a muscle in my back and it never healed up and never went away," she said.
This was no pulled muscle. This was news that changed Kari's life.
***
The doctors found tumors all over her spine, one touching her spinal cord. Her cancer had metastasized and she was now stage 4. Kari's had 52 radiation treatments since then.
She goes every three weeks for an infusion of chemo, not the hard chemo that you think of, but a kind of chemo maintenance program to slow the progression.
"It's all throughout my bones," Kari said.
Some days, the physical pain (not to mention the devastating emotional turmoil) makes it tough for Kari to get off the couch. She has had to quit her job as a speech language pathologist at a child developmental center in Wyoming.
Her bones are so fragile that doctors feared even a small child running into her would break her spine or her hip.
Ed helps encourage her to keep moving, as does Bristol, her 3-year-old Boykin Spaniel. Bristol nudges Kari to play Frisbee or go on a walk.
She has plenty of time to read — and to write. And that, Peyton, is how your letter came to be.
***
Peyton Manning personally left tickets and sideline passes for Kari Bollig to Sunday's Broncos vs. Ravens game. (Photo: Photo provided by Kari Bollig)
Your letter is the only one Kari mailed. The others are still tucked away in her home. She's waiting.
"I'm not mailing them yet," she said. "I could still live 10 years. I could be gone next week, but I could be here in 10 years."
I'm glad she mailed your letter.
I heard what you did for her, as you were leaving her Saturday at the stadium. I heard you leaned in for one of those awkward guy hugs. You said quietly to her as you pulled away: "Keep fighting, Kari. I'll be praying for you."
Thank you, Peyton Manning, for doing what you did. We're all hoping those prayers work.
Follow Dana Benbow on Twitter: @DanaBenbow.The Golden State Warriors are an insanely dominant team. To answer the question in this article’s headline: Yes, the Grizzlies have a chance — about a 6 percent chance according to our Real Plus-Minus-based projections. The Warriors projected Real Plus-Minus (RPM) of +15.8 points against the Grizzlies is easily the best of any team; Golden State has about a 10-point advantage per 100 possessions.
So the Warriors are likely to win, yes, but the series has several interesting contrasts for the basketball geek.
Take speed. If the Warriors do succeed against Memphis, they’ll probably do so playing their breathtakingly fast style. Golden State had by far the fastest pace in the league this season, at 98.3 possessions per game. The Grizzlies play at a lumbering gait: at 92.0 possessions per game, Memphis ranked in the bottom five of the league. The Warriors are also in the top four in total blocks and steals, which ignite fastbreaks. The Grizzlies are content playing solid half-court defense, forcing turnovers and limiting your total shots. It’s fast vs. slow.
Shot selection is another difference. The Warriors, especially Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, excel behind the 3-point arc. The team led the NBA in both 3-point percentage (at nearly 40 percent!), and in the total number of threes attempted. The Grizzlies? They attempt the second fewest 3-pointers of any team in the NBA, with below-average success. Memphis’ strength is near the basket, where you’ll find their two big men, Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph. It’s outside vs. inside.
Curry, who might just win the MVP award, leads the way for a stacked Warriors team; his projected +8.8 RPM is the second highest of any player (behind Cleveland’s LeBron James). At the other end, the Warriors will rely on defensive superstar Draymond Green, the runner-up for Defensive Player of the Year. Draymond will have a unique challenge against the two Memphis big men. If he can handle one of them one-on-one, the Warriors could cruise.
For the Grizzlies, their (already slim) chances took a hit when point guard Mike Conley suffered a facial fracture. He’s projected to play only 15 minutes per game by these RPM calculations. But if he plays through the injury, and if the Grizzlies can slow the pace and prevent the 3-point-happy Warriors from blowing the roof off, Memphis could make this series interesting.by
Cape May, NJ – Like all good foodies, you want to know not only what’s good but what’s new. So, here’s what we know, so far, about the new food stuff in town this year.
New Mexican Restaurant
For those who can never get enough Mexican food, good news – even more is coming!
Sushi is giving way to homemade Mole sauce on Carpenter’s Lane as La Dona opens in Mid May. (Cape May veterans know the spot as Gecko’s former, longtime location.)
Restaurateur Lucy Corvino (an Oaxaca native) and her husband Andrea will be serving a traditional Mexican menu. The couple already owns two Italian restaurants in South Jersey. Lucy says they were attracted to the Cape May spot because there’s no Mexican restaurant right in the heart of town.
Pan Asian Cuisine
For those craving all things Asian, there’s now a pan Asian restaurant in town. Asian Legends is replacing one of Cape May’s old stand bys, Cape Orient. A Malaysian chef and a Chinese chef cook up just about any Asian dish you can dream of.
Pad Thai, Malaysian Red Curry, traditional Chinese favorites, sushi, Japanese dishes – all are on the menu at this restaurant in the Washington Commons, near the Acme. Serving lunch and dinner daily.
Fresh Local Poultry and Pork
Have you been to Beach Plum Farm lately? The farm on Stevens Street in West Cape May now is selling its own poultry and pork, raised right on Cape Island.
Check out the refrigerator case along the back wall. Inside, you’ll find whole and quartered chicken, as well as ground turkey, processed right at the farm.
The farm’s pork is being sold as pork loins and shoulders and smoked as bacon and ham.
Look for a new outdoor cafe to open later this spring, serving, what else, farm raised turkey burgers.
Fresh Pasta
This year, for the first time in Cape May, you can buy freshly made pasta, just like in the big city.
.
Cape May Gourmet, in the Washington Commons, will happily turn sheets of dough into whatever pasta you’d like. Fettuccine? Spaghetti? Even homemade ravioli. The gourmet shop also sells its own marinara sauce. The shop’s run by the folks from the Cape May Peanut Butter company.
Pickles!
A crunchy collaboration between Cape May Point’s Red Store and pickle enthusiast Maria Fox is producing delicious batches of truly local pickles.
Pickle Girl Pickles come bottled in all sorts of interesting flavors – from bread and butter pickles, redolent of cloves to Honey Porter Pickle chips, infused with local beer from the Cape May Brewing Company.
The Pickle Girl even uses locally grown cucumbers from the Red Store farm. Right now, the pickles are available at The Red Store at the Point and at the Little Store coffee shop in Cape May.
In addition to all of these foodie finds, let’s not forget the new tapas restaurant opening in Cape May this Spring!
There’s even more news in Cape May this year.
Big Changes for Cape May Stores
In addition to the Cape May food news, there are some big changes for some long time local stores.Netflix has announced plans to adapt Lemoney Snicket’s beloved 13-part series A Series of Unfortunate Events.
The live-action series will be geared towards children and families, though we imagine many young adults will be tuning in to see one of their favorite stories come to life.
Netflix is currently in search of a director.
“I can’t believe it,” Snicket said in a press release “from an undisclosed location” (readers recall that “Lemony Snicket” is a pen name for Daniel Handler). “After years of providing top-quality entertainment on demand, Netflix is risking its reputation and its success by associating itself with my dismaying and upsetting books.”
Netflix’s VP of Original Content Cindy Holland describes the book series as “unique, darkly funny, and relatable.” She’s right, so we hope these comments mean they’ll place good care into adapting the story.
The streaming service noted that Snicket’s involvement with the adaptation will be “limited” due to “emotional distress.” We’re not sure if this is a subtle way of saying that Handler, the real author, will not be involved.
Article Continues Below
A Series of Unfortunate Events follows the story of three orphaned children who have to live with their uncle named Count Olaf (played by Jim Carrey in the film adaptation). The series’ thirteen books were published between 1999 and 2006.
This won’t be Netflix’s first attempt at creating an original series for children. The instant streaming service currently offers a series based on Dreamworks’ Turbo, while How to Train Your Dragon and Puss in Boots are currently in the pipeline.
Will you give the ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ show a try?
With 13 books, Netflix will have a huge amount of material to work off of. We’re hoping each season will represent one (or two? or three?) book(s) and run for five to six hours.Current Support
Updated Item Filter: April 25th 2016
There is some stuff you will likely want to hide/unhide if you are leveling (bottom of file)
http://pastebin.com/ZdHJbShE
Bandits are pretty much always oak/kill/kill
Templar Guardian
Spoiler
Setup
You will not have 0% mana. The aura calculator is fucked up with enhance + veil
https://poe.mikelat.com/#emGUyMCd/6rB-etr8e/xqBhOGbNd/bHz79MH/5Wl/D8s1bGd
You will need 2x clarity/BM setups. One for wearing wrath and one for not. If you aren't wearing wrath put in purity (likely)
Pre level 2/3 enlighten drop AA because you can't run it.
Lightning golem for attack speed.
2x Energy from Within.
Ephemeral Edge/Lori's Latern/The Sorrow of The Divine/Steppen Eard
You can literally swap latern/sorrow/steppen out for whatever you need/want. They are pretty versatile slots.
Latern is because I've wanted to test a build that uses it (still testing).
Sorrow is in a free pot slot. It solves traveling to Z/O and it solves some support issues of being on X ground and being chipped away, or on mobs. Surprisingly helpful for what seems to be a pretty shit flask.
Steppen Eard basically solves desecrated ground problems which is notoriously annoying for supports and has a great ES base. OP rolled rares would be better tho imo. The movement speed doesn't matter. You are literally whirling everywhere.
Tree - Go Unwavering Faith/Prayer of Glory
Spoiler https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAUAAE8EQ8hxTZrPQ2No8q9sC2HGrjwtg1-DzLc-QYf56Jy-gscNHyj6Hb48KLiTV8kzhxzcDXwD7uvujxrquqcItAyPRsrTRnEdFJuhvorhiIMJ-tIYavfXkyehLx2qb55mnhcveC-ESH_G74j-ScpKtzFk53zlXGuioyepflnBxfk3X7CMdlXWWAfDbcHz7BjXz5u1gKRcipUgcLtObUmxwzqExS0f2ROlxBmKHU9Msy9vnDL7CTW5RX4EB9Af9toRUKcrDlyD2-_rGo9tGWr6VcbZWwj0GyXAVEuuakPpAg==
Used for supporting CoC discharge or Vaal spark (builds that you basically have to use blasphemy to support because they are too fast for quill curse casting)SetupYou will not have 0% mana. The aura calculator is fucked up with enhance + veilYou will need 2x clarity/BM setups. One for wearing wrath and one for not. If you aren't wearing wrath put in purity (likely)Pre level 2/3 enlighten drop AA because you can't run it.Lightning golem for attack speed.2x Energy from Within.Ephemeral Edge/Lori's Latern/The Sorrow of The Divine/Steppen EardYou can literally swap latern/sorrow/steppen out for whatever you need/want. They are pretty versatile slots.Latern is because I've wanted to test a build that uses it (still testing).Sorrow is in a free pot slot. It solves traveling to Z/O and it solves some support issues of being on X ground and being chipped away, or on mobs. Surprisingly helpful for what seems to be a pretty shit flask.Steppen Eard basically solves desecrated ground problems which is notoriously annoying for supports and has a great ES base. OP rolled rares would be better tho imo. The movement speed doesn't matter. You are literally whirling everywhere.Tree - Go Unwavering Faith/Prayer of Glory
Scion Deadeye/Occultist
Spoiler
Setup
https://poe.mikelat.com/#=CpSlcKd/sGoiU5Ud/X9mAw
Corrupt quivers for +1 arrow. You can Rain of Arrows until you get cruel ascendancy (+1 arrow). You can curse all content with 2 arrows. Just aim well. The pierce makes up for the rest.
Tree
Spoiler
https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAAAAL68guSQEYqve8NKyG6qtfI1kv6P2L1N4_4KplfyRbc-OuFBh4PM-eicvjwtgscNH4Nfxq4o-h2-PCgLYcT2uJNXyTOHr2xyqRzcDXwD7mjy9zLr7o8a6rrwH3zZpwi0DKIAj0YVUFv0ytNGcQSzHRSbob6K4YiDCfrSGGr315MnoS8dqm-eFm8XL3gvhEismGwLf8bviP5JykokquNqZOd85VxrOlgi9BGW-TdfsDbpVdZYB8NtVcZtGQce18-btYCkg9sRUNlblS5JscM6hMU1uRsl8NUZiqcrS66P-klR-wnpAuwY9tpwuxqP2RMvbwAA
Spoiler
https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAAAAL68guSQEYqve8NKyG6qtfI1kv6P2L1N4_4KplfyRbc-OuFBh4PM-eicvjwtgscNH4Nfxq4o-h2-PCgLYcT2uJNXyTOHr2xyqRzcDXwD7mjy9zLr7o8a6rrwH3zZpwi0DKIAj0YVUFv0ytNGcQSzHRSbob6K4YiDCfrSGGr315MnoS8dqm-eFm8XL3gvhEismGwLf8bviP5JykokquNqZOd85VxrOlgi9BGW-TdfsDbpVdZYB8NtVcZtGQce18-btYCkg9sRUNlblS5JscM6hMU1uRsl8NUZiqcrS66P-klR-wnpAuwY9tpwuxqP2RMvbwAA SetupCorrupt quivers for +1 arrow. You can Rain of Arrows until you get cruel ascendancy (+1 arrow). You can curse all content with 2 arrows. Just aim well. The pierce makes up for the rest.Tree
PRE 2.2
Spoiler Talisman HC Regular Support
Spoiler
Look at my account character for the gear setup. Character is TieryalTalisman_
https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/Tieryal/characters
Aura setup level 100 values in (with disc on I have 3975 ES) - EHP 8622
https://poe.mikelat.com/#=CpSlcKd/sGoiU5Ud/X9mAw
Leveling Tree
Spoiler https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAwMA37CCEI-mRKtVriycEFgRLXYRr5uHZXyDr7fr7jI0MtGa4B8CRUdFnQQHwGZTUoPbPAUEs1XGn9_vfKIAOliaO_AfrJjtPIKbaPLxbNWmNtjkIkkbGmwqjTbp7FUkqhZv-tLjahcvZOdV1oCkK3gfxy2LbRmX9FJTPV-XlQj0wFRqQyL0bAuTJ--I-TfXz0mx
High Level Tree
Spoiler https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAwMAA-4EswceCPQLYQ0fDXwRUBVQFm8XLxhqGYoajxslHNwdFB2qHb4i9CSqJ6ko-i9vM4c1uTbpOlg64TwoPC1Bh0WdRnFJUUmxS65N41NSVcZV1lfJWAdb9FxrX7Bk52jyakNsC20Zb55wu3KpeC982Xzlfll_xoCkgseDCYNfg8yD24RIhMWPGo9Gj_qTJ5UumK2a4Juhm7WcvqEvogCmV6cIpyusmK9stAy3PriTvorAVMHFwzrDbcT2xq7KSsrT18_YvdkT2Vva3d-K4YjjaukC6rrr7uwY74jwH_DV8kX22vcy99f5N_no-tL7Cf4K_kn-jw==
Look at my account character for the gear setup. Character is TieryalTalisman_Aura setup level 100 values in (with disc on I have 3975 ES) - EHP 8622Leveling TreeHigh Level Tree
Talisman HC Vaal Spark Support
Spoiler
The aura calc basically has the gear setup.
My gloves are running a CWDT Immortal call setup.
Aura setup -- Exact values at 93
https://poe.mikelat.com/#39XLlcKd/p=w6BnGf/Qa5cp/c36dhIEh
Run Blade Vortex - CoH - Curse - Curse in your gloves/boots for the other two curses.
If your vaal spark carry does ass loads of damage don't flip your level 20 ele weakness gems, don't get the curse effectiveness nodes, don't flip your CoH gems.
You can flip your blasphemy if it's supporting a TempChains or a WLM
Leveling Tree
Spoiler https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAwMA37CCEI-mRKtVriycEFgRLXYRr5uHZXyDr7fr7jI0MtGa4B8CRUdFnQQHwGZTUoPbPAUEs1XGn9_vfKIAOliaO_AfrJjtPIKbaPLxbNWmNtjkIkkbGmwqjTbp7FUkqhZv-tLjahcvZOdV1oCkK3gfxy2LbRmX9FJTPV-XlQj0wFRqQyL0bAuTJ--I-TfXz0mx
High Level Tree
Spoiler https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAwMAA-4EswceCPQNfBFQEZYVUBZvFy8YahmKGo8bJRzcHRQdqh2-IvQkqiepKPospi9vMtEzhzQKNZI1uTbpN2Y3gzpYOuFBh0VHRZ1GcUlRSbFLrk3jU1JVxlXWV8lYB1v0XGtfsGTnaPJqQ2wLbRlvnnC7eC985X5Zf8aApILHgwmD24RIhMWPGo9Gj_qTJ5Uul_SYrZrgm6GbtaEvogCmV6brpwinK6yYr420DLc-uJO-isBUwGbDOsNtykrK09fP2L3ZE9lb2t3fiuGI42rpAuq66-7sGO-I8B_w1fJF9tr31_k3-ej60vsJ_gr-Sf6P
The aura calc basically has the gear setup.My gloves are running a CWDT Immortal call setup.Aura setup -- Exact values at 93Run Blade Vortex - CoH - Curse - Curse in your gloves/boots for the other two curses.If your vaal spark carry does ass loads of damage don't flip your level 20 ele weakness gems, don't get the curse effectiveness nodes, don't flip your CoH gems.You can flip your blasphemy if it's supporting a TempChains or a WLMLeveling TreeHigh Level Tree
PRE 2.1
Spoiler
TL;DR versions of the support characters I have been building for the leagues. Each have different goals in mind, and some of the trees can be min/maxed further if you wanted to. Maxing something out in temp leagues HC is generally a pipe dream because the league either ends or you die. I don't play trade flipper, so I try to deal with cheap gear and see what is possible in that realm so you can support people all the way to 100 regularly with pretty amazing safety and consistency.
If you want to be a support in the current meta, win races (to 100), or hit top 20 on ladder every support build is going to generally consist of these mechanics.
2-4 Curses.
2-4 Auras.
Applying Chill.
Because the chill duration is based on damage done vs max hp % and we do zero damage it unfortunately pigeon holes us into two ways to support. Ice shot, or Whispering Ice (chilled ground left behind)
I exclusively use ice shot. Whispering ice is pretty decent for support and has it's own pros/cons but I dislike the speed where quill rain is an extremely fast aggressive curse. If you have seen us clear maps before (2 minute volcanos) you know how fast we need to go, and even then I have problems getting up curses before things die. Whispering ice can be managed to almost keep up with us, but again. I personally favor QR
Global Links -- You are always running a setup like this
Spoiler
Because you need 4 curses, you aren't using whispering ice (free link) and you don't have OP gear (+1 arrow quiv/bow) you are always going to be running 2x curse on hit setups. This is only viable because of the 3.0 attack speed that quill rain gives you. Every pack you just press Curse one + Curse two and boom, done, move on.
Double 4L or single 5L setup (dual curse)
Ice Shot - GMP - CoH - Curse
Ice Shot - GMP - CoH - Curse
5L/4L (tri curse)
Ice Shot - GMP - CoH - Curse - Curse
' '
6L/4L (quad)
Ice Shot - GMP - CoH - Curse - Curse - Curse
' '
5L/5L (quad)
Ice Shot - GMP - CoH - Curse - Curse
Ice Shot - GMP - CoH - Curse - Curse
Easy stuff right? ;D
What curses do you run?
Spoiler
It's either 2 defense, 2 offence or 3 defense 1 offence. Depends on map mods, who's in the party, the gear level and what level map.
In 82 chains it was without question Warlords Mark/Enfeeble/Temp Chains + best offensive based on party. Which happened to be ele weakness.
In Dual curse setups its 1 def 1 off
In Tri it can be either way.
Defensive priority is usually as follows
Temp Chains == Warlords Mark > Enfeeble.
Sounds strange, but warlords mark is extremely underrated in the current meta. Most people don't really understand how good it is, so they just skip over it and go right to enfeeble (which is still strong).
As a helpful tip also. If anyone in the party has a danger from reflect damage. You ALWAYS without question socket your damage curse on hit with your warlords mark. The extra leech they get from the warlords will help with the extra damage they get from the other curse helping out with reflect mitigation.
CI Quad Curse
Spoiler
My summoner had just died in tempest at 97 while cursing high maps as tri curse, and I wasn't doing enough damage relative to everyone else. I noticed things like Poison Tempest of Poison, especially in 82 maps were prevalent, frustrating and downright stupid with vuln on you (many maps).
I could just try to get chaos res on my gear but I was focused on getting leveled, sniping pieces of high ES gear from poe.trade and then getting back up to speed with cursing for havocs group while they were trying to get to 100.
This guy was almost exclusively a curser. He ran PoL/PoF to deal with ele weakness cap, and disc for defense.
The tree
Spoiler https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAwMA34rpAkuuGyXZW20ZCPQi9BFQwFRsCzW5akOTJ6crHU--in_G74hObS0foS8RlsHF-TelxEyzBx4OSOwYiELXz5wy0B8EB0V-lS5d8iy_HdlJse_rg9sOXPDVtvcV10NUVcZq-klRKwqGrvRxOlgRL1ZjrJjrY_fXmZqESJuhtUhca-L3j0YYam1sw20Bb6cIHRR4L-d0i3ra3RVQ6-760nzl2xoc3JrgZp4XL1gHEHuPGriTRZ23MWTnvjoo-lNSjHZV1vVLV8mCx5itnjyApMEAN4MNfPnoHb6m6-q6QYczhyymNAq0DJy-A-43Zlv0DR88KA==
Gear notables
Spoiler
5L quill rain
5L Chest
Soul Strike Arrow Quiver
Eye of Chayula
Deodre's Damning x2
Energy from within jewel x3
Other Links
Spoiler
Gen - Vaal Haste - Chaos Golem - Inc duration
Vaal Disc - Frenzy - LMP - Inc Dura
PoF - Blink Arrow - Disc - PoL
My summoner had just died in tempest at 97 while cursing high maps as tri curse, and I wasn't doing enough damage relative to everyone else. I noticed things like Poison Tempest of Poison, especially in 82 maps were prevalent, frustrating and downright stupid with vuln on you (many maps).I could just try to get chaos res on my gear but I was focused on getting leveled, sniping pieces of high ES gear from poe.trade and then getting back up to speed with cursing for havocs group while they were trying to get to 100.This guy was almost exclusively a curser. He ran PoL/PoF to deal with ele weakness cap, and disc for defense.The treeGear notablesOther Links
1MHC Tri Curse Witch Aura Bot
Spoiler
The tree is basically taken entirely from Bob's tempest support except we use different gear to make the magic happen. This build also can do quad curse, but just needed the gear and died before I got it.
This uses Victario's and alpha along with all the aura nodes so we can run OP versions of auras, but also run Haste/Grace/Anger/Disc + low level clarity all at the same time, while still casting on mana.
I was messing around with stuff a little on this build and I swapped out GMP for LMP to try and curse with it. The difference is small, but it let me run a low level clarity with a smaller mana multiplier which allowed me to get ~60 mana regen which is just above the ~54 required amount for sustain of ice shot coh with LMP.
You have 9 or 10K EHP (hybrid) and have about 40% chance to evade.
Downsides on this build are for sure the 65% chance to hit. No one has ever come close to dying because of it other than myself (because you are the one tagging bosses with 1P). So if you can handle that, it's not a big deal. But it's noticeable.
Tree
Spoiler
https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAwMA34rpAkuuGyXZW20ZIvRsC5Mn74j5N9fPSbF_xhGWBx6VLvDVSVHBxewYcLvZEy9vvoqhL8rTtAxb9Oq6DXxXySj6gsf56EGHtz7-CvJFOuGmV03j_o81kti9mK24kxzcjxrr7prgRZ1TUqcIj0aboRhqeC985VgH99eESFxrw22smDpYVcaD2xVQ2t0dFPrSFm_jaiSqNukXLySwgKRk51XWRnGDCW-eykpfsJu1hMXDOhmK-wn22hqP8bNLV8Dj4Ygdqv5JnL4NHzwoHb4zhwPuTm2lxJwyUUysRzQKN2YspqbrN4N-WSepEVA1uacr
Gear Notables
Spoiler
5L Quill Rain - To Quad curse you NEED 6L (Chest for auras)
Victario's Influence
Alpha's Howl
Deodre's ring x2
Jewels on this guy were chaos res/life/ all res + res
Links
Spoiler
Rarity - Frenzy - Clairty (lvl 7) - Culling strike
Victarios: Gen - Anger - Haste - Vaal Haste (5L inc dura)
Alpha's: Inc dura - Vaal Disc - Grace - Disc
The tree is basically taken entirely from Bob's tempest support except we use different gear to make the magic happen. This build also can do quad curse, but just needed the gear and died before I got it.This uses Victario's and alpha along with all the aura nodes so we can run OP versions of auras, but also run Haste/Grace/Anger/Disc + low level clarity all at the same time, while still casting on mana.I was messing around with stuff a little on this build and I swapped out GMP for LMP to try and curse with it. The difference is small, but it let me run a low level clarity with a smaller mana multiplier which allowed me to get ~60 mana regen which is just above the ~54 required amount for sustain of ice shot coh with LMP.You have 9 or 10K EHP (hybrid) and have about 40% chance to evade.Downsides on this build are for sure the 65% chance to hit. No one has ever come close to dying because of it other than myself (because you are the one tagging bosses with 1P). So if you can handle that, it's not a big deal. But it's noticeable.TreeGear NotablesLinks
1MHC Quad Curse Aura Bot Maruader
Spoiler
This build was originally just something to do before the league was over, also to test RT (which turns out to be great for cursing). But ended up working pretty well, but it's overall gear investment continues to grow.
This build is slightly different than the others, simply because I'm geared to supporting a vaal sparker (but can support everything obviously). Because of this, I grab extra res on the maruader side of the tree which with OP gear can be changed out into life.
You're using 6 uniques, which leaves you with 4 slots left to get enough res to be good to go. Right now my gear is only good enough to do non-ele weak maps. But the vaal sparker wont be doing those anyways. If I am supporting a regular build I remove Romaira's for the power charge generation and put on an all res/health ring.
Because using kaom's causes the build to be so stressed for links, I'm not running vaal haste (lol bad support). But instead vaal clarity because havoc routinely goes OOM on bosses and other stuff. If you were just running with regular party you can rechrome for vaal haste and other goodies.
Current Tree
Spoiler
Avatar of fire is because vaal spark is 50/50 cold/light
https://www.pathofexile.com/fullscreen-passive-skill-tree/AAAAAwEBDR8NfA-rFCAWbxa_Fy8YahmKGjgaPhqPHNwc5x0UHaokiySqJpUnLyj6NZI2PTbpOuE8KDwtPfxBh0WdRnFJsUtXTeNQR |
things ADR-05
Name: Creep Hands
Digimon Level: None
Type: D-Reaper - No attributed type
Certain Kill Skill: Spiral Whip Arms
Strong Point Skill: Squeeze Vine
Favorite Food: Calcium
Favorite Thing: Fisticuffs performance
Hated Thing: Love drama ADR-06
Name: Horn Striker
Digimon Level: None
Type: D-Reaper - No attributed type
Certain Kill Skill: Full Moon Kick
Strong Point Skill: Baldy Blow
Favorite Food: Spinach
Favorite Thing: [Flesh] body appreciation
Hated Thing: Diets ADR-07
Name: Palates Head
Digimon Level: None
Type: D-Reaper - No attributed type
Certain Kill Skill: Sudden Attack Bullets
Strong Point Skill: Moebius Bite
Favorite Food: Sunflower seeds
Favorite Thing: Talking
Hated Thing: Prohibition on whispering ADR-08
Name: Optimizer
Digimon Level: None
Type: D-Reaper - No attributed type
Certain Kill Skill: 46cm Alpha Destruction Cannon
Strong Point Skill: Mjolnir Thunder
Favorite Food: Sandwich
Favorite Thing: Becoming hot
Hated Thing: Noise ADR-01
Name: Juri
Digimon Level: None
Type: D-Reaper - No attributed type
Certain Kill Skill: Alpha Destruction Bullet
Strong Point Skill: Mind Scan
Favorite Food: Parfait
Favorite Thing: Inspecting things
Hated Thing: Unscientific things ADR-09
Name: Gate Keeper
Digimon Level: None
Type: D-Reaper - No attributed type
Certain Kill Skill: Active Wing
Strong Point Skill: 35mm Alpha Rapid-Fire Decay Cannon
Favorite Food: Smoked whale
Favorite Thing: Occupying a town
Hated Thing: Things that run [Unknown]
Name: Mother D-Reaper
Digimon Level: None
Type: D-Reaper - No attributed type
Certain Kill Skill: Unknown
Strong Point Skill: Unknown
Favorite Food: Towns
Favorite Thing: Things to give power to the D-Reaper
Hated Thing: Light [Unknown]
Name: Reaper
Digimon Level: None
Type: D-Reaper - No attributed type
Certain Kill Skill: Shinigami no Kama (Death God's Sickle)
Strong Point Skill: Alpha Decay Bomb
Favorite Food: Wine
Favorite Thing: Destruction of the world
Hated Thing: Humans, digimon Number: 302
Name: Locomon
Digimon Level: Perfect
Type: Data - Machine type
Certain Kill Skill: Wheel Grinder
Strong Point Skill: Steam Bomb
Favorite Food: Coal
Favorite Thing: Touring
Hated Thing: Stop lights Number: 303
Name: Grand Locomon
Digimon Level: Ultimate
Type: Data - Machine type
Certain Kill Skill: Destroyed Crash
Strong Point Skill: Limited Express Attack
Favorite Food: Gasoline (high octane)
Favorite Thing: Dog racing
Hated Thing: Passenger cars Number: 304
Name: Parasimon
Digimon Level: Ultimate
Type: Virus - Parasite type
Certain Kill Skill: Electric Bind
Strong Point Skill: Digicarbolic Steroid
Favorite Food: Dietary fiber
Favorite Thing: Parasitism
Hated Thing: Hay fever Extra data :
- All about anpan
- On Ennichi
- About Inarizushi and Renamon's symbolic connection to it.
- An online copy of the KojikiJean-Simon Roy hopes to be the next Laval Rouge et Or offensive lineman to make a splash at the Canadian Football League draft.
The Stoneham native was among the standouts at a combine this week for Canadian university players who will be eligible for the 2017 draft. Roy tied for the lead in the bench-press test with Sam Narkaj of Concordia, each with 36 reps.
On Tuesday night, Roy saw three fellow Rouge et Or offensive linemen go in the first round of this year’s draft — Philippe Gagnon second overall to the Montreal Alouettes; Charles Vaillancourt fifth overall to the B.C. Lions; and Jason Lauzon-Seguin seventh to the Ottawa Redblacks.
“We have a great coach, Carl Brennan, and it all comes from the teaching we get from him,” said Roy. “That’s a good path for me to follow, but I don’t put extra pressure on myself because of those three.
“For sure, with the way things have gone this week, we think more about the draft, but it is next season that is important for us.”
Players from every university football program in Canada are at McGill University this week for the combine and the annual East-West Game, also for 2017 draft eligibles, on Saturday.
Roy is not worried about the void that would be left if all three draftees are in the CFL next season. Laval has become a factory for the big men. Pierre Lavertu of the Calgary Stampeders, Danny Groulx of the Edmonton Eskimos and Luc Brodeur-Jordain of the Montreal Alouettes are among its alumni.
There are quality backups ready to step in and keep Laval in contention in the Quebec Conference.
“As I said, Carl Brennan works magic,” said Roy. “I’m not worried about the guys who will take over.”
The combine saw Harland Hastings, a Calgary native playing at Acadia University, top the vertical jump test at 38 inches, one more than Jonah Pataki of Queen’s and Orion Edwards of Guelph. Hastings also took the broad jump at 10 feet, five inches, an inch better than Jordan Hoover of Waterloo.
Calgary Dinos defensive-back Robert Woodson had the best 40-yard dash at 4.52 seconds, edging Montreal Carabins kicker Félix Ménard-Brière at 4.55.
Lewis Ward of Ottawa had the best shuttle run at 3.99 seconds, edging two Carabins — Samuel Drapeau and Sean Thomas-Erlington. Another agility test, the three-cone drill, went to Ménard-Brière at 6.84 seconds, just ahead of Regina’s Mitchell Picton.
Hastings split time between football and gymnastics before enrolling at Acadia.
“Jumping’s always been one of my things,” he said. “I hope it shows the work I’ve put in over the years and that it translates into something in years to come.
“It’s a great opportunity to show yourself and to get together with the guys you’re potentially getting drafted with next year. It was a fun experience and something I value highly. The best part of it is that you get to learn all sorts of techniques and, from that, you can pick and pull the techniques that you like and bring it back and make our defence better.”
The two coaches from the 2015 Vanier Cup finalists, Blake Nill of the champion UBC Thunderbirds and Danny Maciocia of the Carabins, will act as head coaches. Laval head coach Glen Constantin is coaching the East’s defensive line, while the West’s staff includes Saskatchewan’s Scott Flory on the O-line and Kevin Eiben of the Toronto Varsity Blues on the D-line.
Maciocia’s East team has players from the Maritimes, Quebec and the eastern part of Ontario while Blake’s West squad is pulled from the rest of Ontario, the Prairies and British Columbia.Transgender Tech. Sgt. Frankie Perez poses in his apartment in Las Vegas on Friday, July 15, 2016. Perez has been serving in the Air Force Reserves for six years and came out to his unit last October. (Loren Townsley/Las Vegas Review-Journal) Follow @lorentownsley
Transgender Tech. Sgt. Frankie Perez poses outside of his apartment in Las Vegas on Friday, July 15, 2016. Perez has been serving in the Air Force Reserves for six years and came out to his unit last October. (Loren Townsley/Las Vegas Review-Journal) Follow @lorentownsley
Transgender Tech. Sgt. Frankie Perez looks at his dog tags at his apartment in Las Vegas on Friday, July 15, 2016. Perez has been serving in the Air Force Reserves for six years and came out to his unit last October. (Loren Townsley/Las Vegas Review-Journal) Follow @lorentownsley
Transgender Navy veteran Christie Butterfield holds up her dog tags at her apartment in Las Vegas on Friday, July 15, 2016. Butterfield said she knew she was a woman at the age of seven, but started her transition five years ago. (Loren Townsley/Las Vegas Review-Journal) Follow @lorentownsley
Transgender Tech. Sgt. Frankie Perez poses with his wife Lizette Perez at their apartment in Las Vegas on Friday, July 15, 2016. Frankie has been serving in the Air Force Reserves for six years and came out to his unit last October. (Loren Townsley/Las Vegas Review-Journal) Follow @lorentownsley
Transgender Navy veteran Christie Butterfield poses in her apartment in Las Vegas on Thursday, July 14, 2016. Butterfield said she knew she was a woman at the age of seven, but started her transition five years ago. (Loren Townsley/Las Vegas Review-Journal) Follow @lorentownsley
Transgender Navy veteran Christie Butterfield poses in her apartment in Las Vegas on Thursday, July 14, 2016. Butterfield said she knew she was a woman at the age of seven, but started her transition five years ago. (Loren Townsley/Las Vegas Review-Journal) Follow @lorentownsley
Retired Marine Blue Montana and his service dog Lilly pose at his apartment in Las Vegas on Saturday, June 16, 2016. Loren Townsley/Las Vegas Review-Journal Follow @lorentownsley
Blue Montana points out his "courage" tattoo, which honors a fallen fellow Marine, on Saturday, June 16, 2016, in Las Vegas. Loren Townsley/Las Vegas Review-Journal Follow @lorentownsley
Retired Marine Blue Montana poses at his apartment in Las Vegas on Saturday, June 16, 2016. Loren Townsley/Las Vegas Review-Journal Follow @lorentownsley
Air Force Reserve Tech. Sgt. Frankie Perez didn’t realize she soon would be transitioning to be a male until a deployment last year to the Horn of Africa.
“I started feeling awkward in the showers,” said Perez, who graduated from Cheyenne High School in 2005.
“I just couldn’t pinpoint it,” he said. “I was feeling something inside where I felt like I didn’t even want to perform my duties at work.
Perez, who served four years active duty as a female airman, is now among those who can serve openly as a transgender man under a new policy announced by Defense Secretary Ash Carter. In launching the transgender military service policy June 30, Carter said it was “the right thing to do for our people and for the force.”
“We’re talking about talented Americans who are serving with distinction or who want the opportunity to serve,” Carter said. “We can’t allow barriers unrelated to a person’s qualifications prevent us from recruiting and retaining those who can best accomplish the mission.”
Perez, 29, and Blue Montana, 40, a Marine Corps veteran who served as a female beginning in 1993 but has been undergoing surgeries since 2011 for male-appearance modifications, said they were pleased the policy finally has evolved. Still, they both expressed concerns at what they perceive as a lack of details.
Christi Butterfield, 65, an honorably discharged Vietnam-era Navy veteran and former law enforcement and corrections officer, served as a man but recently has changed to female gender. She also lauded the new policy, saying it’s “the best thing that ever happened to the military.”
“Whether you’re transgender or not, if you’re willing to go fight for your country, what difference does it really make?” said Butterfield, who recently moved to Las Vegas from upstate New York.
“I happened to know at 7 years old I should have been born a girl. Actually, some of the times in the Navy it was somewhat torturous because at shower time I was with these guys and I had to fight off feelings. I just did what I had to do. I just couldn’t let the secret that was inside out.”
Montana joined the Marine Corps “because I’ve always had a big self-love of country and being patriotic.”
He said he knew that eventually “trans people” would be able to serve openly, as gays and lesbians were allowed to do with the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy five years ago.
“It seems like they kind of said, ‘Oh yeah. Trans people can serve, but oh God, we’ve got to go back and make policies about what are we going to do when they go to boot camp,’” said Montana, who works as transgender program manager at The Center on Maryland Parkway, which offers services and support to the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender community.
“What are they going to do?” Montana said, referring to Defense Department officials. “We don’t know yet. They kind of put the cart before the horse.”
Air Force Maj. Bryan Lewis, a public affairs officer at the Pentagon, said the gender designation or marker entered for the service member in the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System is what determines the uniform dress standard and grooming standard the service member is expected to meet.
“That also includes facilities that are subject to military regulation for the use of bathroom and shower facilities and berthing,” he said Friday.
Changing a service member’s gender marker in the reporting system will require information from a military medical provider that a person is undergoing treatment for sexual modifications. The Pentagon issued a manual Friday that details how military personnel can get sex changes with time off for the transition.
A Rand Corp. study cited by the Defense Department gives a mid-range estimate of 2,450 transgender personnel out of 1.3 million active component service members, plus 1,510 in the selected reserve component. Only a fraction of the active component — between 29 and 129 each year — will seek transition-related care that could disrupt their ability to deploy.
Montana said, “There are so many shades of transgender. The umbrella is huge. I’m just afraid that they (Defense officials) are not aware of what exactly being transgender is and who we are as people.”
He expects there will be more bullying and intimidation of men in the ranks who are transitioning to be women because they have “a little harder road than trans-men do.”
“It’s kind of easier for us to transition,” Montana said. “We take a couple shots of testosterone, grow some facial hair, cut our hair and we pass pretty well. With trans-women it’s not that easy. They have a little bit more difficult of a time.”
During Perez’s four years of active duty, “I identified as a butch lesbian because that’s what I thought I had to be. But I knew I had to get out because the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy was in place and there was no way I was going to fight and die for my employer who won’t even allow me to be open about who I love,” said Perez, who married a lesbian, Lizette Perez, this year.
Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., a member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said she supports the new Defense Department policy “because it recognizes the reality that there are already transgender individuals serving in the armed forces.”
“Now it is important that the Pentagon ensures that it is well-prepared to treat all of our nation’s heroes fairly; and that the VA provides access to the services they need and deserve when they return home,” Titus said in a statement.
Peggy Kearns, director of the VA Southern Nevada Healthcare System, said the VA doesn’t currently perform transgender surgeries, but provides pre- and post-care for veterans who are changing their gender.
“It’s being talked about but at this point it is not authorized as an eligible care,” Kearns said. “So if somebody is going through transition, we can do the first part with the hormones and those kind of things. And, if they go out somewhere and have the surgery, we can do the post-care.”
Perez said the policy change for transgenders in the military has created “a whole new ballgame.”
“Before, when I was going to the base I had to shave my face so nobody would see my facial hair,” Perez said. “But now since the ban has been lifted … it’s going to be completely different.”
Contact Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308. Find him on Twitter: @KeithRogers2This video is no longer available
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Big & Multiple TONSIL Stones Removal at home ► How to remove tonsil stones (READ DESCRIPTION)
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To remove these tonsil stones I used a tip of my mom's make up brush because it's bigger and smoother than q-tips. I cleaned it and disinfected it before and after. I think it is easier to get them out this way both, the big stones and the little ones. I have lots of stones on both sides. I found out that fresh garlic helps to slow down the formation. Listerine and mouth wash don't work well on tonsil stones because of the type of bacteria.
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4,041A hijacking scare at Kennedy Airport grounded two jumbo planes packed with passengers Monday. Pei-Sze Cheng spoke with some of the passengers, and has more of the air traffic control recordings that captured the tense exchange between one of the pilots and a controller. (Published Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2012)
Police and FBI are investigating a false threat in which a caller claimed a hijacker was hiding in a plane set to land at John F. Kennedy Airport Monday afternoon.
The threat was phoned in between 3 to 3:30 p.m., just as American Airlines Flight 24 from San Francisco and Finnair Flight 5 from Helsinki were about to land at Kennedy, according to law enforcement sources.
"The captain got on and he said, 'I'm not sure if this is bogus or not, but there's going to be some law enforcement people coming on the plane,'" passenger Tim Skelly recounted.
When the planes landed at JFK, they were moved to an isolated area to be searched. Sources said the level of concern was low, but audio recordings between the pilot of one of the planes and the control tower at Kennedy Airport reveal a tense exchange as they both attempted to figure out why the plane was being met by emergency vehicles.
Pilot, JFK Control Tense Exchange
In a tense exchange with air traffic control at Kennedy Airport, a pilot of one of the planes targeted in a phone threat seeks answers as to why emergency vehicles are greeting the plane on the tarmac. Courtesy LIVEATC.NET. (Published Monday, Sept. 17, 2012)
"Can you contact your company? Do they have any information for you?" the air traffic controller asks the pilot in the audio recordings.
"Negative, they're not answering. What do you have?" the pilot asks.
"I don't have a thing at this moment, except that you and the aircraft beside you need to wait in that area," the controller says.
Rock Stars: Then and Now
The pilot says, "OK, we're surrounded by emergency vehicles. There's a reason for this. Somebody's got to give us the reason, or we're going to evacuate the aircraft. You got 60 seconds."
Finally, the controller tells the pilot, "We have the information. Can you possibly call?"
The pilot responds, "Negative. I would demand the information right now over a frequency."
The Port Authority Police received a phoned threat that hijackers wearing gas masks were hiding in the wheel wells of the American Airlines plane, but the information was vague, sources said. The plane was carrying four federal air marshals.
Debbie Teitelbaum, a Long Island passenger who was on one of the planes told NBC 4 New York, "They told us to stay calm while they searched the plane, but it was very nerve-wracking."
The Finnair flight was cleared around 4:30 p.m., a federal official said, and an all-clear on the American Airlines flight followed shortly afterward.
All wheel wells of both planes were checked and police found nothing, sources said. Neither pilot indicated an emergency.
Police and FBI interviewed passengers and crew on both planes as part of the investigation, and are reviewing the phone call in which the threat was made.ARLINGTON, Texas -- Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott is never going to give his critics the satisfaction of thinking he listens to them. He wants us to believe they’re invisible and irrelevant.
But you can bet Prescott heard the criticism after last week’s poor performance against the New York Giants, whether it came from sports talk radio, his friends relaying comments, or on social media.
Even Adidas unveiled a timely national ad this week with Prescott essentially telling people to doubt him at their own risk.
Prescott did what he needed to do Sunday night at AT&T Stadium against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in front of a national television audience. He emphatically shut up his critics, especially those calling for Tony Romo to replace him, even though the Cowboys' former starter hasn’t taken a snap in a NFL regular-season game in 389 days.
Prescott completed a career-high 88.9 percent of his passes (32-of-36) for 279 yards and ran for a touchdown in the Cowboys' 26-20 win Sunday night.
“I think he’s shown that he can do what you hope that a quarterback can do,” owner Jerry Jones said. “He can come back from when he doesn’t play as well as he wanted to play. I think it ought to show you he’s sure not worried about anything being said peripherally about him. He’s gonna go to work and go to town, so we can quit worrying about that kind of stuff.”
Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott was back on his game Sunday night against the Bucs. Ronald Martinez/Getty Images
Jones, of course, is among the culprits when it comes to discussing hypothetical ways Romo could start again. Last week, Garrett and Prescott each addressed comments made by Jones and former star quarterback Troy Aikman, who harshly criticized the owner.
“There was less time on social media, but that was about the only thing different," Prescott said. "I don't pay attention to the noise.
“I couldn’t tell you what was said all week, but I kind of found out about some stuff later in the week. But it doesn’t really bother me. If anything, it’s motivation. I just wanted to perform after the game I played last week. I just wanted to respond after my performance. He said, she said doesn’t affect me.”
That’s one of the things that's special about Prescott. He hears the critics but doesn’t let it bother him.
“He’s handled every situation he’s come across since he’s been with us very, very well,” Garrett said of Prescott. “He’s handled success really well. He’s handled adversity, adversity within games and adversities from week to week.
“He’s got a great demeanor. Guys follow him. He’s just a natural leader. He did what he needed to do to play well and play at a high level for us, and everyone responded around him.”
In a 10-7 loss to the Giants last week, Prescott completed 17 of 37 passes for 165 yards and two interceptions. Against Tampa, Prescott had 21 completions for 191 yards in the first half.
He didn’t force the ball into coverage this week. He didn't just look for the big play or force the ball to Dez Bryant. He took what the defense gave him and completed passes to six different players in the first quarter, displaying the confidence we’ve seen from him all season.
As a result, Dallas’ offense moved the way it has moved nearly all season against teams not named the Giants. The Cowboys gained 449 yards and collected 24 first downs. They were 5-of-13 on third down after going a combined 2-for-24 over the previous two games.
For the first time in 11 games, Prescott failed to throw a touchdown pass. He could not care less. Prescott is the anti-Romo. His game is all about intangibles and winning -- not statistics. These Cowboys run the ball more than any other team in the league. Their style is not conducive to accumulating gaudy passing numbers, and Prescott is cool with that.
“Patience is one of his strengths, and he’s done a good job of that all year,” Garrett said. “He reads things well. He understands what we want to do against what defenses are doing and he throws the ball to the right guy.”
Prescott completed his last 12 passes, including all 11 of his attempts in the second half as the Cowboys rallied from a 20-17 third-quarter deficit.
Prescott’s most important pass came with 6:30 left in the fourth quarter when he completed a 19-yard slant to Bryant on second-and-nine from the Dallas 5. The Cowboys led 23-20 at the time, and if they couldn’t get a first down or flip field position, Tampa would be in prime position to tie the score or take the lead. Ezekiel Elliott gained 42 yards off right tackle on the next play, and the drive ended with Dan Bailey's fourth field goal.
There won’t be any questions this week about whether Romo should replace Prescott, but they’ll pop up each and every time Prescott plays less than stellar, as long as Romo remains on the roster.
Prescott, however, has proved he can answer them.Charlie Austin played for Poole Town between 2008 and 2009
Southampton striker Charlie Austin is supporting one of his former non-league clubs in their bid to avoid demotion.
Sixth-tier club Poole Town need to raise £70,000 to upgrade their home ground by the end of March.
Austin, 27, has told Poole's board they can have free use of his box at Southampton's St Mary's Stadium to entertain potential investors.
He scored 48 goals in 42 games for the Dorset club between 2008 and 2009 before moving to Swindon Town.
Poole are a point off the play-off places in their first season in National League South. Their home ground Tatnam, in the grounds of a secondary school, is set to be graded by an inspection.
The club will be relegated should they fail to pass the inspection, which requires a minimum amount of terracing for standing and upgrade their floodlights.
"It's a massive ask for those of us running the club to maintain our National League position from a financial point of view," vice-chairman Chris Reeves told BBC Radio Solent.
"On the pitch, the team have done us proud. But, we have to comply with the ground grading issues.
"It just doesn't bear contemplation that we would be relegated," Reeves added. "Somehow or other, we've got to bridge this gap."
The club have raised nearly £1,000 in the first 24 hours since launching an online donations page for the improvements.Description
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ReviewsHAMILTON — For years they were known as the rudest and crudest fans in the CFL, and probably the loudest, at least per capita.
But Blue Bomber head coach Mike O’Shea says that tag may no longer belong to fans in the Steel City.
“I would challenge that,” O’Shea said as the Bombers arrived Saturday. “It would be interesting to see some Hamilton fans come out and see what they do in Winnipeg. Or what they do in a couple other western cities. Because it’s pretty loud where we are, too.”
One of the reasons might be the switch from old Ivor Wynne Stadium to the more polished Tim Horton’s Field.
“They’ve gone through some changes in terms of the type of fan and the type of experience that you get here in this stadium with (owner) Bob Young," O’Shea said. "But they’re still rowdy.”
O’Shea’s comments aren’t likely to make things any quieter on Sunday, when the Bombers play their first game at the new facility, which opened last season.
In the past he’s told stories of being pelted with batteries, money, even warm milk when he was a visiting player with the Argos.
It was all part of the experience at Ivor Wynne, which O’Shea says he’ll miss.
“You always knew you were in a game. It was fun,” he said. “A lot of fun. To me, that’s the way it should be.”President Barack Obama, flanked by Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, gives his State of the Union address during a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday Feb. 12, 2013. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, Pool)
It's a great idea, one I've espoused on these very pages. The president suggested raising the federal minimum from its current level of $7.25 up to $9 by 2015 and then index it to inflation. An increase of that magnitude would directly lift the wages of 15 million low-wage workers, according to the WH.
Clearly, in an economy where for decades growth has failed to reach our lowest wage workers, it's time to raise the wage floor to ensure that low-wage workers have a decent shot at a fair wage.
From the WH fact sheet:
Raising the minimum wage mostly benefits adults, and especially working women: Around 60 percent of workers benefiting from a higher minimum wage are women, and few are teenagers -- less than 20 percent.
Raising the minimum wage helps parents: The average worker who would benefit from a rise in the minimum wage to $9 an hour brought home 46 percent of his or her household's total wage and salary income in 2011, according to the Current Population Survey.
For a working family earning $20,000 - $30,000, the extra $3,500 per year from raising the minimum wage would cover:
The family's spending on groceries for a year; or
The family's spending on utilities for a year; or
The family's spending on gasoline and clothing for a year; or
Six months of housing.
Raising the minimum wage will boost wages without jeopardizing jobs while improving turnover and productivity: A range of economic studies show that modestly raising the minimum wage increases earnings and reduces poverty without measurably reducing employment, and that in fact employers may see a more stable workforce due to reduced turnover and increased productivity:
Numerous careful economic studies have shown that increasing the minimum wage has no negative effect on employment. Recent comprehensive studies have built on earlier research and confirmed that higher wages do not reduce employment, potentially because they increase employers' ability to attract, retain, and motivate workers. And they benefit workers by increasing the reward to work. For example, one recent study found that when states like New York, Rhode Island, California, and Vermont raised their minimum wage, their workers benefited relative to workers in neighboring states that did not raise their minimum wage. This study concluded: "These estimates suggest no detectable employment losses from the kind of minimum wage increases we have seen in the United States." [Arindrajit Dube, T. William Lester, and Michael Reich, 2010, "Minimum Wage Effects Across State Borders: Estimates Using Contiguous Counties," Review of Economics and Statistics.]
In 2006, the Congressional Budget Office analyzed a2 increase in the minimum wage and found that "the potential employment and unemployment impacts of raising the federal minimum wage rate... are difficult to predict, but are likely to be small."
Source: NYTIt’s that time of year again, when the “Best Books of the Year” lists begin to flurry like snowflakes. There’s the august New York Times’ 10 Best Books of the Year, many of which also appear on the year-end round ups by Publisher’s Weekly, BuzzFeed Books, NPR, BookRiot, the user-generated lists on Goodreads…and the list of lists goes on and on. There is inevitably the backlash to the lists and surely we can look forward to the backlash to the backlash. But do you ever wonder why we have all these lists in the first place?
According to Donald L. Foster in his essay “100 Best Books,” “The game officially began in 1886 when Sir John Lubbock compiled a list of one hundred books which he considered ‘necessary for a liberal education.’ The list was reprinted several times in various forms, with such notables as William Gladstone, Thomas Carlyle, and the Prince of Wales providing comments and suggestions. Soon others began drawing up their own lists and the ‘100 Best Books’ became an international sport.” Such notables as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Upton Sinclair, and William Jennings Bryan provided their own “best of” lists at various times; the compilation of “best” books has evolved to include categories like “Books I Enjoyed the Most” and “Most Influential Books,” and in the internet age has become even more granular. Foster notes that publishers and readers alike seem to love these kinds of lists, despite their inevitable lawlessness: “Having evolved over the years with little or no regard for basic ground rules, the game has developed a great many inconsistencies.”
It probably has something to do with that deep urge to be reading the Right Books, born in us as we plow through our school syllabi and nursed as we peruse the Suggested Readings (if we are the “extra credit” type). There are so many books published every year, how can we know which ones are worthwhile? No wonder we crave some kind of informed updating of the canon.
As for us here at JSTOR Daily, we’d love to hear your favorite books of the year. Head over to our Facebook page and let us know!Watching the Democrats’ smoothly staged, potently scripted convention last week, voters could easily think that Hillary Clinton has this election in the bag.
The critiques of Donald Trump made devastatingly clear that he’s a preposterous, dangerous candidate for the presidency. The case for Clinton was compelling, and almost every party leader who mattered showed up to make it.
That included President Obama, who answered Trump’s shockingly gloomy vision of America with a stirring assurance that we have every reason to feel good. Clinton forcefully amplified that assessment. She peddled uplift, not anxiety.
But in 2016, is that the smarter sell? Are prettier words the better pitch?
They made for a more emotional, inspiring convention, so much so that many conservatives loudly grieved the way in which Democrats had appropriated the rousing patriotism and can-do American spirit that Republicans once owned. But Trump has surrendered optimism to Clinton at precisely the moment when it’s a degraded commodity, out of sync with the national mood. That’s surely why he let go of it so readily.Tower Records stores once served as mainstays for music devotees who would shuffle through their bins of vinyl records and stacks of CDs to find new and favorite sounds.
Actor Colin Hanks was one of them. Known for roles in films like “Orange County,” and in television series like “Fargo” — for which he earned an Emmy nomination — the Sacramento native makes his directorial debut with “All Things Must Pass,” a documentary about the rise and precipitous fall of Tower Records.
The film hit theaters earlier this month. Below, you’ll find a few memorable nuggets from Colin about the music retail chain’s origins, its intrepid young employees, and the industry shifts that ultimately led to its demise.
Before it became a retail behemoth, Tower Records got its start at a Sacramento drug store.
Tower Records founder Russ Solomon above his Sacramento, Calif., store in 1989. (Image Courtesy of All Things Must Pass.)
Tower Records sold music, records, LP’s, cassette tapes, and 8-tracks, singles, things like that. [Its founder Russ Solomon] ended up opening 192 stores around the world, and they were the predominant music retailer over the course of about 40 years. The main reason why I really wanted to tell this story is: I was having dinner with an old family friend of mine, and we were talking about what a bummer it was that the stores were closing, and at the end of the conversation she said in passing, “Gosh! I can’t believe it all started in that little drug store, that’s just crazy!” And I said, “Excuse me? What are you talking about?” And she told me that Russ Solomon started selling used 78s out of his father’s drug store in the late ’30s, early ’40s. And that was about as close to a light bulb moment as I’ve ever had, and I just said, “That sounds like a documentary.”
Solomon empowered his young employees and bucked the typical business model.
(Image Courtesy of All Things Must Pass.)
Russ Solomon sort of created that store upon this foundation that the stores are run by the kids that work there. They stock what they want to listen to, they design the stores the way they want to design it, and they tell the higher-ups, “OK, this is what we’re doing, this is what’s working.” So it was very much an organization that was run from the bottom up, not from the top town. Then, of course, it involved the music industry, so you had your nefarious characters that worked there, you know — questionable business practices and all of that sort of stuff. Definitely not a corporate culture going on behind the scenes at Tower Records.
Its very un-corporate environment included mysterious budget expenses like |
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Absolutely no doubt that @KatieEberling would have done better for USA3. Hope the marketing dollars were worth it. #merit #Olympics2014 - Chuck Berkeley (@ChuckBerkeley) February 18, 2014
Berkeley competed in the 2010 Games in Vancouver but did not make the U.S. team for Sochi. In an interview with The Associated Press after his Twitter comments, he called the U.S. selection process for the Sochi Games "corrupt" and questioned why Jones received a spot on the women's roster.
Berkeley, who competed in World Cup this season, said the teams for Sochi were chosen based largely on an athlete's popularity. He added that some sliders were favored over others with better credentials and that the USA-3 women's sled Jones is pushing at the Olympics would fare better with someone else in her spot.
"I get that people want to latch on to a media sensation and run wild," Berkeley told the AP, referring to Jones. "But it comes down to this: There are athletes who deserve to be there who are not there, on the women's and the men's sides. And you have to ask yourself why is that the case. What is wrong with the selection process? Why is it flawed? Why is it corrupt?"
After hearing of Berkeley's remarks, U.S. Bobsled and Skeleton Federation CEO Darrin Steele told the AP on Wednesday that he stands by the team selections. He also noted that certain athletes who did not get picked for Olympic spots, such as Eberling, were able to accept roles as alternates and help the team in Sochi.
While Berkeley did not mention Jones by name in his tweet, the jab toward the former hurdler -- always a lightning rod for critics -- was thinly veiled at best.
"From my personal experience with Lolo, she's had a very bad attitude," Berkeley said.
He did clarify to the AP that he thinks the attention the two-time Summer Olympian has brought bobsledding is a good thing.
U.S. officials have said that Jones' inclusion on the Olympic roster has not led to any sponsorship opportunities for the federation.
Jones was one of three women chosen from a six-woman pool for the push athlete spots, and Steele said at the time that it was "incredibly close" among Jones, Eberling and Emily Azevedo for what amounted to the final spot.
Steele told the AP at the time that the selection committee relied only on data and results in making its picks, and that Jones "absolutely" earned her spot on the team.
For the record, this is strictly MY opinion. Sorry to offend all the "experts" out there. Jealousy is not in my repertoire. #Olympics2014 - Chuck Berkeley (@ChuckBerkeley) February 18, 2014
"The men's and women's teams, we kept our distance from each other this year because of Lolo Jones," Berkeley said in the interview hours after the initial tweets. "For no other reason. We like everybody else. It was because of Lolo Jones."
Jones and Fenlator were 11th after Tuesday's first two runs of the women's bobsled event. They had the fifth-fastest average push times in the field on the opening night, and the other two U.S. sleds were in the gold- and bronze-medal positions at the midway point of the competition.
Berkeley also had harsh words for U.S. coaches, calling them "complete idiots" without referring to any by name.
Berkeley, a push athlete, said he thought he should have made the Sochi team, and he does not plan on sliding again for the U.S. unless the federation makes major changes in leadership and coaching.
"I'll just say this: Cory Butner has never won a World Cup medal in his entire career as a driver without me in the back of his two-man sled, ever," Berkeley said. "So how does Chuck Berkeley stay home when that's the case? It's just weird. I've won medals before Cory Butner in two-man. It's strange to me that certain individuals who don't meet all the criteria points... but someone else is going to go over you. At what point is the USBSF held accountable?"
Butner raced in the two-man competition at Sochi with Chris Fogt, the reigning U.S. push champion, in the back of his sled. They finished 12th.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.TWENTY million Chinese people are in danger of arsenic poisoning from drinking water, according to a new risk-mapping technique.
Arsenic occurs naturally in the world’s rock, dissolving in underground water that can pollute wells. If consumed over decades, it can cause cancers, as well as other kidney and liver diseases. The hazard is recognised, but few countries undertake the laborious task of testing each well.
Luis Rodriguez-Lado of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology in Dübendorf, and Chinese colleagues, developed a system using geological warning signs that revealed the two most susceptible landscape – alkaline inland drainage basins and delta regions with new river sediments. Globally, the latter includes Bangladesh, the scene of what the World Health Organization called “the largest poisoning of a population in history”.
The team tested their model in China, and identified two previously unsuspected areas likely to be at risk: parts of the north China basin and Sichuan province (Science, doi.org/nkx).
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The system should help ensure any plans to tap dangerous groundwater are scrapped.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Deadly well water”Count ‘em. Three bipartisan agreements in Congress in two months: a budget deal, a spending bill, and now, a long-delayed, long-argued, nearly $1 trillion farm bill that passed the Senate Tuesday, 68 to 32, and is ready for President Obama’s signature.
Political polarization in Washington has yet to melt into a puddle of brotherly love, but at least some of the basic work of the people is getting done – in contrast to the partial government shutdown that angered millions of Americans last October. Some in Congress are even hopeful that the bills approved so far will spark a bit of trust and lead to other deals, such as on the debt ceiling or even immigration – at least before the heat of the election season descends on Capitol Hill.
“The fact that we have an agreement on the farm bill, that we had an agreement on the budget, and that there’s been indications they might be willing to move ahead on immigration – it’s very positive,” says Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) of Minnesota.
The senator attributes some of the progress to the backlash from Americans after the partial government shutdown. “People had just had it, and we’re getting some more bipartisan work on these major issues that have been sitting around for just way too long.”
Approval ratings for Congress plunged 11 percentage points during last year's government shutdown, to a record low of 9 percent, according to a November Gallup poll.
The willingness of House Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio to “stand up to the tea party” last December “was a big deal,” Senator Klobuchar said. Mr. Boehner endorsed the farm bill in the House, despite objections from conservatives over its costs. It passed last week 251 to 166.
In contrast to 2011, when Boehner and a new House GOP majority held out for dollar-for-dollar spending cuts for every dollar increase in the debt limit, now the speaker seems willing to raise the debt limit – which expires on Friday – rather than threaten default. “There’s no sense picking a fight we can’t win,” he reportedly told his Republican colleagues in a closed caucus meeting Tuesday morning.
The farm bill also had its Senate dissenters – 23 Republicans and nine Democrats voted against it. Liberals say an $8 billion cut to the food stamp program, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), is too severe. Conservatives objected to wasteful spending – particularly as described by Sen. Charles Grassley (R) of Iowa, in which 10 percent of the biggest farmers get 70 percent of the benefits.
The bill represents compromise and some small reform. It ends subsidies that were paid whether a farmer planted or not – but it expands the crop insurance program. It avoids the steep SNAP cuts that House conservatives wanted (nearly $40 billion), but was double the $4 billion cut originally called for by the Democratic-led Senate. It promotes land conservation, nutritious fruits and vegetables, and still manages to save $16.6 billion over 10 years – a modest saving, but a saving nonetheless.
“It wasn’t revolutionary at all. But they got it done and, I’m telling you, in this world that is no small achievement,” says Dan Glickman, a secretary of Agriculture under President Clinton and a former congressman who is now with the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.
Discouraged Americans might rejoice with Mr. Glickman, but they shouldn’t get too carried away. The farm bill is traditionally the most bipartisan – make that nonpartisan – piece of legislation that Congress considers. The dividing lines aren’t so much red versus blue, but regional or crop-specific. The fact that this bill was bogged down for some two years reflects the tenacity of polarization that has come to define Congress.
Passing a farm bill, raising the debt ceiling, budgeting – these things are supposed to be the routine work of Congress. Now “each one of these ordinary events is proclaimed to be a bipartisan miracle,” says Ross Baker, a congressional expert at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. The five-year farm bill is an accomplishment, sure, he says, but compared “to what Congress ought to be doing effortlessly, it’s nothing at all to rejoice about.”
These accomplishments don’t, for instance, portend a willingness in Congress to work through the tough issues facing the country. The budget agreement negotiated by Sen. Patty Murray (D) of Washington and Rep. Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin at the end of last year nips and tucks at the deficit, but doesn’t address the long-term drivers of the $17 trillion national debt – entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security. The farm bill does not plan for long-term, sustainable food production in a world with a growing population and changing climate.
Yet some lawmakers hope that the baby steps of recent weeks will lead to more baby steps – perhaps even bigger ones. Senate Republicans and Democrats are apparently still discussing a bipartisan solution to extend unemployment insurance. Both parties in the House and Senate are working on an infrastructure bond that would be paid for by repatriated corporate taxes. Senator Grassley may not have liked the farm bill, but he told the Monitor that perhaps the bipartisanship expressed in that legislation might well spill forward to immigration reform.
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“Anytime there’s a major bipartisan effort here that succeeds, I think it gives momentum to other such efforts,” says Sen. Carl Levin (D) of Michigan. He, too, hopes recent progress will rub off on immigration legislation.
[Editor's Note: The original version of this article misstated the number of bipartisan agreements passed in Congress in two months.]Emergency Department trolley crisis – Cost €86.28m
Emergency Department (ED) services have been at crisis point for some time, as regularly highlighted by the ‘Trolley Watch’ survey carried out by the Irish nurses and Midwives Organisation. The trolley crisis is not just an Ed crisis but a symptom of the malaise that is endemic across the wider health system. It is primarily due to a lack of capacity resulting from the chronic failure of government to provide adequate funding to the public health system. There are insufficient staff and beds in the acute hospital system; insufficient exit packages; and insufficient nursing home beds or home care options. Sinn Féin is prioritising the provision of an additional 500 nurses to tackle the crisis in the Eds themselves and to open further beds across the system. We would also increase the number of Registered nurse Prescribers. And in developing sustainable solutions to the issue of delayed discharges we have provided for additional nursing home beds, home help hours and home care packages.
Waiting times crisis - Cost €55.83m
The Irish Hospital Consultants Association has highlighted the real cost to the health system of agency consultants, which work out at twice the price of a long-serving permanent consultant and three times the cost of a new consultant. Sinn Féin has prioritised the recruitment of an additional 250 hospital consultants and medical secretaries for 2016. These posts are vital if we are to tackle shamefully long waiting times for consultations and treatments.
Increase maternity resources - Cost €15.16m
Ireland had the highest per capita birth rate of all 28 member countries of the Eu in 2014. despite this, maternity care in Ireland has been left in crisis, with shortages of staff in hospitals across the state. Our maternity services are severely understaffed, lacking both midwives and obstetricians. Sinn Féin would recruit an additional 250 midwives, and obstetricians and gynaecologists from our new consultant intake for 2016.
Increase investment in mental health services - Cost €29.16m
Year after year the Government has failed to deliver on its mental health commitments. despite a greater need for mental health services, there are 1,200 fewer mental health staff now than there were in 2006. Sinn Féin believes that the ‘A Vision for Change’ strategy for mental health must be implemented. We intend to address staffing-level shortcomings with a particular focus on staffing Child and Adolescent Mental Health teams, the provision of suicide critical assessment nurses and mental health intellectual disability posts and increasing access to the Counselling in Primary Care service.
Increase funding to disability services - Cost €45.89m
565,000 people in this state reported having various forms of disability in the last census. Disability is a societal issue, affecting people of all ages and their families, directly and indirectly. despite disability having being proclaimed as a focus for the Government, the recession and austerity imposed has seen a reduction in services for those with disabilities in the order of 14-16%. Sinn Féin’s budget proposals provide for between 500 and 600 occupational therapists, physiotherapists, speech and language therapists, and psychologists, and additional funding for personal assistant hours and community based neuro-rehabilitation teams and transitional services.
Medical Card Reform - Cost €21.29m
Some of our sickest and most vulnerable citizens continue to go without medical cards. With the exception of childhood cancer, the time- consuming and onerous financial audit of the entire household remains the sole criteria upon which eligibility for a medical card is based. This is despite promises by government to build compassion into the system. Our proposals include providing an automatic medical card for children with significant medical needs arising from serious illness or disability. Further provisions for the extension of free GP visits to the remainder of the population, commencing with lower income households and for the expansion of GP capacity to facilitate this roll-out will be included in an upcoming Health Policy document. We are now providing for an initial increase in the number of GPs in training.
Address high cost of prescription charges and medicines - Cost €33.9m
The overwhelming body of evidence shows that charges for drugs can lead to higher costs on the health budget in the medium to longer term, not to mention the serious strain and ill effects they can have on the health of those who need medications. As a first step in phasing them out, we would reduce the charge per prescription by 50c as well as lowering the drug Payment Scheme monthly limit from €144 to €132.
Increase investment in dental care - Cost €81.1m
During the recession there has been a drastic scaling back across the three main fields of public-funded dental provision. As with other frontline services the recruitment moratorium has had a negative effect on frontline dental services, and waiting lists have become shamefully long. We would provide an additional 80 dentists, including orthodontists, and 120 dental nurses, expand orthodontic treatment for children, extend the annual dental check-up, and restore funding for maintenance treatments.
Increase emergency ambulance cover - Cost €7.8m
Many communities across the country experience long and dangerous delays waiting for ambulances. HIQA sets the targets in which 80 per cent of life-threatening cardiac or respiratory emergency calls for emergency assistance are supposed to be dealt with within 8 minutes. Last year just 26.6% of such calls were responded to within this time. In rural areas just 6.6% of calls were responded to within the eight-minute target time. We would increase emergency ambulance cover by providing two additional ambulances, including personnel (88), for each of the four HSE regions.
Increase funding for the national Drugs strategy - Cost €5.76m
Problem drug use is a public health issue. In the nine years from 2004 to 2012 problem drug use played a role in the deaths of 5,289 people. That’s more than one death every single day. But despite the threat to the lives of so many, predominantly young men, funding for the health services vitally needed to stabilise and save these lives has been severely cut. We would increase funding for delivery of the national drugs Strategy.
Additional funding to strengthen HIQA’s role - Cost €630,000
HIQA has a varied and challenging workload in setting standards across the health sphere and monitoring whether they are adhered to, in hospital, residential homes, child care settings and technology relating to health care. HIQA needs to be adequately supported and resourced. We make an initial provision for additional staff.
Increase funding to Healthy Ireland - Cost €200,000
There are currently only five staff in the department of Health assigned to work in the Health and Wellbeing Programme, which is coordinating Healthy Ireland. Providing adequate funding for Healthy Ireland will help to ensure that citizens young and old are encouraged to achieve as high a level of health and wellbeing as possible.Flickr / Hourman Wal-Mart's fourth-quarter earnings announcement was just released.
In the announcement, the company addressed the emails circulated among executives that leaked on Friday, describing February sales figures as a "total disaster," and citing the effects of the payroll tax hike as the main culprit.
However, a few analysts and economists pointed out that it could be due to a delay in tax refunds this year that were pushed back because of changes to laws that were part of the fiscal cliff.
The implication was that consumers were waiting to get their tax refunds before buying that new flat-screen TV, so Wal-Mart's sales started slower than expected this month.
In the release, Wal-Mart admitted that delayed tax refunds seem to be the primary driver, contrary to what was said in the leaked emails (emphasis added):
"We are confident that our low prices will continue to resonate, as families adjust to a reduced paycheck and increased gas prices," Simon said. "We see the underlying health of the Walmart U.S. business is sound, and sales trends are similar to what we've demonstrated in the last few quarters.
However, February sales started slower than planned, due in large part, to the delay in income tax refunds. We began seeing increased tax refund check activity late last week in our stores, resulting in a more normalized weekly sales pattern for this time of the year.
Due to the slower sales rate in the first few weeks of this year's first quarter, we are forecasting comp sales for the 13-week period from Jan. 26 to Apr. 26, 2013 to be around flat. We continue to monitor economic conditions that can impact our sales, such as rising fuel prices, changes in inflation and the payroll tax increase.
Click here for more from Wal-Mart's release >Real Madrid Club wants signings but don't know when
January simply must provide solutions to Real Madrid's biggest problem; not the future of its coach or president, but rather its transfer market activity with at least one arrival thought to be essential for the remainder of the season to be a success.
Making movements in the window is not something that Los Blancos are squeamish about, as shown by their eagerness to sign Kylian Mbappe in the summer. While those within the Estadio Santiago Bernabeu were worried by the striker's lack of experience, it was instead his desire to stay in France that saw him snub the Spanish capital.
The search for such a quality player has since been hastened, thanks to Real's 14-point deficit in the LaLiga title race and their relative struggles to reach the Champions League last-16, a feat achieved albeit from second-place in their group.
Problems arise when deciding exactly who they would like to sign as some options, including Timo Werner, are cup-tied for European competition with those who aren't, such as Mauro Icardi, enjoying life as the star man at their current club and unlikely to be a constant starter in Madrid.
For example, would Icardi be worth the 120 million euro fee in January when he wouldn't have had the adaptation period that a summer arrival would afford?
The answer is fairly straightforward but the question doesn't go away as easily. Thus, Real are keen to sign a striker and, if the situation arises, a central defender, before January 31.
Transfer fees are however growing and Liverpool's 85m euro purchase of Southampton defender Virgil Van Dijk shows how askew the market currently is. With that in mind, how much would Daniel Levy demand for Harry Kane? More than the 222m euro record that Neymar commanded, that's for sure.
In recent years, Zinedine Zidane has focused on young signings such as Dani Ceballos and Vinicius, and while this tactic is to remain, there is the cash ready and waiting for Los Blancos to go and capture a ready made addition to boost the team.
Therein lies another issue. The team as it stands exists in relative harmony and enjoys the trust of its coach, and any threat to that may not be thought of as worth the risk.
It all leaves plenty to think about for those in charge at Real Madrid, with the clock ticking and the price tags rising. They may want to make a signing, they just don't know how or when.A family has lost custody of two children featured in a series of "prank" videos, which some said actually showed child abuse.
The YouTube account "DaddyOFive" became wildly popular in recent weeks after posting videos where two parents played "pranks" on their children. In particular, they would accuse one child, named Cody, of a range of bad behaviour – and then punish him physically and emotionally for it.
Shape Created with Sketch. Forbes' Highest-Paid YouTubers of 2016 Show all 10 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Forbes' Highest-Paid YouTubers of 2016 1/10 1. PewDiePie ($15 million) (Real name Felix Kjellberg) Getty 2/10 2. Roman Atwood ($8 million) Getty 3/10 3. Lilly Singh ($7.5 million) Lilly Singh Getty 4/10 4. Smosh ($7 million) (Real names Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla aka Smosh) Getty 5/10 5. Rosanna Pansino ($6 million) Getty 6/10 6. Tyler Oakley ($6 million) Getty 7/10 7. Markiplier ($5.5 million) (Real name Mark Fischbach) Getty 8/10 8. German Garmendia ($5.5 million) Getty 9/10 9. Rhett and Link ($5 million) (Real names Rhett McLaughlin and Charles Lincoln 'Link' Neal) Getty 10/10 10. Miranda Sings ($5 million) (Real name Colleen Ballinger) Getty 1/10 1. PewDiePie ($15 million) (Real name Felix Kjellberg) Getty 2/10 2. Roman Atwood ($8 million) Getty 3/10 3. Lilly Singh ($7.5 million) Lilly Singh Getty 4/10 4. Smosh ($7 million) (Real names Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla aka Smosh) Getty 5/10 5. Rosanna Pansino ($6 million) Getty 6/10 6. Tyler Oakley ($6 million) Getty 7/10 7. Markiplier ($5.5 million) (Real name Mark Fischbach) Getty 8/10 8. German Garmendia ($5.5 million) Getty 9/10 9. Rhett and Link ($5 million) (Real names Rhett McLaughlin and Charles Lincoln 'Link' Neal) Getty 10/10 10. Miranda Sings ($5 million) (Real name Colleen Ballinger) Getty
Now Rose Hall, the biological mother of 9-year-old Cody and his sister Emma, says that she has obtained emergency custody of her children.
"They're doing good," Ms Hall says on the video where she appears with her lawyer. "They're getting back to their playful selves."
Ms Hall thanked the YouTube community for raising attention towards the channel.
DaddyOFive's creators, which included Cody's father, claimed that the videos were harmless pranks and that the children didn't mind taking part in them. But a range of prominent YouTubers said that the videos depicted abuse – pointing to videos where the parents scream and swear at the kids, tell them they are going to be adopted and one where Cody's father appears to push him into a bookcase.
The videos gained the channel almost 800,000 subscribers and millions of views, as well as supporters who said they enjoyed the stunts being shown in the video. But they also attracted detractors, including YouTube star Philip DeFranco, who released a video editing some of the more horrifying clips together.
That video was viewed more than three million times and brought widespread condemnation of the DaddyOFive channel.
As well as the apparent developments between the parents of Cody and his sister, the Martin family posted a video on their DaddyOFive channel apologising for what they did, and appeared on US TV. They said that they were unaware of the effect the videos would have on their children and apologised for them getting out of hand.
The rest of the videos have now been removed from the channel and the apology has been viewed almost two million times.
The Martins had initially said that the people who opposed the videos were "haters" and that by criticising the stunts they were in fact upsetting the children more.Building the supergrid would require an investment of US$80bn (£40bn), plus the cost of the wind turbines – a fraction of the €1 trillion the EU expects to pay for a 20 per cent reduction of its carbon footprint by 2020. The average price of the electricity generated would be just 4.6 euro cents per kWh, competitive with today's rates, which are likely to rise as fossil fuels run out....
The scheme would make the use of renewable energy, particularly wind power, so reliable and cheap that it would replace fossil fuels on an unprecedented scale, serving 1.1 billion people in 50 countries. Europe's 1.25bn tons of annual CO2 output from electricity generation would be wiped out. High-voltage direct current (HVDC) lines, up to 100 times as long as the alternating current (AC) cables carried by the National Grid's pylons, would form the system's main arteries. HVDC lines are three times as efficient, making them cost effective over distances above 50 miles.
The Independent reports that a proposed supergrid could supply Europe with carbon free electricity primarily from wind power. The 5,000-mile electrical grid, stretching from Siberia to Morocco and Egypt to Iceland, would slash Europe's CO2 emissions by a quarter, scientists say.
"We have the technical abilities to build such a supergrid within three to five years," said Czisch, an energy systems expert at the University of Kassel in Germany. "We just need to commit to this big long-term strategy." The supergrid would draw power from massed turbines in a band of countries to Europe's south and east that have above average wind potential, feeding it to the industrialised centres of Europe. The scale would overcome the biggest obstacle to wind power – its unreliability. In smaller networks, such as Britain's National Grid, calm weather could cut production to zero. But the supergrid would cover a region so large that the wind would always be blowing somewhere.
A UPI article added:
Gregor Czisch’s dissertation has rattled the energy world. Its main claim: Given the political will, Europe could within a few years meet 100 percent of its electricity needs from renewable energy sources, at no cost difference to today’s fossil fuel-based system.
... It would rely on some 70 percent wind energy, backed up by storage hydropower and biomass. "Some of the best wind capacities lie in deserted areas, such as in Siberia, Kazakhstan and the Sahara," Czisch told UPI. "And then you have the coastal region of Morocco, which has excellent wind capacities." Photovoltaics don’t play a major role in Czisch’s scenario because they are simply too expensive and because there are other, better sources available, including solar-thermal energy from southern Spain and the Sahara, for example.
Foreword thinking or an absurd suggestion? I don't know that DC lines are three times as efficient as AC lines, but that is a small point. Czisch didn't comment on superconducting transmission, previous post, for some of the main lines, which are higher efficiency and more importantly can conduct up to 10 times the amount of power of today’s conventional copper cables of the same size. The use of superconducting cable would slow down the project, as the production capacity is not available, but the three to five year construction time estimated for the project is much too optimistic, as no doubt is the US$80bn price tag. But despite all these negative comments, I think it would be a great project that could be built within 20 years. Getting the political will is the main problem.Thank you for that kind introduction.
It’s a pleasure to follow the Minister for Defence Procurement, and I very much intend to pick up on some of his themes.
But first, I’d like to say a few words on where the Royal Navy stands following the Strategic Defence and Security Review.
SDSR overview
Almost 18 months ago, on a dark November day, the Navy Board met in Scotland to determine our SDSR strategy.
We made what, in retrospect, was a quite extraordinary decision to define a highly ambitious future for the Royal Navy, based around 3 core capabilities of Continuous At Sea Deterrent and Carrier Strike, together with Amphibious Readiness.
It was reasonable in terms of an aspiration for a great nation.
But it was extraordinarily ambitious simply because of the wholesale political and budgetary uncertainties of the time.
Yet, with May’s General Election everything changed, and the first part of our plan looked possible.
The newly elected majority government had already committed to renewing the deterrent, and to bringing both our 2 new aircraft carriers into service, so the big building blocks of our future were already in place, even before the SDSR began.
And then the July budget last year defined a financial future of 2% for defence that gave our plan fiscal depth, perhaps not so much in the very early years, but certainly thereafter.
So, our focus switched, therefore, to making sure that the totality of these strategic promises were met, and that the necessary supporting and enabling components were properly credible.
And that, by and large, is what the SDSR delivered:
8 highly credible anti-submarine warfare Type 26 frigates;
9 new Maritime Patrol Aircraft necessary to protect the deterrent and support sea control;
At least 5, and listening carefully to the Prime Minister and Chancellor, probably more, new general purpose frigates too;
More F35B jets flying from our carriers, and earlier than planned;
Plus the Fleet Solid Support Ships necessary to sustain their global reach.
So nothing fancy, merely the necessary supporting components to deliver these 2 strategic responsibilities credibly.
Balanced fleet
But there are 2 other really noticeable features of the SDSR.
Firstly, we’ve met this objective while maintaining investment in a balanced fleet.The Royal Marines remain the UK’s ‘go-to’ contingency force.
The drumbeat of submarines under construction at Barrow continues, with signs of improved support performance.
Every helicopter type in the Fleet Air Arm is being replaced or upgraded.
There are 4 new tankers as well as supply ships for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary.
Plus investment in larger patrol ships, unmanned mine countermeasures technology, Special Forces, reserves and all the other capabilities which deliver power at sea, and from the sea.
National Shipbuilding Strategy
The second noticeable feature was that 2015 marked the first time in decades that the Royal Navy emerged from a defence review unscathed. In fact, we’re set to grow, in ships and people. The increases may be modest for now, but soon the government will unveil its National Shipbuilding Strategy. It will set out plans to replace all 13 Type 23 frigates on a one for one basis. This will be achieved, as I’ve said, with 8 Type 26 anti-submarine warfare frigates together with at least five general purpose frigates.
Those 2 small words, “at least”, are hugely significant. For the past 20 years, and longer, we’ve have to make do with the words “up to”.
Remember the phrase “Up to 12 Type 45 destroyers”, which of course became 8 and then 6?
So I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the words “at least” over “up to” any day.
Carrier journey
And none of this journey and outcome happens by accident. SDSR 2015 was a huge team effort across the Royal Navy, and defence.
Yet the seeds were sown many years ago, decades ago in fact.
It’s down in no small part to the strategic foresight and steadiness under fire of the men who have stood in my place, and all those who supported them, many of whom are here tonight.
And while there have been setbacks along that journey, too often the focus was on what was lost, when it should have been on what was retained.
Because the navy of tomorrow is born out of the navy of today; and our case was reinforced, year-after-year, by our sailors and marines on operations, demonstrating what we offer the nation.
Nothing is more reflective of this truth than our carrier journey.
This year, this month, marks the fiftieth anniversary of Denis Healy’s seminal 1966 defence white paper, which cancelled the CVA-01 carrier project. 50 years.
Some thought, perhaps hoped, it would mark the end of British carrier based air power.
Yet there followed in the 1970s perhaps some of the most imaginative staff work the Ministry of Defence has ever seen as 3 “through-deck cruisers” slowly, quietly, evolved into small aircraft carriers.
And so began what Nick Childs aptly termed “the Age of Invincible”: 3 decades of carrier operations: in the Falklands, followed by Bosnia, the Gulf, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone.
Indeed, those who argue that the Queen Elizabeth class carriers are too big, fail to appreciate that their size was determined precisely because of experience gained through back-to-back operations in the 80s and 90s.
It’s now 18 years since George Robertson stood up in Parliament and set this project in train.
It’s not been an easy journey since then.
There were a few moments when it was frankly touch-and-go.
Plenty of people predicted they wouldn’t be built, or that they would suck the rest of the navy dry.
Even 5 years ago, we had commentators helpfully suggesting that the Libya intervention was evidence yet again that we could rely on land based air power for future operations.
Not only had they forgotten the lessons of 1982, but they seemed not to notice when France and Italy deployed their carriers, despite having airfields within easy reach, or our own brilliant creative use of HMS Ocean for Apache strike, which once again showed that the navy does not let the nation down.
And just look at where we are today.
In the United States, the first squadron of US Marine Corps F35Bs is operational, with UK personnel alongside them every step of the way. This summer you’ll see the F35 in UK skies. Get used to the sight because many more are coming our way.
Meanwhile, in the Gulf, our frigates and destroyers have |
amazing. It’s another dark episode. We know that certain characters are in jail, we come back to Polis and we pick up in the aftermath of Lexa’s death and we begin to understand what the conclave is all about. Let’s just say things unfold from there and we begin to see Clarke doing what Clarke does, which is compartmentalizing and finding a way to suck down her pain and be our hero and try and save her people yet again. With the loss of Lexa, she has to worry about whether or not the new commander will continue to be an ally. So we’ll see her doing what people do in life when terrible things happen, when tragedy strikes. She’s going to suck it up and try to move on and do what she has to do to save her people.
Any chance of seeing more episodes set in the past aboard Polaris?
I loved that story. I had been waiting since the beginning to do an origin story really, because that’s what that was, it was the origin of the Ark, the end of the world. I think Javier [Grillo-Marxauch], the writer of the script, did a great job laying in this mythology of the second A.I. Every one of those scenes is so dense and rich and that’s a tough thing to do because none of the characters in the show, aside from Erica Cerra playing Becca, are in those scenes. But they were still fascinating and emotional.
I want to know what was going on with all these people up there.
Spinoff!
That’s what I’m saying! Let’s get that out there.
Well we’re talking about it. We’re talking about both how to continue that story in The 100, and are there possibilities to explore other time periods, in a way.
Alright, well when you’re ready to talk about it, let me know.
If the fans want it, and they ask for it and they scream loud enough, maybe they’ll get it.
The 100 returns March 31 at 9/8c on The CW.The Iranian Navy has dispatched a flotilla on a mission to Oman, local media report, and will enter international waters.
Read more
On Sunday, the 47th flotilla, comprised of an Alborz destroyer and Bushehr logistic warship, set sail from the southern port city of Bandar Abbas after a ceremony attended by naval commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, Tasnim News reports. From Oman, the ships will head to the Gulf of Aden and international waters north of the Indian Ocean.
At the same time, the 46th flotilla, made up of a Sabalan destroyer and Lavan logistic warship, is due to return to Iran on Sunday after completing a two-month mission to secure naval routes and protect merchant vessels and oil tankers in the Gulf of Aden. The Iranian Navy has been conducting patrols of the region since November 2008 as part of international anti-piracy efforts.
“Today, there is some controlled insecurity in the Gulf of Aden and we have been able to escort over 4,000 oil tankers and cargo ships to the safe regions without any disruption in our plans for oil and non-oil exports and imports,” Admiral Sayyari told Fars News Agency on Sunday.
READ MORE: US is like ‘armed robber breaking into your house’ – Iranian defense minister
The Gulf of Aden, which lies between the Horn of Africa and the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, is home to multiple security threats. The ongoing conflict in Yemen between the Saudi-backed government and the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels has led to a number of ships in the area coming under attack. Meanwhile, pirates in Somalia have been taking advantage of the chaos to launch raids on merchant vessels passing through the area, one of the busiest shipping routes for oil in the world.I sit here with indescribable feelings. I just finished reading an article I found online about Ramarley Graham; an 18-year-old unarmed boy who was shot and killed by police in his own home in the Bronx. I will allow you to read the article instead of explaining it all, or if you prefer here is a short video with some surveillance clips of the incident. This lost life was simply due to our War on Drugs.
I do not envy the police and the job we continue to make more and more difficult for them. The problem here is these officers did not operate with in the law. They, from my knowledge, had no evidence yet followed, broke in, and shot this boy because they suspected he had drugs and a gun. They were wrong! Well at least about the gun, and if we start shooting people for having some dried plant I am really worried for our nation. I can understand a police-person’s fear of being shot. What I can not understand is why would you shoot to kill, why not shoot his arm going for the assumed gun, or his foot for that matter? Why not use a taser?
Police are around to keep us safe not treat us like criminals. Personally I do not feel like I am innocent until proven guilty, I feel like I am viewed as a potential criminal by the police. And I am a White, 27-year-old who lives near Portland, OR. I feel for the Graham family. This War on Drugs we have created has caused more pain and destruction than heroin does to the addict. We have Pharmacies on every corner, mandated health insurance by 2014, and our obesity rates are breaking the scale. Do you see a War on Fast Food? Do you see a War on getting our youth addicted to sugar and caffeine? Do you see a War on Pharmaceuticals? No. Why? Because they make rich people more money. Because these things do not always show how cruel they are until it is too late. I challenge you, I challenge you to really think about your beliefs. Can you find reason behind this War on Drugs? I would be more than glad to hear it because all I see is people being thrown in Jail for using a drug, many of which are safer than legal pharmaceuticals. Most of these people are not criminals other than for breaking an archaic law and because of that their chances at making an honest life next to nothing. I see lives being destroyed and people being killed. I see this “problem” of drug usage getting worse not better. We need to change something, we need to not continue down this path. I am afraid to see what happens if we do.
So Much I could say about this but I am very curious in your thoughts on this so keeping it short today.
If you would like a more known news source, here is a NY Times article.
AdvertisementsVolkswagen executive Oliver Schmidt, charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States over the company's diesel emissions scandal is shown in this booking photo in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, U.S., provided January 9, 2017. Courtesy of Broward County Sheriff's Office/Handout via REUTERS
MIAMI/NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Thursday ordered a Volkswagen executive charged in the Justice Department’s diesel emissions investigation held without bail pending trial.
Oliver Schmidt was arrested Saturday at Miami’s International Airport as he planned to fly home after a vacation. He was one of six current and former VW executives charged this week in U.S. District Court in Detroit. The other five are in Germany and are unlikely to be extradited.
U.S. Magistrate Judge William Turnoff ruled Schmidt was a flight risk. His lawyers said they planned to appeal the decision.
The Justice Department also said Schmidt “faces what would be an effective life sentence” if convicted. Schmidt is charged with eleven felony counts, which could be punished by up to 169 years in prison, the government said.
Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) agreed to plead guilty and pay $4.3 billion in civil and criminal fines.Making sure your team understands they are just obstacles
Your team needs to know they are just obstacles in your way of farming, this will make it easier for them to understand their position as subhumans.When one or more of your teammates seems to think they are somehow important/relevant to the game you need to step in and explain their position.This will often mean you will be solo as am against a trilane, but that's ok.Firstly because you will not have to share xp with anyone.Secondly, because if you followed the previous step you already established the rules and your team knows that if you die even once you will start feeding mid, so as soon as you are in trouble they will tp top, save you and run away before they get to leech any xp. Otherwise you can just feed mid and help educate this community.With AAA Opening Day nigh, the Bats have made public their 25-man roster for the season. This team is going to look a lot different from last year's, with a mix of journeymen and top prospects set to make up the roster. Let's get to it, shall we?
CATCHERS
Tucker Barnhart (24), Chris Berset (27), Ramón Cabrera (25)
Barnhart is the starter here, a catcher with above-average Major League-ready defense, a good eye, and not a ton else. If one of Mesoraco or Pena go down for an extended period of time, expect Tucker to Drive By into Cincinnati. Berset is a journeyman who hit.187 in AA last year, while Cabrera was brought in from the Tigers organization after being named a AA All Star.
INFIELDERS
Jermaine Curtis (27), 3B; Hernán Irribarren (30), UT; Iván De Jesús, Jr. (27), 2B; Irving Falú (31), IF; Dan Johnson (35), 1B; Josh Satin (30), IF; Eugenio Suárez (23), SS
The only real prospect here is Suárez, acquired from the Tigers in the Alfredo Simon deal. Curtis is a former Cardinals farmhand, Johnson had a giant home run for Tampa on that wild final day of the season in 2011, and a bunch of mildly interesting journeymen and failed prospects.
OUTFIELDERS
Donald Lutz (26), Yorman Rodríguez (22), Steve Selsky (25), Bryson Smith (26)
Irribarren also plays some OF, so that's your 5. Yorman is by far the most interesting guy here, and let's hope he can continue to develop against the toughest pitching he's faced outside of his September call-up while playing a solid CF. Lutz will be in left, with Selsky in RF and Big Gingie Bryson taking on the 4th OF role.
ROTATION
Dylan Axelrod (29), RHP; David Holmberg (23), LHP; Michael Lorenzen (23), RHP; Jon Moscot (23), RHP; Josh Smith (27), RHP
Lorenzen, Moscot, and Holmberg are the prospects here, and in that order. Lorenzen seems to have been fast-tracked to the majors despite limited pitching experience, and the results so far have supported that. Moscot is an under-the-radar guy for those unfamiliar with the farm, but he's got solid upside. Holmberg is looking to get his act together after two underwhelming seasons.
BULLPEN
Nate Adcock (27), RHP; Chris Carpenter (29), RHP; Nick Christiani (27), RHP; Carlos Contreras (23), RHP; José De La Torre (29), RHP; Ryan Dennick (28), LHP; Donovan Hand (28), RHP; Sam LeCure (30), RHP; Pedro Villarreal (27), RHP
No, not that Chris Carpenter. A few new faces, but no one to get too excited about. Adcock was a Rangers farmhand, De La Torre stunk it up in the Brewers org last year, and Hand saw time with the Brewers in the past, but was in AAA last year. LeCure will probably (hopefully) be back in Cincinnati soon, while Contreras has the most upside by far of any of the remaining arms.
MANAGER: Delino DeShields
PITCHING COACH: Ted Power
HITTING COACH: Tony Jaramillo
SUMMARY
This team will be more exciting than last year, with a rotation that includes actual prospects instead of MiLB depth, along with a few legitimate position prospects in Rodríguez, Suárez, and, to a lesser extent, Barnhart and Lutz. There's some lightning-in-a-bottle potential to be had with some of the older minor league acquisitions, but the Reds don't seem to like giving them a shot (see Navarro, Rey last season). In any case, there's some depth here, but not a ton unless some guys have a career year. It's also interesting to note that this means Daniel Corcino and Robert Stephenson will be in AA.
If you're interested in learning a bit more about each of these guys, the Bats put out a nifty little bio on each of them, which can be found here. And for those of you who like repetition, here's the full roster.Gary Johnson victory in NM is 'plausible,' and could force Electoral College deadlock
"Most of the time, Trump would be the beneficiary of a Clinton loss in New Mexico. But the model also assigns Johnson, the Libertarian Party's presidential nominee, an outside chance - 2 or 3 percent - of winning the state. That could lead to an Electoral College deadlock that looks like this"
Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson has a real shot at winning the State of New Mexico, where he was governor for 8 years. A poll released by the Albuquerque Jounal newspaper shows Johnson receiving 24 percent of the vote.
While this is below the 35% support given Democrat Hillary Clinton, and the 31% saying they will vote for Republican Donald Trump, it is within the realm of possibility that Johnson could pull enough support away from the major party candidates by Election Day to win the States 7 electoral votes.
The website http://www.fivethirtyeight.com and its analyst, Nate Silver, considers such a result plausible. Sunday, Silver tweeted that the new poll makes "plausible" a map that shows New Mexico going to Johnson on Election Day. This could deadlock the Electoral College between Clinton and Trump, who would receive 267 and 266 electoral votes respectively. Silver's map in fact show's that scenario. A total of 270 electoral votes are needed to clinch the election.
But, Silver cautioned, while it's possible, such a result is "not likely" because the FiveThirtyEight model gives Johnson only a 2 to 3 percent chance of winning New Mexico, and about a 0.2 percent change that causes a deadlock.
The poll of 501 likely New Mexico voters, conducted Sept. 27 to 29 by landline and cellphone, has a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.
It's one of Johnson's best showings yet in any State. The poll boosts Johnson's argument that he his campaign has achieved the necessary 15% threshold necessary to take part in the two two remaining presidential debates.
The United States Electoral College is the institution that elects the President and Vice President of the United States every four years. Citizens of the United States do not directly elect the president or the vice president; instead they elect representatives called "electors", who usually pledge to vote for particular presidential and vice presidential candidates.
Wikimedia Commons Electoral College map showing the results of the 2012 U.S. presidential election. President Barack Obama (D-IL) won the popular vote in 26 states and the District of Columbia (denoted in blue) to capture 332 electoral votes. Former Governor Mitt Romney (R-MA) won the popular vote in 24 states (denoted in red) to capture 206 electoral votes.
Electors are apportioned to each of the 50 states as well as to the District of Columbia (also known as Washington, D.C.). The number of electors in each state is equal to the number of members of Congress to which the state is entitled, while the Twenty-third Amendment grants the District of Columbia the same number of electors as the least populous state, currently three. Therefore, there are currently 538 electors, corresponding to the 435 Representatives and 100 Senators, plus the three additional electors from the District of Columbia. The Constitution bars any federal official, elected or appointed, from being an elector.
Except for Maine and Nebraska, all states have chosen electors on a "winner-take-all" basis since the 1880s. That is, each state has all of its electors pledged to the presidential candidate who wins the most votes in that state. Maine and Nebraska use the "congressional district method", selecting one elector within each congressional district by popular vote and selecting the remaining two electors by a statewide popular vote. Although no elector is required by federal law to honor a pledge, there have been very few occasions when an elector voted contrary to a pledge.
The Twelfth Amendment, in specifying how a president and vice president are elected, requires each elector to cast one vote for president and another vote for vice president.Corey Lewandowski, Trump's former campaign manager, said Monday on 'The Laura Ingraham Show' that his supporters people want Trump "to be himself," and apply his unique talents to government. Lewandowski suggested that any attempt to change Trump would be met with failure.
He suggested that if former Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly wants to be successful as White House chief of staff, he will learn "very quickly... to let Trump be Trump."
"[Trump] doesn't want to change. And that's not what the American people voted for. They didn't vote to have Donald Trump change. They voted for him to be himself," he said.
He added: "What I think General Kelly is going to bring is discipline to the staff. He's the chief of staff. He's not the chief of the president."
"If [Kelly] is able to do his job --which I think he will-- which will be limiting the backbiting and the infighting amongst the individuals who are serving inside the administration — that is a very, very important thing, and put everybody on one agenda, which is the Trump agenda," Lewandowski explained.
More generally he wondered:
LEWANDOWSKI: [President Trump] has not had a significant legislative accomplishment yet, which I think is a shame, considering the Republicans control both the House and the Senate and the White House, and they haven't moved that big legislative agenda that they should have done.
You couple that with the fact that we have not started building the wall, we do not have tax reform done, we don't have repeal and replace done, we don't have a massive infrastructure spending bill done. And people are starting to question, you know, can anybody truly change a broken Washington, D.C.?
"Instead, this president has gotten no credit for [appointing Supreme Court Justice] Neil Gorsuch, no credit for personally injecting himself into the removal of the U.S. citizens sitting in an Egyptian prison that he released, none of the credit for cutting the government regulations and trying to reduce the bureaucracy because [health care reform] is not done yet. And that has to get done. I've been very clear — if anybody makes pledges on the campaign trail and they don't fulfill those pledges, they need to be held accountable," Lewandowski added.He also commented on the 'Deep State':"There's also the fault of the administration for not filling all of the vacancies and getting rid of all of the holdovers of the previous administration," Lewandowski said. "And what we have seen is the 'deep state' is very real. And there are many, many, many individuals who continue to serve in senior positions inside the government that were there from the previous administration, and their job is to make sure that this agenda does not move forward. That is very clear. And that is part of the reason why [Trump's] approval numbers are not where they should be."EDITOR'S NOTE — A look at the veracity of claims by public officials
WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite promising "the truth, and nothing else" in his convention speech, Donald Trump presented the nation with a series of previously debunked claims and some new ones Thursday night — about the U.S. tax burden, the perils facing police, Hillary Clinton's record and more.
A look at some of the Republican presidential candidate's claims and how they compare with the facts:
___
TRUMP: "Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this administration's rollback of criminal enforcement. Homicides last year increased by 17 percent in America's 50 largest cities. That's the largest increase in 25 years."
THE FACTS: A rollback? President Barack Obama has actually achieved some big increases in spending for state and local law enforcement, including billions in grants provided through the 2009 stimulus. While FBI crime statistics for 2015 are not yet available, Trump's claim about rising homicides appears to come from a Washington Post analysis published in January. While Trump accurately quotes part of the analysis, he omits that the statistical jump was so large because homicides are still very low by historical standards. In the 50 cities cited by the Post, for example, half as many people were killed last year as in 1991.
___
© AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during the final day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Thursday, July 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill) TRUMP: "The number of new illegal immigrant families who have crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total from 2015. They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources."
THE FACTS: The pace of releasing immigrants is driven not by the Obama administration, but by a court ruling. A federal judge ruled last year that the government couldn't hold parents and children in jail for more than 20 days. An appeals court partially rolled that back earlier this month, saying that parents could be detained but children must be released.
By the standard used by the government to estimate illegal border crossings - the number of arrests — Trump is right that the number in this budget year has already exceeded last year's total. But it's down from 2014. ___
TRUMP: "When a secretary of state illegally stores her emails on a private server, deletes 33,000 of them so the authorities can't see her crime, puts our country at risk, lies about it in every different form and faces no consequence - I know that corruption has reached a level like never before."
THE FACTS: Clinton's use of a private server to store her emails was not illegal under federal law. Her actions were not established as a crime. The FBI investigated the matter and its role was to advise the Justice Department whether to bring charges against her based on what it found. FBI Director James Comey declined to refer the case for criminal prosecution to the Justice Department, instead accusing Clinton of extreme carelessness.
As for Trump's claim that Clinton faces no consequence, that may be true in a legal sense. But the matter has been a distraction to her campaign and fed into public perceptions that she can't be trusted. The election will test whether she has paid a price politically. ___
TRUMP: "The number of police officers killed in the line of duty has risen by almost 50 percent compared to this point last year."
THE FACTS: Not according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, which tracks police fatalities daily. The group found that the number of police officers who died as of July 20 is up just slightly this year, at 67, compared with 62 through the same period last year. That includes deaths in the line of duty from all causes, including traffic fatalities.
It is true that there has been a spike in police deaths from intentional shootings, 32 this year compared with 18 last year, largely attributable to the recent mass shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge. But that was not his claim.
And overall, police are statistically safer on America's streets now than at any time in recent decades.
For example, the 109 law enforcement fatalities in 2013 were the lowest since 1956. ___
TRUMP: "My opponent has called for a radical 550 percent increase in Syrian (refugees).... She proposes this despite the fact that there's no way to screen these refugees in order to find out who they are or where they come from. I only want to admit individuals into our country who will support our values and love our people."
THE FACTS: Trump persists in making the bogus claim that the U.S. doesn't screen refugees. The administration both screens them and knows where they are from. The Department of Homeland Security leads the process, which involves rigorous background checks. Processing of a refugee can take 18 months to two years, and usually longer for those coming from Syria. Refugees are also subject to in-person interviews and fingerprint and other biometric screening.
For all that caution, U.S. officials acknowledge that the Islamic State group could try to place operatives among refugees. Last year, FBI Director James Comey said data about people coming from Syria may be limited, adding, "If we don't know much about somebody, there won't be anything in our database." ___
TRUMP: "Two million more Latinos are in poverty today than when President Obama took his oath of office less than eight years ago. Another 14 million people have left the workforce entirely.... President Obama has almost doubled our national debt to more than $19 trillion, and growing."
THE FACTS: Trump is playing with numbers to make the economy look worse than it actually is. The sluggish recovery over the past seven years has been frustrating. But with unemployment at 4.9 percent, the situation isn't as bleak as he suggests.
Trump's figure of 14 million who've stopped working since Obama took office comes from the Labor Department's measure of people not in the workforce. It's misleading for three reasons: The U.S. population has increased in that time; the country has aged and people have retired; and younger people are staying in school longer for college and advanced degrees, so they're not in the labor force, either.
A better figure is labor force participation — the share of people with jobs or who are searching for work. That figure has declined from 65.7 percent when Obama took office to 62.7 percent now. Part of that decrease reflects retirements, but the decline is also a long-term trend.
On national debt, economists say a more meaningful measure than dollars is the share of the overall economy taken up by the debt. By that measure, the debt rose 36 percent under Obama (rather than doubling). That's roughly the same as what occurred under Republican President George W. Bush.
The Hispanic population has risen since Obama while the poverty rate has fallen. The Pew Research Center found that 23.5 percent of the country's 55.3 million Latinos live in poverty, compared with 24.7 percent in 2010.
___
TRUMP: "When a secretary of state illegally stores her emails on a private server, deletes 33,000 of them so the authorities can't see her crime, puts our country at risk, lies about it in every different form and faces no consequence — I know that corruption has reached a level like never ever before in our country."
THE FACTS: Clinton's use of a private server to store her emails was not illegal under federal law. Her actions were not established as a crime. The FBI investigated the matter and its role was to advise the Justice Department whether to bring charges against her based on what it found. FBI Director James Comey declined to refer the case for criminal prosecution to the Justice Department, instead accusing Clinton of extreme carelessness.
As for Trump's claim that Clinton faces no consequence, that may be true in a legal sense. But the matter has been a distraction to her campaign and fed into public perceptions that she can't be trusted. The election will test whether she has paid a price politically." ___
TRUMP: "When that same secretary of state rakes in millions and millions of dollars trading access and favors to special interests and foreign powers, I know the time for action has come." THE FACTS: That's a somewhat overheated take on a legitimately troublesome issue for Clinton.
Although financial disclosures show she earned only her government salary as secretary of state, she made more than $21 million afterward, over three years, for speeches and appearances for private companies. None of those speeches was paid for by foreign governments, but some groups she addressed could be counted as special interests.
As well, the Clintons' family charity, the Clinton Foundation, received millions of dollars in donations while she was secretary of state, some from foreigners. And Bill Clinton earned millions making appearances and speeches for foreign corporations and organizations while his wife was at the State Department. ___
TRUMP: "After four years of Hillary Clinton, what do we have? ISIS has spread across the region, and the entire world. Libya is in ruins, and our ambassador and his staff were left helpless to die at the hands of savage killers. Egypt was turned over to the radical Muslim Brotherhood, forcing the military to retake control. Iraq is in chaos. Iran is on the path to nuclear weapons. Syria is engulfed in a civil war and a refugee crisis now threatens the West.... This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction, terrorism and weakness."
THE FACTS: It's an exaggeration to suggest Clinton, or any secretary of state, is to blame for the widespread instability and violence across the Middle East.
Clinton worked to impose sanctions that helped coax Tehran to a nuclear deal with the U.S. and other world powers last year, a deal in which Iran rolled back its nuclear program to get relief from sanctions that were choking its economy.
She did not start the war in Libya, but supported a NATO intervention well after violence broke out between rebels and the forces of dictator Moammar Gadhafi. The country slid into chaos after Gadhafi was ousted and killed in 2011, leaving it split between competing governments.
Clinton had no role in military decisions made during the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Republicans' claim that high-level officials in Washington issued a "stand-down" order delaying a military rescue in Benghazi has been widely debunked.
On Iraq, Clinton as a senator voted in 2002 to grant President George W. Bush authority to invade Iraq, but has since said it was a "mistake." Many in the Middle East do not regret Saddam's ouster and regional allies allowed U.S. bases in their country to support the war. But many also now fear the Islamic State group, which rose in the chaos of Syria's civil war and Iraq's security vacuum. ___ Associated Press writers Josh Boak, Stephen Braun, Deb Riechmann, Jim Drinkard and Alicia A. Caldwell in Washington and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.For most of the country, today marks that first, tentative day back at work. But it’s not just us ordinary folk who are getting into the swing of things again – Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman and the cast of Sherlock will be trying to remember how exactly to do their jobs too, as filming gets under way on the Sherlock special.
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“On my way West,” tweeted co-creator and star Mark Gatiss this morning as he made his way from London to Bristol where the majority of shooting is set to take place.
On my way West. It begins… #Sherlock — Mark Gatiss (@Markgatiss) January 5, 2015
Along with Gatiss, Cumberbatch and Freeman, Sherlock fans will be on the look out for Andrew Scott, who is set to appear as Moriarty after the beloved arch-villain made an apparent return from the dead at the end of series three.
Viewers will also be keen to solve the mystery of exactly why the first official picture for the one-off episode (due to air at the end of 2015) featured Sherlock and John in Victoria-era garb.
Could the pair somehow be going back in time to the original era of Sherlock Holmes? Is Moriarty really alive? As always, the new episode of Sherlock is shrouded in mystery but Gatiss has described it in one intriguing word – “ghosts”. Make of that what you will…
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Because even though I’m offering nothing to nowhere to no one… chances are almost 100% that I’m the woman for you. Which is a shame because I'm not going to date you. Even if you’re an unhealthy, overweight man who’s ready to feel the exhilarating anxiety of wondering if I even have feelings for you. In a moment I’ll give you three reasons why I’m seriously the girl for you. One of them might actually turn you on. Before I get to that, check out these recent photos of me. I’m 5’8, have dirty blonde hair, and am only slightly overweight… and if this were like all the “dating profiles” cobbled together by typical women it’d be pretty much the same self deprecating collection of words you’re reading now with maybe a few more quotes from dead celebrities who died of cocaine overdoses. Instead, I’ll give you the three reasons why there’s a near 100% chance…
…you will want to date me!
The first one is, I’m really not interested in dating anyone right now. Of course, this will only make you want to date me even more. You’ll probably try to weaken me by being persistent and it’ll only hurt your chances. I wake up, after only 5 hours of sleep, and I drink maybe 30oz of iced coffee, I don’t meditate, and I run through the rest of my day high on anxiety. My energy and anxiety will confuse you into thinking I’m flirting. Mostly I’m just trying to function. And let me tell you… do I ever function! Actually, right now I’m: Writing sketch comedy and character bits to perform. Making motion graphics for Rhett & Link. Making regular impulsive purchases on Amazon after midnight. Purchases include… Wigs to allow me to become another person Pink jelly platform sandals A book of hot sauces Body acne spray
Anyway, does any of this sound good to you? I hope not. Every word on this page is true. Yes it's clever and, although I’ve made a modest attempt to make it entertaining, you should also know that I am sincere. Yes, including the part about not taking you on a free vacation. Of course, we should never meet. You're going to feel like I want you to message me, but you're wrong. I know you love me. The problem is I'm just not interested in who you are as a person. Don't send an exciting message to me, and let’s see what happens.
Don't write your exciting message here!NEW DELHI (Reuters) - A government crackdown on Muslim-dominated abattoirs and the trade of cattle dragged down India’s exports of leather shoes by more than 13 percent in June, as leading global brands turned to China, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Pakistan to secure supplies.
A shoemaker poses for a picture in an underground workshop in Agra, India, June 9, 2017. REUTERS/Cathal McNaughton/Files
The drop in exports of shoes and leather garments comes as a setback for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has sought to create millions of jobs by more than doubling the leather industry’s revenues to $27 billion by 2020.
Emboldened by the victory of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2014 general election, Hindu hard-liners, who consider cows sacred, became more assertive in their calls for a clamp-down on both the meat and leather industries, run by Muslims, who make up 14 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people.
“The writing was already on the wall,” Nazir Ahmed, CEO of shoemaker Park Exports, told Reuters by phone from Agra, a shoe-making hub and home to the Taj Mahal. “We have killed the goose that laid the golden egg.”
India, the world’s second-biggest supplier of shoes and leather garments, exports nearly half its leather goods, with overseas sales estimated at $5.7 billion in the 2016/17 fiscal year to March, down 3.2 percent from a year earlier. Footwear exports fell more than 4 percent in April-June, to $674 million.
INFORMAL SECTOR
In March, after being appointed chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and a major leather exporter, Yogi Adityanath, a firebrand Hindu monk, ordered a closure of abattoirs operating without licenses.
Slaughterhouse owners complain that much of India’s meat and leather trade takes place in the informal sector, and it’s hard to get licences, especially for smaller units.
In May, citing cruelty to animals, the federal government banned the trade of cattle for slaughter, and restricted livestock sales only for agricultural purposes such as ploughing and dairy production.
But the country’s top court overturned that order, citing the hardship the ban had caused.
That has not brought relief as repeated attacks on trucks carrying cattle still rankle the leather trade.
“The supreme court has allowed the resumption of trade for cattle, but the ground reality is that cow vigilante groups continue to be active and no one wants to risk his life by transporting cattle,” Ahmed said.
Deterred by a clutch of measures that squeezed the supply of leather, a key raw material, brands like H&M, Inditex-owned Zara and Clarks, cut back their |
there were no differences in age or gender between the individuals included and excluded from the analysis.
Figure 1: Study outline and timeline of the 2009–2010 and 2010–2011 pandemic waves in the UK. Shown is the outline of the study (top) in the context of the timeline of the evolving pH1N1 pandemic (bottom). The bar chart shows UK influenza virological surveillance data from the World Health Organization's FluNet (http://www.who.int/influenza/gisrs_laboratory/flunet/en/) highlighting the study recruitment and follow-up time points for seasons 1 and 2 in relation to influenza activity in the UK during 2009–2011. Red bars indicate influenza A, and blue bars indicate the number of cases of pH1N1 detected by virological national surveillance. Week number was measured from the start of each year. Healthy adults recruited just after the first wave of the pandemic had passed in the UK were followed over two influenza seasons (T 0 –T 3 ), with PBMCs and serum samples collected before and at the end of each winter influenza season. During each influenza season, symptom questionnaires were emailed to participants every 3 weeks with automated weekly reminders. Nasal swabs were collected by participants if they were symptomatic and were returned to the laboratory. Infection was defined by detection of pH1N1 virus in the returned nasal swabs or a fourfold rise in pH1N1 hemagglutination-inhibition titer in paired serum samples. Arrows between the boxes denote the longitudinal progression of individuals during the study; white boxes indicate individuals not infected with pH1N1, pink boxes indicate pH1N1-infected individuals, green boxes indicate symptomatic infection, and blue boxes indicate asymptomatic infection. ICL, Imperial College London; Ab, antibodies. Full size image
Figure 2: Study flow chart of sample selection for the analysis of heterosubtypic T cell correlates of protection against clinical outcomes of infection. A total of 342 participants were enrolled in the study. During the study period, 51 individuals were infected (identified by seroconversion or a pH1N1-positive RT-PCR result in a self-administered nasal swab), 43 of whom were included in the final analysis. Individuals were excluded from the analysis because of any of the following factors: unavailability of paired serum samples for diagnosis of infection (n = 94); being seropositive for pH1N1 at baseline, which indicates a previous encounter with pH1N1 and thus would prevent analysis of heterosubtypic T cell responses (n = 68); remaining uninfected through the study (n = 128); not returning any symptom survey (n = 6); or unavailability of viable stored PBMCs (n = 3). Of these 43 individuals, definitive clinical outcomes were ascertained in 25 individuals. Following the analysis plan, the 25 infected individuals were grouped on the basis of increasing severity of symptomatic outcomes during the influenza illness episode. Colored boxes represent the different groups compared in the analysis. Light pink boxes represent individuals with asymptomatic or symptomatic influenza infection, pink boxes represent individuals with fever (bottom) or without fever (top) during the illness episode, and dark pink boxes represent individuals with fever and cough or sore throat (defined by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as symptomatic illness). Those individuals who shed (blue box, bottom) or did not shed (blue box, top) virus were also compared. Full size image
Incidence of infection and outcomes
Of the 43 incident cases included in the analysis, 32 were diagnosed by antibody seroconversion and 11 were diagnosed by detection of virus in nasal swabs; all of the subjects except one had antibody seroconversion. In 25 of these individuals, we reliably determined the date, symptoms and symptom score for the clinical episode during which influenza infection occurred, whereas in the remaining 18 infected individuals, the presence of more than one reported symptomatic episode precluded this determination. We grouped these 25 individuals according to their clinical outcomes for analysis (Online Methods and Fig. 2). Of these 25 subjects, 15 returned nasal swabs during their illness episode, 11 of whom shed virus (pH1N1-positive nasal swab determined by RT-PCR), and 4 individuals did not shed virus despite having antibody seroconversion.
Pre-existing crossreactive T cells and illness severity
In all 43 individuals seronegative for pH1N1 antibodies at the time of recruitment, we detected pre-existing crossreactive T cells to pH1N1 (Supplementary Fig. 1) that contained a predominance of cells with an IFN-γ+IL-2− cytokine-secreting profile, as has been reported previously12. The frequency of crossreactive T cells was independent of age.
We first assessed the association between pre-existing T cells and risk of subsequent pH1N1 infection. The frequencies of pre-existing crossreactive total cytokine-secreting T cells or cytokine-secreting T cell subsets at baseline did not differ between individuals who became infected (n = 43) and age- and gender-matched individuals who did not acquire pH1N1 infection (n = 34) (Supplementary Fig. 2).
Among pH1N1-infected individuals, we determined the relationship between the frequencies of pre-existing crossreactive cytokine-secreting T cells before infection with subsequent development of symptomatic outcomes (Fig. 3). We first assessed the global CD4 and CD8 response to antigens that were conserved between the pandemic strain and influenza A virus strains that had circulated previously by quantifying T cells responding to live virus. We detected higher frequencies of pre-existing crossreactive total cytokine-secreting T cells to live pH1N1 virus (P = 0.03) in individuals who developed illness without fever (n = 12) compared to those whose illness was accompanied by fever (n = 13) (Fig. 3a). We determined the quantitative relationship between the frequency of virus-specific T cells and the risk of developing influenza illness (Supplementary Fig. 3). Three individuals with completely asymptomatic infection had higher frequencies of pre-existing total cytokine-secreting crossreactive T cells to pH1N1 virus (P = 0.02) as compared to the 22 individuals with symptomatic infection (data not shown).
Figure 3: The frequencies of pre-existing crossreactive T cells are inversely associated with illness severity in infected individuals. (a–i) Responses to live pH1N1 virus stimulation (a,d,e), summed responses to conserved CD8 epitopes from PB1, M1 and NP proteins (b,f,g) and responses to CMV lysates (control antigen) (c,h,i) of total (blue), IFN-γ+IL-2− (pink), IFN-γ−IL-2+ (green) and IFN-γ+IL-2+ dual (orange) cytokine-secreting cells quantified by FLISpot. The total frequency of cytokine-secreting T cells represents the summed frequencies of the three functional subsets, IFN-γ+IL-2−, IFN-γ−IL-2+ and IFN-γ+IL-2+. Cellular immune responses to live pH1N1 virus, CD8 conserved influenza epitopes and CMV lysates were determined in individuals (n = 25) developing an illness with fever (n = 13) compared to those with no fever (n = 12) and in individuals with fever with cough or sore throat (n = 15) compared to those without fever and cough or sore throat (n = 10). P values were estimated by Mann-Whitney nonparametric test. In the box plots, the box represents the third centile (75%) and first centile (25%), with the horizontal line representing the median (50%). The whiskers represent 1.5 times the IQR, with outliers shown. Each circle represents the frequency of cellular responses for an individual. SFCs, spot-forming cells. Full size image
We next tested our specific hypothesis that CD8+ T cells to highly conserved viral epitopes mediate a protective response by assessing cellular responses to highly conserved CD8 epitopes from the immunodominant internal PB1, NP and M1 proteins (Supplementary Table 3). We observed higher frequencies of total cytokine-secreting T cells to conserved CD8 epitopes in individuals who developed illness without fever (P = 0.02, n = 12) or symptoms of influenza-like illness (ILI) (P = 0.04, n = 15) as compared to individuals with fever (n = 13) or ILI symptoms (n = 10) (Fig. 3b). No differences in the frequencies of total cytokine-secreting T cells between the different symptomatic groups was observed for responses specific to control cytomegalovirus (CMV) antigen (Fig. 3c). CD8+ T cell depletion abrogated the response to these epitopes, confirming that the responses were mediated by CD8+ T cells (Supplementary Fig. 4). Further enumeration of the three key functional T cell subsets by fluorescence-immunospot (FLISpot) identified only the IFN-γ+IL-2− T cell subset as being associated with reduced risk of developing more severe influenza infection (Fig. 3d–g).
Total symptom score during the illness episode correlated inversely with the frequency of pre-existing total cytokine-secreting T cells specific for live virus (r = −0.39, P = 0.05) (Fig. 4a), and the inverse correlation was stronger for responses specific to the conserved CD8 epitopes of immunodominant core proteins (r = −0.50, P = 0.01) (Fig. 4b). The strongest inverse correlation was between total symptom score and the frequency of IFN-γ+IL-2− T cells specific for conserved CD8 epitopes (r = −0.56, P = 0.004) (Fig. 4).
Figure 4: Inverse correlation of crossreactive T cells and symptom score. (a–f) Correlation between the frequency of total (a–c) and IFN-γ+IL-2− (d–f) T cellular responses to live virus (a,d), the summed responses to conserved CD8 epitopes from PB1, M1 and NP proteins (b,e) and the responses to CMV lysates (control antigen) (c,f) quantified by FLISpot and symptom scores. Symptom score was defined by totaling the scores for each of the following symptoms: fever, sore throat, cough, headache and myalgia. r values are the Spearman rank correlation coefficients. Each circle on the plot represents an individual. Full size image
There was no correlation between the frequency of total cytokine-secreting T cells (Fig. 4c) or IFN-γ+IL-2− T cells (Fig. 4f) that were specific for control CMV antigen and total symptom score (r = −0.33, P = 0.13 and r = −0.15, P = 0.48, respectively) or decreased risk of more severe illness (Fig. 3c,h,i), suggesting that the T cell responses that were associated with limiting illness severity were influenza specific.
Phenotype of crossreactive CD8+IFN-γ+IL-2− memory T cells
To pinpoint the specific phenotype of the pre-existing influenza-specific protection-associated CD8+IFN-γ+IL-2− T cell population, we stratified this population into its constituent memory subsets by multiparameter flow cytometry using the surface markers CD45RA and CCR7 (ref. 24) We hypothesized that the circulating late-effector subset of memory CD8+ T cells (cells with this phenotype predominate in the lung25 and are readily activated to secrete IFN-γ on influenza exposure23) would correlate with protection against symptoms. The IFN-γ+IL-2− T cell response to live virus was dominated by CD8+ T cells, which comprised predominantly CD45RA−CCR7− effector-memory and CD45RA+CCR7− late-effector T cells (Fig. 5a). The proportion of CD8+IFN-γ+IL-2− T cells in the CD45RA+CCR7− late-effector subset was inversely correlated (r = −0.49, P = 0.02) with total symptom score (Fig. 5b). Functional characterization of this protection-associated CD8+IFN-γ+IL-2−CD45RA+CCR7− T cell population for lung homing (CCR5)26,27,28,29, degranulation (CD107A and CD107B (CD107A/B))30 and cytokine secretion (tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α)) revealed that 70% of these cells expressed CCR5 and 33% expressed CD107A/B (Fig. 5c) in response to live pH1N1 virus, demonstrating a capability for rapid cytotoxicity and lung homing on virus exposure.
Figure 5: Inverse correlation of pre-existing crossreactive late-effector CD8+IFN-γ+IL-2− cells and symptom score. Phenotypic characterization was performed using multiparameter flow cytometry of the different memory subsets of influenza virus–specific CD8+IFN-γ+IL-2− cells on the basis of CCR7 and CD45RA surface expression after overnight stimulation of PBMCs with live pH1N1 virus in pH1N1-infected individuals (n = 22; in 3 of 25 infected individuals, samples were of insufficient quantity for flow cytometry analysis). (a) The proportions of CD8+IFN-γ+IL-2− secreting cells that were of the effector-memory (CD45RA−CCR7−), late-effector (CD45RA+CCR7−), central-memory (CD45RA−CCR7+) or naive (CD45RA+CCR7+) phenotype. (b) Correlation between the proportion of pre-existing CD3+CD8+IFN-γ+IL-2− cells of the late-effector CD45RA+CCR7− subset and total symptom score. r values are the Spearman rank correlation coefficients. (c) In individuals with influenza-specific late-effector CD8+IFN-γ+IL-2−CD45RA+CCR7− cells (n = 17), functional characterization of these cells for expression of CD107A/B, CCR5 and TNF-α was undertaken with multiparameter flow cytometry. Symbols represent the proportion of CD45RA+CCR7−CD8+IFN-γ+IL-2− cells expressing CD107A/B, CCR5 and TNF-α for each individual, with the line showing the median response. Each circle on the plot represents responses for an individual. Full size image
Although a recent report in an artificial experimental challenge model implicated CD4+ T cells in limiting the severity of influenza illness, we found no association between total symptom score and the proportion of virus-specific CD4+IFN-γ+IL-2− cells (r = −0.093, P = 0.68) or the late-effector CD45RA+CCR7− subset of CD4+IFN-γ+IL-2− T cells (r = −0.012, P = 0.96) (Supplementary Fig. 5). We designed our study to test the role of CD8+ T cells in heterosubtypic immunity, and therefore we did not use longer peptides containing optimal CD4 epitopes. Thus, our experiments do not rule out a possible correlation of CD4+ T cells with illness severity.
Heterosubtypic T cell responses and viral shedding
As evidenced by the decrease in influenza incidence with school closure during the 2009 pandemic31, limiting influenza transmission is critical for pandemic control. The frequencies of pre-existing live virus–specific IFN-γ+IL-2− T cells were significantly higher (P = 0.05) in individuals not shedding virus compared to those shedding virus, whereas there was no significant difference in the total frequencies of cytokine-secreting cells between these two groups (Supplementary Fig. 6), which is consistent with results of experimental challenge studies showing an association of T cell frequencies with reduced viral shedding21,22. Individuals might be misclassified as nonshedders if they collected their nasal swabs at a later time point after the onset of symptoms than nonshedders did; however, there was no statistically significant difference in the time from symptom onset to nasal swab collection between infected individuals that shed virus and those that did not.720p, 792p, 900p - video games often operate at significantly lower native resolutions than the 1080p output of the console may suggest. We've discussed at length our opinions on how much this actually matters to the gameplay experience (generally speaking, 900p isn't as much of a visual comedown as the raw maths suggest) but in this piece, we'll be going into depth on how we actually make the calculations - and how you can produce your own analyses.
Pixel-counting - as it's known - is a fairly simple procedure. Back in the day, we would require access to lossless captures from the consoles in making our analysis, requiring an expensive capture card. But in the current generation console era, Sony and Microsoft have made it very easy for everyone to gain access to premium quality screen captures - both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One allow users to produce PNG shots of in-game action that can be copied onto a USB stick then taken over to your computer for analysis.
And that's where the actual pixel-counting procedure takes place. What's required to ascertain native resolutions are long, preferably sharp geometric edges, preferably high contrast in nature to highlight the'stair-step' edges of the line. From there, across what is generally a 30 pixel sample, we count the amount of stair-steps generated by the console. Assuming we're talking about vertical resolution, 20 steps from a 30 sample gives us this calculation - (20/30) x 1080. End result: 720p. If you see 25 steps, that's (25/30) x 1080... 900p.
Tom and Rich offer this video demonstration of the techniques involved in ascertaining native rendering resolutions of console titles.
It may sound a little complex at first, but it's simply a matter of observation and basic maths. To illustrate how it's actually done, we've made a 'hands-on' video to demonstrate the technique. In there we cover the best way to grab screenshots for analysis, and then how we use Microsoft Paint as our tool of choice, for setting the pixel sample (the 'ruler') and then counting the edges. In addition to the video, there's also a download available here - it features a number of demo screenshots in original form, along with pixel-counting annotations provided by Tom Morgan. Compare and contrast with your own efforts and you'll soon get the picture.
So why choose a 30-pixel sample for our 'ruler' in the first place? Well, when we encounter a sub-native title, we generally expect developers to drop down to 900p or at a push, 720p. A 30-pixel sample is divisible by both 20 and 25, the results we expect to see for those upscaled resolutions. But of course, there can be wrinkles: the Xbox One versions of Far Cry 4, Dying Light and Call of Duty Advanced Warfare retain a 1080p vertical, but opt for a sub-native horizontal resolution. The pixel counting technique still works here as generally we take both measurements from both vertical and horizontal edges - you'll just get different results for each axis. Games like Call of Duty Black Ops 3, utilising dynamic resolution, can be trickier to track - a high-quality capture card is definitely required there to catch differences during in-the-moment gameplay.
Even factoring out dynamic resolution, there are outliers that require extending the 30-pixel sample 'ruler' to something higher. Take Titanfall and Watch Dogs on Xbox One for example - both operate at 792p (1408x792). Generally, the longer the pixel sample, the tighter the ratio between rendered pixels (game resolution) and the raw output of the console. And the tighter the ratio, the more accurate your analysis will be. Sometimes it can take a while to definitely pin down exact rendering resolution, but in the rare occasion when doubts remain, higher pixel samples from a longer 'ruler' reduce the potential for error to just a few pixels.
Pixel-counting Shadow of Mordor on Xbox One. We draw a 30-pixel horizontal 'ruler', drag it down until it meets an in-game edge and then count the stair-steps. There are 25 in total from the 30 pixel sample. (25/30) x 1920 gives us a 1600 pixel horizontal resolution. Click on the image above for full resolution.
Ultimately, getting a good lock on resolution is all about having good, high contrast edges to analyse. The era of post-process anti-aliasing - which tends to blur those edges - means you need to be really careful with your sample shots, but it's actually a fair bit easier than the last-gen era, where native rendering resolution choices were a lot more arbitrary, and where the arrival of post-process AA in combination with the much lower resolution made analysis considerably more challenging owing to excessive blur. Back then, we made a fair few calls on resolution using choice shots where FXAA was 'broken', leaving some crucial edges untreated, giving us the means to get a decent lock.
With the exception of a few notable games, pixel-counting is a relatively simple task in the current-gen era. There are no arcane arts or high-tech tools involved - and the basic nature of the tools available means that practically everyone who owns a PS4 or Xbox One can give it a shot. Often, much of the work we do at Digital Foundry can be demystified quite easily - and what made this piece interesting to produce from our perspective was the fact that the tools used are well within the reach of the majority of our audience. If there's anything else you'd like us to tackle, feel free to let us know.
Ever wondered how Digital Foundry produces its performance videos? Check out this Inside Digital Foundry post to see the bespoke frame-rate analysis tools in action.Here's how to get a happy adulthood despite your unhappy childhood.
We've all heard the phrase "unhappy childhood," but what does that mean, exactly? Does a childhood that includes trauma or abuse affect you as an adult? How can we make peace with what happened in the past? YourTango sat down with experts Carol Freund, Jane Warren and Larry Cappel to get to the bottom of this difficult issue.
Cappel outlined some things that might contribute to an unhappy childhood, although he noted, "These things can contribute to an unhappy childhood. However, in a home with enough unconditional love from caregiver to child, it's possible to grow up happy in spite of these obstacles:"
Being poor, though poverty by itself does not guarantee an unhappy childhood
Being raised by a single parent
Experiencing a divorce during your childhood
Being in a home with a parent or sibling with a severe physical or mental illness
Losing a parent, sibling or other close loved one"
Warren explained that problems can begin even before birth: "We're all impacted by the events that occurred and the messages we heard when we were growing up. Even the events that were occurring and the emotions that were flowing within our mother while she was carrying us... this impacts us. And possibly back before that as well.
"Did you have a hard childhood? What made it hard? How do you define 'hard'? What makes one person's childhood hard and another's easy? Yes, we have certain measures and indicators of abusive behavior that children can be subjected to, and on the extreme end of the scale these create extremely difficult childhoods that would be hard for most people to process and integrate into the remainder of their lives."
Everyone's 'unhappy' isn't the same
Freund explained that what constitutes "unhappy" might be different for everyone, saying, "It's not always the big things that make children unhappy. When I was a kid, my immigrant mother was so busy trying to succeed in this new country that she didn't have time for a kid's conversation.
"I didn't know this was a problem for me until I had my own kids. I loved to listen to my daughter. I even remember some of her bits of wisdom. My mother worked hard, and I would have felt selfish to admit that I was sad and needed more attention. Not until I was older and consistently felt discounted in relationships did I trace the feeling back to the experiences of my younger self. And only then could I stop sabotaging my present day relationships."
Warren went on to discuss the complex fact that what's "hard" for one person may not be for another: "If you grew up in a family that yelled and screamed when they were angry, does this make your childhood 'hard'?
"We know people who have descriptions of their childhood experiences that are eerily similar. Yet, one of them repeats the behavior she was exposed to, another has adopted a more passive-aggressive approach to life, and a third is able to express their needs openly, cleanly, calmly and navigates her adult life with little stress or worry.
"Didn't they all have the same 'hard' childhood? Your fundamental personality traits will play a big part in determining how you react to your childhood circumstances. As you grow into adulthood — and if you are willing to become aware and curious about the circumstances of your life and how those circumstances continue to impact your behaviors and beliefs—you have an increasing amount of choice about how to move beyond (or deeply integrate) these childhood experiences."
And the effects of those experiences can creep up on you. As Freund explained, "Often, I hear adults come face to face with a childhood unhappiness they didn't know they had until they began see a pattern of thought or behavior that just doesn't make sense."
So how do you get a "happy" adulthood out of a "hard" childhood?
Cappel said, "Happy has become a loaded term in the USA. For the most part, advertising that tells us what 'happy' is supposed to be. If you purchase the right car, clothes, beer, house, etc., then you will be happy. The subtle message of commercials tells us that 'unhappy' is caused by not doing what the commercial says.
"The appropriate Buddhist term I'd like to replace 'happy' with is equanimous, the experience of equanimity. It can best be described as the ability to experience an even-keeled content acceptance of life, regardless of what pleasant or unpleasant thing might be happening at any given moment. It's the ability to experience the full range of human emotion ranging from ecstatic joy to the deepest sorrow with an even-keeled quality of being present and aware for your experience of your life in every moment with total acceptance.
"So, what kind of things happen during our childhood that cause us to struggle to be fully present with ourselves as adults?
"What happens to make us tune out with drugs, alcohol, TV, etc. to get into a relationships in order to feel better about ourselves, to be anxious, depressed, or unable to be relaxed present around others? To answer this we need to understand a tiny amount of developmental psychology.
"Children have immature nervous systems that mature and form based on their interactions with the world and the people in it. The way this happens between a parent and child is through the use of empathy and attunement. Attunement is sort of like intuition: With it, you can understand what your child is experiencing even when they can't tell you with words, and then reflect that experience back to them, you are attuning. Empathy is the ability to respond to another with kindness, compassion, and a gut-level understanding of their experience; absent of criticism or judgment.
"When a caregiver attunes to and is empathetic in their responses, then the child feels understood, and valued. It serves as a mirror for them to see themselves as a good person. This positive experience with the adult allows a child to feel secure, and gives them permission to be natural and relaxed. They are able to grow into a relaxed, secure and productive adults."
If, as a child, you were not treated with empathy and attunement, you may find yourself an unhappy adult.
How do you know if you are unhappy?
You don't feel secure, and worry about safety, money or something else.
You don't like who you are and try to hide it by pretending to be someone you are not.
You regret your past and get down on yourself often.
Your mind runs a mile a minute and you are always imaging future scenarios that don't happen.
You hate your body or how you look.
Warren offered some real, actionable advice for how to move forward and upward after an unhappy childhood:
"Face and accept that the things that happened to you, actually happened. That, no, they weren't helpful or pleasant. No, you didn't request these circumstances, deserve the treatment you received, and there is no good rationale or excuse that needs to be made for anyone else’s behavior. It just was."
"Shower yourself with love and appreciation for being here today and facing the circumstances of your life. Commit to moving beyond the automatic actions and reactions that these circumstances instilled in you."
"Wonder about the gifts. As a result of these circumstances, there are likely benefits that you can identify (this is not about making these circumstances a 'good' thing; it's about harvesting what you can from the reality of your life). Were you belittled and bullied as a child? Has that created in you a compassion for those in similar circumstances? Has it created a discernment of nuances of words and their impact? Has it created a self-reliance that allows you to step aside from people who perpetuate belittling and bullying?"
"Choose what it is that you actually want with respect to your behaviors and responses."
"Take a small, visible action that moves you in a new direction."
Cappel also has suggestions for how to move forward:
Find a good therapist who can help you.
Work through the grief and the pain of the past.
Understand the reasons why things were like they were.
Grieve the loss and then let then let the past go.
Come to realize at a gut level that you can be happy.
be happy. Change your self-defeating thoughts into positive ones.
Learn to love yourself just as you are without criticism and judgment.
Freund encourages us to embrace and acknowledge our past: "Trying to dismiss what's there is likely to trap us into reliving the past. And the more real people are about what's inside of them, the more giving they can be to others."
She also has tips for healing and moving on, no matter what your childhood looked like:
Allow yourself to acknowledge feelings. The ones that keep coming up and don't seem to make sense or that seem out of proportion may date back to childhood.
Know that allowing feelings is not complaining or blaming; feelings don't make you weak and they don't mean your parents didn't love you.
Allow natural expression — crying, comforting yourself, accepting comfort.
Change the way you deal with your unhappiness, as the old patterns can trap you—blocking, pretending, constantly blaming yourself or someone else.
Think of sadness as rain. If you pretend it's sunny out, if you hate rain, or if it's raining harder somewhere else, you're still going to get wet. Your best bet is to get an umbrella and know the weather will change.
Cappel has these words of wisdom: "What we think we want from another is actually a desire to connect to some deeper part of ourselves. Learn to love yourself then turn your love outward to others just as they are, appreciating their special qualities and uniqueness, instead of trying to use them to fill your own sense of not being good enough."
Acknowledge, accept, embrace and release. Now that is true inspiration for healing.Red Bull has become much more than just an energy drink company over the past two decades. The Austrian company has held the electronic music-focused Red Bull Music Academy event series annually since 1998 and has built upon this cultural platform with radio programming, an exhibition space in New York City, and an artist residency program in Detroit. Now, as artnet News points out, CEO Dietrich Mateschitz has announced an new independent venture: a right-wing news organization that is being compared to Breitbart.
In an interview with Austrian newspaper Kleine Zeitung on April 8, Mateschitz was critical of Germany and Austria’s lenient policies on refugees, rallied against “intellectual elites” and political correctness, and expressed his support for Trump. He also announced plans for his new media platform Näher an die Wahrheit, which translates to Closer to the Truth. Mateschitz described the venture as a “research platform” and said it would operate independently of Red Bull.
In a statement to The FADER, a representative for Red Bull said, “Mr. Mateschitz gave a personal interview – published on April 8th, 2017. Our company values freedom of mind and encourages open conversation.”
Read moreWHY TRAIN WITH A HEART RATE MONITOR?
Finding your personal heart rate zone and training with heart rate intervals allows you to maximize your workout. Simply put, if you train at lower heart rates (BPM or Beats Per Minute) it will require you to workout longer to achieve benefits. If you work out at BPMs that are too high for a prolonged period, you will burn out too fast, before you've reached your workout goals. Rhythm+ has advanced optical sensors that will give you a precise BPM reading so you can stay in your zones and receive the maximum benefit from your workout! Train Smart, Get Fit!™.
This chart illustrates the relationship between heart rate levels and workout efficiency during interval training. Please consult your physician before starting any exercise routine to ensure that you are healthy enough to engage in a training regiment. Heart rate zones vary by a person's age, consider consulting a personal trainer regarding the appropriate heart rate zones for you.A photo of a Friday event on the front page of Sunday’s paper. News Star/Newseum
According to an admittedly conservative estimate from FiveThirtyEight, more than 3.2 million people attended women’s marches in hundreds of towns and cities around the world on Saturday. It may well have been the largest demonstration in U.S. history.
And yet a full half the hundreds of newspapers archived by the Newseum didn’t make the marches the lead story in Sunday’s issue. A Quartz tally of around 450 papers’ front pages found that, while publications in all major U.S. cities and many papers in other countries led with coverage of the marches, 27 percent mentioned the protests in a smaller spot on the front page. More than a fifth—22 percent—didn’t mention the march at all.
The Women’s March on Washington was the main event on Saturday, but there were marches in communities all over the country. Many local papers likely steer clear of national stories, which could explain why some of them ran pieces on relatively small local matters on the front page if there wasn’t a nearby march to cover or a cabal of local folks heading to D.C. for the big one. That may be why the Enterprise Ledger of Alabama ran an A1 story on an awards banquet for the local football team, and why the Delaware State News printed “A Vision for Dover Mall” on the front page, with no mention of the 1,000-person march that happened elsewhere in the state.
But many U.S. local papers dedicated their entire Sunday front pages to Trump, ignoring the massive marches against him—and against the systemic forces that got him to the presidency—completely. On the day after the marches, the front page of Alabama’s Sunday Dothan Eagle featured a story on Trump’s CIA press conference, a piece on Trump’s executive order affecting the Affordable Care Act, and a Q and A with local political party leaders about “the future of jobs, military, and guns.” Florida’s Villages Daily Sun populated the near entirety of its front page with pretty capsule biographies of Trump’s proposed cabinet. The News-Star of Monroe, Louisiana, ran a big color photo of women pledging allegiance at a local Donald Trump party on Friday night, a day and a half before the paper came out. “Trump Ready!” read the headline. Nearly 200 people marched in Green Bay, Wisconsin on Saturday, in solidarity with millions of others around the world; but you wouldn’t know it from the Sunday issue of the Green Bay Press-Gazette, whose front page featured an NFL preview and giant illustration about a teen’s mental health.
In other words, it’s possible that a not-insignificant swath of America has no idea that one of the largest single organized protests the world has ever seen took place on Saturday. There has been much talk since the election about how social media networks and ideologically skewed online media outlets have erected so-called “bubbles” around segments of the country, but for those people who still get their news from the local paper, the bubbles may be particularly impermeable.
As Quartz’s Christopher Groskopf points out, the people who are most likely to make the local papers their primary news source are disproportionately old, white, and rural-dwelling—demographics that usually lean conservative and went for Trump in November’s presidential election. These people aren’t necessarily getting their “news” from Breitbart and Fox. They’re absorbing a less extreme but similarly limited worldview from their local papers. Taking a peek at these communities’ news sources can make for a fascinating thought experiment on alternate universes—or “alternative facts.” The progressive bubble hears about hateful Trump rallies and underestimates their power. In some right-wing bubbles, the resistance doesn’t even exist.A woman tourist, aged 53, fell as she attempted to climb the trig at the Cabo de la Nao in Javea, Alicante, to take photographs of the famous lighthouse and the coastline. The SAMU ambulance service reached the woman after about 45 minutes, according to witnesses, and she was rushed to the hospital in Denia in a critical state after suffering severe head and back injuries and remained in an induced coma but unfortunately died of her injuries later on.
The fatal accident has revealed safety deficiencies at this unique vantage point on the coast of Javea. The trig, which belongs to the National Geographic Institute, has precarious rusted iron grips that serve as a staircase. Tourists tend to climb the trig to gain a vantage point for photographs; it sits at 122.3 metres above |
ates/1963/wigner-bio.html)
1995 Jan 1, Austria, Finland and Sweden joined the European Union. Sweden held their elections to the parliament later that year on 17 September. Austria held its elections on 13 October, 1996 and Finland on 20 October, 1996.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_European_Union)(Econ, 5/1/04, p.26)
1995 Jan 1, In Bosnia a four month truce between the Bosnian Serbs and the Bosnian government was brokered by former Pres. Jimmy Carter.
(WSJ, 6/11/96, p.A14)(SFC,10/16/97, p.A12)
1995 Jan 1, Fred West hanged himself in his London prison while awaiting trial in the murders of a dozen girls and women. The victims included his wife's 16-year-old daughter and 8-year-old stepdaughter and several young runaways.
(AP, 1/13/04)
1995 Jan 1, Chile, Egypt, Guinea-Bissau, Poland and South Korea joined the non-permanent sector of the Security Council.
(SFC, 1/1/97, p.C1)
1995 Jan 1, The Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), formed in 1973, was renamed the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
(http://tinyurl.com/4wq42s)
1995 Jan 1, Teburoro Tito, the incoming president of Kiribati, moved the International Date Line a thousand miles east around Kiribati to allow all of its 33 atolls to be line the same time zone. Thus the atoll of Kirimati never experienced Dec 31, 1994.
(SSFC, 12/17/06, p.G5)
1995 Jan 1, Fernando Henrique Cardoso took office as Brazil's 37th president. He pushed up interest rates to 25% and stabilized the economy.
(WSJ, 12/15/95, p.A-13)(AP, 1/1/00)
1995 Jan 2, Marion Barry was inaugurated as mayor of Washington D.C., four years after leaving office to serve a six-month sentence for misdemeanor drug possession.
(AP, 1/2/00)
1995 Jan 2, Chechen defenders drove Russian troops out of the capital of Grozny.
(AP, 1/2/00)
1995 Jan 3, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo announced an emergency plan for wage and price controls and budget cuts to stabilize the peso and combat spiraling inflation. The peso had lost 37% of its value since Dec. 20, 1994.
(WSJ, 1/13/95, p.A3)(AP, 1/3/00)
1995 Jan 4, The 104th Congress convened, the first entirely under Republican control since the Eisenhower era; Newt Gingrich was elected speaker of the House.
(SFC, 11/7/98, p.A4)(AP, 1/4/00)
1995 Jan 4, Eduardo Mata (52), Mexican conductor, died in air crash.
(www.imdb.com/name/nm0557996/)
1995 Jan 5, President Clinton received Republican congressional leaders at the White House, declaring that "we can do a lot of business together" on reforming the way government works.
(AP, 1/5/00)
1995 Jan 5, Angus King (b.1944) began serving as governor of Maine. He continued in office as an independent for two terms until Jan 8, 2003.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_King)
1995 Jan 5, A warrant was issued for the arrest of James “Whitey" Bulger (b.1929), top mobster of Boston’s Winter Hill Gang. He had disappeared with his girlfriend just days before the warrant was issued. Bulger was linked to 21 murders and in 2000 became a fixture on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted" list. In 2007 Kevin Weeks authored “Brutal: The Untold Story Of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob."
(http://tinyurl.com/2c8u37f)(SSFC, 1/30/05, p.A13)(http://tinyurl.com/29unfq4)
1995 Jan 6, Haitians housed at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba were sent home by the U.S. military against the refugees' will and over protests of refugee advocates.
(AP, 1/6/00)
1995 Jan 6, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef and Abdul Hakim Murad were arrested in Manila, Philippines, when explosives that they were mixing blew up and alerted the police. In their apartment were found bomb-making manuals and timers and evidence that they intended to blow up US jetliners. They were found guilty by a jury in New York on 9/5/96.
(SFC, 9/6/96, p.C5)
1995 Jan 6, In South Africa Joe Slovo, a former leader of the South Africa Communist party and white hero of the liberations struggle, died. He was born in Obeliai, Lithuania, to a Jewish family who emigrated to South Africa when he was eight.
(Econ, 3/3/12, p.62)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Slovo)
1995 Jan 7, Major General Viktor Vorobyov, a senior commander leading Russian troops in their advance on the secessionist capital of Chechnya, was killed by a mortar shell.
(AP, 1/7/00)
1995 Jan 8, "Guys & Dolls" closed at Martin Beck Theater, NYC, after 1143 performances.
(www.theatredb.com/QShow.php?sid=s0398)
1995 Jan 8, The Inner City Church in Knoxville, Tenn., burned down. Arson was suspected and investigations by the FBI and ATF were later begun.
(SFC, 6/11/96, p.A16)
1995 Jan 8, Russian forces in Chechnya pounded the capital of Grozny with rocket and mortar fire in an attempt to scatter Chechen fighters defending the presidential palace.
(AP, 1/8/00)
1995 Jan 8, In Sri Lanka the Tigers and government agreed to a truce.
(SFC, 7/24/96, p.A9)
1995 Jan 9, In New York, trials began for Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and 11 other defendants accused of conspiring to wage a holy war against the United States. Nine were convicted of seditious conspiracy, and two reached plea agreements with the government.
(AP, 1/9/00)
1995 Jan 9, Severe flooding forced people to flee resort communities in the hills north of San Francisco.
(AP, 1/9/00)
1995 Jan 9, Peter Cook (57), English comic and actor (Bedazzled, Beyond the Fringe, The Wrong Box), died.
(AP, 1/9/05)
1995 Jan 10, President Clinton declared flood-stricken areas of California major disaster areas.
(AP, 1/10/00)
1995 Jan 10, Russia announced a 48-hour truce in breakaway Chechnya, but the cease-fire fell apart after a few hours.
(AP, 1/10/00)
1995 Jan 11, President Clinton and Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama held a low-key summit in Washington, playing down differences over trade.
(AP, 1/11/00)
1995 Jan 11, A 9-year-old girl survived a Colombian airliner crash that killed the other 52 people aboard near the Caribbean resort of Cartagena.
(AP, 1/11/00)
1995 Jan 12, Qubilah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X, was arrested in Minneapolis on charges that she had tried to hire a hitman to kill Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan; the charges were later dropped.
(AP, 1/12/00)
1995 Jan 12, In LA, Ca., Judge Ito heard defense arguments for questioning racial attitudes of Detective Mark Fuhrman in the murder trial against OJ Simpson. Fuhrman had found a bloody glove at O.J.'s estate.
(www.usatoday.com/news/index/nns053.htm)
1995 Jan 12, In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, an American soldier was killed and another wounded during a shootout with a former Haitian army officer who also was killed.
(AP, 1/12/00)
1995 Jan 13, The Johnson Grove Baptist Church in Bells, Tenn., burned down as did the Macedonia Baptist Church in Denmark, Tenn. Arson was suspected and investigations by the FBI and ATF were later begun.
(SFC, 6/11/96, p.A16)
1995 Jan 13, Italy named Treasury Minister Lamberto Dini its prime minister. He pledged to resign after approval of a deficit cutting budget.
(AP, 1/13/00)(WSJ, 10/27/95, p.A-1)
1995 Jan 13, Authorities in the Philippines said they had unearthed a conspiracy by militant Muslims to assassinate Pope John Paul II during his visit.
(AP, 1/13/00)
1995 Jan 14, Pope John Paul II addressed a huge rally in Manila, urging young people to reject cynicism.
(AP, 1/14/00)
1995 Jan 14, Russian troops in the breakaway republic of Chechnya captured the Council of Ministers building, a key rebel position in the capital Grozny.
(AP, 1/14/00)
1995 Jan 15, The San Francisco 49ers defeated the Dallas Cowboys 38-28 in the National Football Conference title game, while the San Diego Chargers upset the Pittsburgh Steelers 17-13 in the American Football Conference championship.
(AP, 1/15/05)
1995 Jan 15, San Francisco’s I. Magnin store on Union Square closed. The first I. Magnin was founded in 1877 on Market St. In 2006 James Thomas Mullane authored “A Store to Remember," an illustrated history of the store.
(SSFC, 12/31/06, p.E1,5)
1995 Jan 15, British soldiers ended daytime patrols in Belfast, Ireland.
(SFC, 6/18/96, p.A8)
1995 Jan 15, Pope John Paul II celebrated a final Mass during his visit to the Philippines, drawing millions of people.
(AP, 1/15/00)
1995 Jan 16, In Union, S.C., a prosecutor announced he would seek the death penalty for Susan Smith, the woman accused of drowning her sons, 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alex. Smith was later convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
(AP, 1/16/00)
1995 Jan 17, George W. Bush (b.1946) began serving as the 46th governor of Texas. Bush had already picked Alberto Gonzales (b.1955) as his general counsel.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush)(Econ, 7/14/07, p.38)
1995 Jan 17, A magnitude 6.9 earthquake hit the port city of Kobe, Japan. 5,502 people were killed in the worst earthquake to hit Japan since 1923.
(WSJ, 1/18/95, p.A1)(AP, 6/22/02)(SSFC, 4/16/06, p.F4)
1995 Jan 18, The new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta, opened. It’s cost is $63 million and it’s size is 225,000 sq. ft.
(SF E&C, 1/15/95, SFE Mag. p.21)
1995 Jan 18, The death toll climbed past 6,000 in the earthquake in Kobe, Japan.
(AP, 1/18/00)
1995 Jan 18, South African President Nelson Mandela's cabinet denied amnesty sought by 3,500 police officers in apartheid's waning days.
(AP, 1/18/00)
1995 Jan 19, Russian troops regained control of the presidential palace in Grozny, the capital of the breakaway republic of Chechnya.
(AP, 1/19/00)
1995 Jan 20, The U.S. State Department announced a partial lifting of economic sanctions against North Korea.
(AP, 1/20/00)
1995 Jan 20, Bruno Jordan, suit salesman and brother a drug enforcement officer, was shot dead in El Paso. In 2002 Charles Bowden authored "Down By the River," an account of the murder and narcotics traffickers.
(NW, 1/13/03, p.61)
1995 Jan 20, The Mt. Zion AME Church in Williamsburg Co., S.C.., burned down. Arson was suspected and investigations by the FBI and ATF were later begun.
(SFC, 6/11/96, p.A16)
1995 Jan 20, The Japanese government, criticized for being slow to respond to Kobe's devastating earthquake, admitted its initial reaction might have been "confused."
(AP, 1/20/00)
1995 Jan 20, Jean-Claude Juncker (b.1954), the leader of the Christian Social People's Party, succeeded Jacques Santer as PM of Luxembourg. “Juncker’s Curse" was named after Jean-Claude Juncker, who famously quipped: “We all know what to do. But we don’t know how to get reelected once we've done it."
(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Juncker)
1995 Jan 21, President Clinton, addressing the Democratic National Committee, implored members to "bear down and go forward" despite results of the 1994 elections.
(AP, 1/21/00)
1995 Jan 22, The Macedonia Baptist Church in Manning, S.C., burned down. Arson was suspected and investigations by the FBI and ATF were later begun. Four Klansmen were later arrested and convicted.
(SFC, 6/11/96, p.A16)(SFEC, 7/21/98, p.A3)
1995 Jan 22, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy died at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., at age 104.
(AP, 1/22/98)
1995 Jan 22, Two Palestinians blew themselves up at Beit Lid junction in central Israel and killed 21 Israelis. Dozens of others were injured and the Islamic Jihad took responsibility.
(WSJ, 3/6/96, p. A15)(G&M, 7/31/97, p.A8)(AP, 1/22/00)
1995 Jan 23, The US Supreme Court ruled that companies accused of firing employees illegally could not escape liability by later finding a lawful reason to justify the dismissal.
(AP, 1/23/00)
1995 Jan 23, A French team of paleontologists led by Michel Brunet on 1/23/95 discovered a lower jaw with 7 teeth and a separate canine of a hominid from 3.5 to 3 million years of age. The discovery was made in a dried lake bed of central Chad and named Australopithecus bahrelghazalia after the Arab name of a nearby river.
(SFC, 5/23/96, p.A14)
1995 Jan 24, President Clinton appealed for common ground as he delivered his second State of the Union address, this time before a Republican-led Congress.
(AP, 1/24/00)
1995 Jan 24, The prosecution gave its opening statement at the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
(AP, 1/24/00)
1995 Jan 25, The defense gave its opening statement in the O.J. Simpson trial in Los Angeles, saying Simpson was the victim of a "rush to judgment" by authorities who had mishandled evidence and ignored witnesses.
(AP, 1/25/00)
1995 Jan, 25, Extensive flooding hit the streets of Las Vegas and many casinos had water dripping onto gambling tables.
(HFA, '96, p.73)
1995 Jan 25, The top of a Chinese Long March missile disintegrated as it hit supersonic speeds and destroyed a Hughes Apstar 2 satellite. The debris killed at least 6 villagers.
(SFC, 6/15/98, p.A5)(www.christusrex.org/www2/china/Hughes/pg7.html)
1995 Jan 25, A team of Norwegian and American scientists launched a Black Brant XII four-stage sounding rocket from the Andoya Rocket Range off the northwest coast of Norway to study the aurora borealis over Svalbard. Nuclear forces in Russia were put on alert, and the nuclear-command suitcase was brought to President Boris Yeltsin, who then had to decide whether to launch a nuclear barrage against the United States. This became known as the Norwegian rocket incident or Black Brant scare.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident)
1995 Jan 26, A little more than three weeks after Republicans took control of Congress, the House endorsed a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution designed to eliminate chronic federal deficits.
(AP, 1/26/00)
1995 Jan 27, About 5,000 mourners gathered at the site of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its liberation.
(AP, 1/27/00)
1995 Jan 28, President Clinton was host to a 5 1/2-hour "work session" of governors, legislators and local officials, both Democrats and Republicans, to discuss welfare reform.
(AP, 1/28/00)
1995 Jan 29, The San Francisco 49ers became the first team in NFL history to win five Super Bowl titles, beating the San Diego Chargers, 49-26.
(AP, 1/29/00)
1995 Jan 30, The Smithsonian Institution abandoned plans for a major exhibit on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, yielding to critics who charged the exhibit would have portrayed America as the aggressor and Japan as the victim in World War II.
(AP, 1/30/00)
1995 Jan 30, At least 42 people were killed and nearly 300 wounded when a car bomb blamed on Muslim insurgents exploded in downtown Algiers.
(AP, 1/30/00)
1995 Jan 31, President Clinton scrapped a $40 billion rescue plan for Mexico, announcing instead that he would act unilaterally to provide Mexico with $20 billion from a fund normally used to defend the U.S. dollar.
(AP, 1/31/00)
1995 Jan 31, The Mt. Calvary Baptist Church in Hardeman Co., Tenn., burned down. Arson was suspected and investigations by the FBI and ATF were later begun.
(SFC, 6/11/96, p.A16)
1995 Jan 31, George Abbott (b.1887), legendary Broadway producer-director, died in Miami Beach, Florida, at age 107.
(AP, 1/31/00)
1995 Jan, "The Oxford History of the American West," was published, 904pp, $39.95.
(WSJ, 1/11/95, A12)
1995 Jan, Roger Penrose wrote "Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness." The book is an attempt to show that the human mind is not like a computer program, and that no computer program could substitute for the mind.
(WSJ, 1/9/95, A10)
1995 Jan, Jed Katz and Phil Marcus founded Rent Net, a computerized listing of available rental units across the US. Its web address is http://www.rentfacts.com
(SFC, 5/12/96, p.E-6)
1995 Jan, The US Postal Service began to allow consumers to use credit cards in postal purchases.
(WSJ, 4/30/96, p.A8)
1995 Jan, In Georgia Andrew Cook (21) shot and killed Michele Cartagena (19) and Grant Hendrickson (22) in a lover’s lane. Cook, the son of a former FBI agent, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1998.
(SFC, 3/20/98, p.A3)
1995 Jan, In Nevada the charred body of Ron Rudin (64), a millionaire real estate developer, was found in the desert. His 5th wife, Margaret, was suspect but there was insufficient evidence to arrest her.
(SFC, 2/2/98, p.A3)
1995 Jan, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic reportedly made contact with an arms dealer, Nikolas Oman, to buy a secret nuclear device of red mercury for $6 million cash and an additional $60 million from the mortgage of a state-owned refinery.
(SFEC,12/14/97, p.A25)
1995 Jan, British Lieutenant General Rupert Smith, UN commander in Bosnia, arrived in the Bosnian capital and set up an intelligence cell.
(SFC, 6/4/96, p.A12)
1995 Jan, Commercial internet service became available in China.
(Econ, 4/6/13, SR p.6)
1995 Jan, In Lesotho Letsie gave up the crown to his returned father.
(LVRJ, 11/1/97, p.14A)
1995 Jan, In Peru Manuel Lopez Paredes was arrested. Police discovered 3.5 tons of cocaine, valued at more than $600 million, ready for shipment by the family cartel.
(SFC, 8/17/96, p.A12)
1995 Jan-Jun, In Mexico almost 9,000 companies went bankrupt and 1 million Mexicans were thrown out of work.
(SFC, 8/3/98, p.A13)
1995 Feb 1, The US Federal Reserve boosted interest rates by 0.5%, the seventh rate hike in a year.
(AP, 2/1/00)
1995 Feb 1, House Republicans pushed through a bill restricting the US federal government's ability to impose unfunded mandates on states.
(AP, 2/1/00)
1995 Feb 2, President Clinton nominated Henry Foster Jr. to succeed fired Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders; however, Foster's nomination was later defeated in the Senate.
(AP, 2/2/00)
1995 Feb 2, The leaders of Egypt, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians held an unprecedented summit in Cairo to try to revive the Mideast peace process.
(AP, 2/2/00)(http://tinyurl.com/255pml)
1995 Feb 3, The space shuttle Discovery blasted off with a woman, Air Force Lt. Col. Eileen Collins, in the pilot's seat for the first time in NASA history.
(AP, 2/3/00)
1995 Feb 3, At the O.J. Simpson trial in Los Angeles, prosecution witness Denise Brown wept on the stand as she described the humiliation and abuse of her sister, Nicole Brown Simpson, at the hands of the former football star.
(AP, 2/3/00)
1995 Feb 3, IBM in fashion shed its dress code in favor of casual wear.
(SFEC, 8/29/99, p.C1)
1995 Feb 4, A standoff between the United States and China escalated into a trade war, with each country ordering stiff tariffs against the other.
(AP, 2/4/00)
1995 Feb 4, Patricia Highsmith (b.1921), American born novelist, died in Switzerland. Her first novel, “Strangers on a Train" (1950) was made into a 1951 film by Alfred Hitchcock. In 2009 Joan Schenkar authored “The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith."
(SSFC, 12/13/09, p.E3)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Highsmith)
1995 Feb 5, The White House and congressional Republicans drew battle lines over President Clinton's $1.61 trillion budget, with Republicans accusing Clinton of "taking a walk" and the administration saying Clinton was cutting the deficit more than any president in history.
(AP, 2/4/00)
1995 Feb 6, President Clinton unveiled his $1.61 trillion budget for 1996, mixing mild tax relief and spending reductions.
(AP, 2/6/00)
1995 Feb 6, Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, the alleged mastermind of a campaign of violence, pleaded guilty in New York to plotting urban terrorism.
(AP, 2/6/00)
1995 Feb 6, The space shuttle Discovery flew to within 37 feet of the Russian space station Mir in the first rendezvous of its kind in two decades.
(AP, 2/6/00)
1995 Feb 6, Poet James Merrill (b.1926) died in Tucson, Arizona, from AIDS. In 2001 Alison Lurie authored "Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson." In 2015 Langdon Hammer authored James Merrill: Life and Art."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Merrill)(SSFC, 3/11/01, BR p.3)(Econ., 4/18/15, p.75)
1995 Feb 6, Pres. Jean-Bertrand Aristide disbanded the Haitian army and replaced it with a civilian police force.
(AP, 2/11/04)
1995 Feb 7, Ramzi Yousef, the alleged mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, was arrested in Islamabad, Pakistan, after two years as a fugitive.
(AP, 2/7/00)
1995 Feb 8, US Surgeon General nominee Henry Foster said in an ABC interview he'd performed 39 abortions, more than three times as many as previously stated.
(AP, 2/8/00)
1995 Feb 8, The U.N. Security Council approved sending 7,000 peacekeepers to Angola to cement an accord ending 19 years of civil war.
(AP, 2/8/00)
1995 Feb 8, A 6.4 earthquake at Trujillo, Colombia, killed over 46 people.
(http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/eqlists/sig_1995.html)
1995 Feb 9, A preview of "Heiress" opened at Cort Theater NYC for 340 performances.
(www.ibdb.com/production.asp?id=4287)
1995 Feb 9, Former US Sen. J. William Fulbright (b.1905) died in Washington, DC.
(http://exchanges.state.gov/education/fulbright/fulbbio.htm)
1995 Feb 9, David Wayne (b.1914), [Wayne Mcmeekan], US actor (Dallas), died.
(www.imdb.com/name/nm0915536/)
1995 Feb 10, The US House passed a GOP crime bill boosting funding for state prisons but requiring states to get tougher on violent criminals before they could receive any money.
(AP, 2/10/00)
1995 Feb 11, President Clinton, in his weekly radio address, threatened to veto any attempt by Republicans to scrap plans to put 100,000 additional police officers on the streets.
(AP, 2/11/00)
1995 Feb 11, The space shuttle Discovery landed at Cape Canaveral, Fla., ending a historic rendezvous mission with Russia's Mir space station.
(AP, 2/11/00)
1995 Feb 12, Jurors in the O.J. Simpson murder trial toured the scene where Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman had been slain, then visited the estate of the former football star.
(AP, 2/12/00)
1995 Feb 13, House Speaker Newt Gingrich ruled out running for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination.
(AP, 2/13/00)
1995 Feb 13, The Hague War Crimes Tribunal indicted 21 Serbs for atrocities against Croats and Muslims interned in a Bosnian prison camp. Zeljko Meakic, Bosnian Serb police officer, was charged with commanding the Serb Omarska camp in northwest Bosnia. Dusan Tadic, Bosnian Serb cafe owner, was charged for visiting Serb-run camps to beat and kill non-Serb inmates.
(WSJ, 6/11/96, p.A14)(SFC, 11/30/96, p.A15)(AP, 2/13/00)
1995 Feb 14, The best-seller "Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Making Your Marriage Work" by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider was first released. The dating strategy expanded to "Rules III" in 2001 despite divorce plans by Ellen Fein.
(WSJ, 3/23/00, p.B1)
1995 Feb 14, A federal judge rejected the Justice Department's proposed antitrust settlement with Microsoft Corporation; U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin was later overruled by an appeals court.
(AP, 2/14/00)
1995 Feb 14, The House passed the centerpiece of the Republican anti-crime package, voting to create block grants for local governments while eliminating President Clinton's program to hire more police. The president later vetoed a spending authorization bill containing this provision.
(AP, 2/14/00)
1995 Feb 14, Britain’s Sizewell B nuclear power plant, near Leiston, Suffolk, started generating power. Construction had started in 1988.
(www.british-energy.com/pagetemplate.php?pid=96)
1995 Feb 14, Nigel Finch, British filmmaker, died. he had just finished shooting his film "Stonewall." The film was completed by Christine Vachon.
(SFEC, 7/21/96, DB p.32)
1995 Feb 14, Michael Vincent Gazzo (b.1923), US actor, playwright (Godfather 2), died.
(www.imdb.com/name/nm0311155/)
1995 Feb 15, The FBI arrested Kevin Mitnick, its "most wanted hacker," and charged him with cracking security in some of the nation's most protected computers. Mitnick was released Jan. 21, 2000, after serving five years behind bars.
(AP, 2/15/00)
1995 Feb 15, A fire roared through a three-story nightclub in Taichung, Taiwan, killing at least 64 people.
(AP, 2/15/00)
1995 Feb 15, Population of People's Republic of China hit 1.2 billion.
(www.china.org.cn/e-white/familypanning/13-2.htm)(WSJ, 11/20/95, p.A-1)
1995 Feb 16, Four people were killed when tornadoes tore through rural north Alabama.
(AP, 2/16/00)
1995 Feb 16, In a dark and defensive address to his nation, Russian President Boris Yeltsin berated his military leaders for big losses and human rights abuses in Chechnya, but insisted Russia had to use force to defend its unity.
(AP, 2/16/00)
1995 Feb 17, Federal judge allowed a lawsuit claiming US tobacco makers knew nicotine was addictive and manipulated its levels to keep customers hooked.
(http://starbulletin.com/specials/liggett.html)
1995 Feb 17, Colin Ferguson was convicted of six counts of murder in the December 1993 Long Island Rail Road shootings. He was later sentenced to a minimum of 200 years in prison.
(AP, 2/17/00)
1995 Feb 18, The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People replaced veteran chairman William Gibson with Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, after the rank-and-file declared no confidence in Gibson's leadership.
(AP, 2/18/00)
1995 Feb 19, A day after being named the new chairwoman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Myrlie Evers-Williams outlined her plans for revitalizing the civil rights organization, saying she intended to take the group back to its roots.
(AP, 2/19/00)
1995 Feb 19, Calder Willingham (b.1922), novelist, scriptwriter (The Graduate), died of lung cancer in New Hampshire.
(www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1244)
1995 Feb 20, An American Marine, Sgt. Justin A. Harris, died in a helicopter crash during the evacuation of United Nations forces from Somalia.
(AP, 2/20/00)
1995 Feb 21, The United States and Mexico signed an agreement to unlock $20 billion in U.S. support to stabilize the peso, but under tough conditions.
(AP, 2/21/00)
1995 Feb 21, Chicago stockbroker Steve Fossett became the first person to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon, landing in Leader, Saskatchewan, Canada.
(AP, 2/21/00)
1995 Feb 21, Robert Bolt (b.1924), British playwright (Doctor Zhivago, Man for All Seasons, Bounty), died.
(www.imdb.com/name/nm0004122/)
1995 Feb 21, Art Kane (b.1925), photographer, died.
(www.deathleague.com/person.asp?prk=505&msk=0)
1995 Feb 22, Ed Flanders (b.1934), actor (Dr Westphall-St Elsewhere), committed suicide.
(www.imdb.com/name/nm0281130/)
1995 Feb 22, Bill Bailey (b.1909), a union activist and vice-president of SF dock Local 10, died. He was a veteran of the Lincoln and Washington battalions during the Spanish Civil War and a writer and actor in his later years [see Jul 26, 1935]. The Telegraph Hill cottage in which he lived, ended up near a MUNI yard at Tulare and Indiana streets, where it became damaged beyond repair.
(www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SPbailey.htm)(SFC, 6/24/99, p.A19)(SSFC, 3/7/10, p.A2)
1995 Feb 22, Security forces in Algiers crushed a prison uprising by Islamic extremists, resulting in 96 deaths by official count.
(AP, 2/22/00)
1995 Feb 22, France accused four American diplomats and a fifth U.S. citizen of spying, and asked them to leave the country.
(AP, 2/22/00)
1995 Feb 23, Administration officials said President Clinton would review dozens of affirmative action programs.
(AP, 2/23/00)
1995 Feb 23, The Dow Jones industrial average closed above the 4,000 mark for the first time, ending the day at 4,003.33.
(WSJ, 12/16/96, p.C1) (AP, 2/23/00)
1995 Feb 23, Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter arrived in Haiti to help prepare for peaceful elections.
(AP, 2/23/00)
1995 Feb 23, James Alfred Wight (b.1916), Scottish author Yorkshire veterinarian, died. His penname was James Herriot and his work included "All Creatures Great and Small," which was later made into a BBC TV series. His first book was "If Only They Could Talk." His home and shop in Thirsk was opened for visitors in 1999.
(www.todayinliterature.com/biography/james.herriot.asp)(SFC, 7/19/99, p.A22)
1995 Feb 24, Under pressure from farm-state Republicans, US House leaders abandoned a campaign promise to disband the food stamp program.
(AP, 2/24/00)
1995 Feb 25, Former President Jimmy Carter wound up a 54-hour visit to Haiti, denying he'd been given a chilly reception by Haitians whom he'd helped save from a potentially bloody U.S.-led intervention.
(AP, 2/25/00)
1995 Feb 25, In Oklahoma store manager Richard Yost was beaten to death with a baseball bat and placed in the freezer of his supermarket in Tulsa. Three men were later executed for the murder and a 4th was convicted to life in prison.
(AFP, 1/10/14)(http://tinyurl.com/qhw3t45)
1995 Feb 26, The United States and China averted a trade war by signing a comprehensive agreement on copyright and patent protection.
(WSJ, 6/11/96, p.A12)(AP, 2/26/00)
1995 Feb 26, Barings PLC, Britain's oldest investment banking firm, was forced into bankruptcy after an employee in Singapore, Nicholas William Leeson (28), speculated in derivatives on Tokyo stock prices that resulted in losses exceeding $1.4 billion.
(WSJ, 2/27/95, p.A-1)(AP, 2/26/00)
1995 Feb 27, Court-appointed salvagers swarmed into Britain's oldest investment bank to evaluate the remaining assets of Barings PLC after Nick Leeson, a 28-year-old trader, ruined the firm by gambling on Tokyo stock prices.
(AP, 2/27/00)
1995 Feb 27, Bernard Cornfield (b.1927), British financier, died. In 1972 Charles Raw, Bruce Page and Godfrey Hodgson authored “Do You Sincerely Want to Be Rich: The full story of Bernard Cornfield and IOS."
(http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Obituary/1995/misc.html)(http://tinyurl.com/dxlwv)
1995 Feb 28, U.S. Marines swept ashore in Somalia to protect retreating U.N. peacekeepers.
(AP, 2/28/00)
1995 Feb 28, Denver International Airport opened after 16 months of delays and $3.2 billion in budget overruns. A $250 million automated baggage handling system contributed to the delays. United Airlines gave up on the system in 2005.
(AP, |
cast. At what point do we conclude that this relentless public mauling at the hands of government MPs and their private sector proxies is intended not merely to expose the CBC to proper scrutiny as a public agency, but to intimidate it in its function as a news organization?
The problem the CBC faces is that whatever their motives might be, its antagonists are, on the whole, right (you should pardon the expression). They are right in terms of the immediate controversy, i.e., whether the corporation is obliged to comply with access to information requests, even from its competitors: clearly, under the law, it must. While the law makes exception for certain types of documents, it cannot be up to the CBC alone to decide which documents qualify for this exception, as a court has lately ruled.
And they’re right in their more general proposition: that it is long past time for fundamental reform of the corporation’s mandate and structure. Put simply, the case for a publicly funded television network has collapsed. It has done so under the weight of three inescapable realities.
The first is the CBC’s own woeful performance, at least when it comes to English TV. The corporation has always been unable to decide whether its mandate was to be an elite/niche broadcaster serving audiences the private networks would not, or whether it was to be a mass-audience, nation-uniting broadcaster. Trying to do both, it has succeeded in neither: its programming is not, on the whole, particularly good or particularly popular.
The second is that the conditions that once justified public funding are no longer present. In television’s technological infancy, the combination of “spectrum scarcity” (only three or four channels) and the total reliance, given the impossibility of charging viewers directly, on advertising as a source of revenue, made for monotonous viewing: lots and lots of the same types of shows, all aimed at the broadest possible audience. Advertisers had no interest in how much people wanted to watch a given show, only that they were watching it. The case for public broadcasting, then, was not so much to supplant the market as to recreate it: to mimic the diversity of choices on offer in most normal markets.
But there are hundreds of channels now, and viewers can pay directly, not only for each channel, but each show. There is no longer any appreciable divide in the range and quality of offerings on public and private television: the real divide now is between subscription channels, like HBO, and the “free” advertising-financed models. And yet this world, too, is fast becoming obsolete.
This is the third point: network television, of any kind, is doomed. Recent years have already witnessed a sharp decline in the amount of time spent watching television, while the dwindling television audience is further fragmented between more and more networks.
Fast-forward five years from now, and it’s quite clear that television will no longer be delivered in the form of separate channels, each streaming a series of programs one after the other. Turn on your TV, rather, and you’ll see a screen full of icons representing the shows you subscribe to: the iTunes model. Indeed, that’s how many people watch TV now.
Put it all together, and there is simply no case for continuing to aim hundreds of millions of dollars every year at a single point on the dial. It’s not good for taxpayers. It’s not good for viewers. And it’s not good for the CBC itself, and the people who work there. The best television, as on HBO, emerges from a partnership between creative producers and a passionate, demanding, discerning audience.
Put the CBC on pay, then, and watch it soar. It could still be a public broadcaster, and some of its services could still be subsidized. But the main English network would be a subscription channel, rather like the CBC News Network, or perhaps a constellation of them, each charging a separate fee.
Longer term, as I say, the whole network model will have to be rethought. Even if public funding were still considered necessary, the better model may well be Telefilm: i.e., just fund programs, wherever they appear, rather than the network and all its expensive infrastructure.
So big change is coming. That much is certain. The question is whether the CBC will get out in front of it, or whether it will drag its heels, hankering after a world that has gone and isn’t coming back.
Perhaps the present controversy will clinch the case. So long as the CBC is dependent on the public purse, it will always be vulnerable to political pressure and the vagaries of budget cuts. Freed from that dependence, it would be free to chart its own course, accountable neither to advertisers nor to backbenchers, but to those best and wisest of judges, its viewers.ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Raising a clenched fist to supporters and storming at one point from the courtroom, former military chief Ilker Basbug has cut a defiant figure defending the army’s prestige at his trial for terrorism. But the extraordinary scenes have stirred mixed emotions among Turks and raised questions about the way a sprawling coup plot investigation is being handled.
“The Turkish army has never been defeated,” one fellow officer told General Basbug in court at the start of his trial this week in the Silivri high-security prison where the former commander has been jailed since January.
“Of course! All this will pass,” Basbug replied, having denounced his trial as an assault on the entire military leadership and a “black stain” on the country’s history.
The reality is that NATO’s second biggest army has already been defeated as a dominant political force in Turkey. The sight of a former Chief of General Staff in the dock on terrorism charges would only a few years ago have been unthinkable.
For the “Pashas”, there is little prospect of a return to the days when the army staged coups, some bloody, some an act of behind the scenes pressure, to unseat governments in the name of stability and defence of Turkish secular democracy.
Basbug’s personal battle to prove his innocence got off to a explosive start this week. Besides his brief exit from the court room, he refused to recognise the authority of the court and, talking to journalists expressed horror at the terrorism charge.
Besides those who demonstrated support alongside the barbed wire-topped fence of the prison, there was some sympathy on the streets of the country’s biggest city, Istanbul.
“Why would a man as powerful as Basbug join a terrorist organization? He’s already the head of one of the best armies in the world,” said pharmaceuticals sector worker Guven, 33, drinking tea in an upmarket district of Istanbul.
“He has a million armed men ready to act as soon as he says the word. It doesn’t make sense to me. Justice is losing prestige with such frivolous allegations,” said Guven, who declined his given his surname.
Basbug is among hundreds of officers, lawyers, academics and journalists charged with membership of an alleged underground network, Ergenekon, that planned a campaign of disinformation, bombings and assassinations to precipitate an army coup against a government suspected by some of Islamist ambitions.
SUPREME COURT
Legal experts questioned elements of the prosecution and there was support for Basbug’s argument, rejected by the court, that he should be tried by the supreme court, or Yuce Divan.
“The constitution is clear that the Yuce Divan is the place for chiefs of staff and force commanders to be tried for crimes related to their duties,” constitutional professor Ergun Ozbudun told Reuters.
“The court is exceeding its authority in my view and it is insisting on it. I hope this mistake will be corrected at the appeals court stage,” Ozbudun said.
Basbug’s court room clash with judges hearing a case he has dubbed a “comedy” vividly illustrated tensions that have simmered between the military and Erdogan.
Since coming to power in 2002, Erdogan’s government has gradually reined in the previously dominant generals, who had just a few years earlier had engineered the departure of Turkey’s first Islamist prime minister in what became known as the ‘post-modern coup”.
Despite the historical significance of the top general’s court appearance, newspapers gave the trial only limited front page coverage on Wednesday, possibly reflecting political sensitivities rather than news judgement on the day.
That said, there is a degree of public weariness and confusion at an array of coup probes dating back to the police discovery of a hidden arms cache in Istanbul in 2007.
The Konda research consultancy said this month some 60 percent of Turks believe Ergenekon exists and those involved should be prosecuted. So, despite five years of investigations, there has been a dearth of convictions, and some 40 percent have their doubts.
And there is a persistent chorus of critics who question the investigations and argue that they have been used to stifle opposition to the government.
The polarisation between supporters and opponents of Erdogan’s AK Party is evident on the streets of Istanbul, where some saw the Ergenekon trials as an attack on the secular republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
“They’re trying to undermine everything and everyone who loves Ataturk. They are trying to change the system into an Islamic republic. I don’t believe Ergenekon exists,” said Aysenur, 19, as she shopped with a friend.
REVENGE FOR PAST COUPS?
Many see the case as revenge for the 1997 ‘post-modern coup’, but the government denies any political motivation.
Advocates of the investigation, however, see it as part of the country’s democratisation and say Basbug should not be given special treatment.
“Everyone is equal before the law. His former title doesn’t give Basbug the right to walk out of court,” said Osman Ozal, a man in his fifties, between pulls on his cigarette.
“Everyone is equal in the eyes of God and justice.”
Basbug’s trial is another milestone in the diminishing status of the military.
Erdogan established control over the armed forces after its failed attempt to prevent former Islamist Abdullah Gul from becoming president in 2007. The General Staff posted a note on its website cautioning against his appointment, clearly expecting the government to back down. Cabinet, however, called the military’s bluff and publicly rejected the advice.
Erdogan’s dominance was assured by the resignation of Basbug’s successor and the other force commanders last year in protest at the detention of more than 200 officers in another army coup plot investigation — “Sledgehammer”.
Among the most enthusiastic opponents of the investigations is the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), two of whose deputies are in jail as Ergenekon defendants.
CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu questioned the integrity of the Ergenekon judges and described the Silivri prison where they are held as a “concentration camp”.
The charge of leading a terrorist group is especially painful for an officer who spent his military career fighting the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a militant group designated a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and the EU.
Veteran commentator Taha Akyol found the charge perplexing.
“In order to say that somebody is a ‘terrorist group leader’ it is essential for that person to have a close link to violence even if he does not comment violence himself. There is not even an allegation of that against Basbug,” Akyol said in the Hurriyet daily.
He also found an apparent contradiction in an indictment that describes Basbug as both a top leader of Ergenekon and just an “intermediate leader” conducting psychological operations for the group.
After last year’s resignation of the top brass and with many former leading military figures like Basbug in jail, the armed forces now face the task of carving out a fresh role under new chief General Necdet Ozel.
In a sign of a possibly more harmonious relationship between government and military, Erdogan recently addressed the military academies in Istanbul. President Gul also attended army manoeuvres for the first time in the southeast of the country.
For all the bluster of the Silivri courtroom, ministers and the “Pashas” may yet be finding a way to live together.Lost actor Dominic Monoghan was seen hanging at Naughty Dog’s office today. He tweeted his picture next to Jak and Daxter statue. Before you ask how this is related to Uncharted 4 – let me clarify – Dominic Monoghan has previously spilled beans on a “new” Uncharted in one of his live conference call and now he is visiting Naughty Dog’s office – exciting, isn’t it?
Naughty Dog’s Creative Director and Writer Amy Hennig, who is known for her involvement in Uncharted series retweeted this photo tweeted by Dominic Monoghan. Wait, this is not it. Even Geoff Keighley joined the conversation with “Isn’t that cool :)” tweet. How does this link together, you ask? Geoff Keighley is the producer of VGAs at Spike TV. Check the tweet below
What about the Dominic Monoghan interview? During one of his live conference call for his work in live action series of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, he accidentally spilled beans on a “new” Uncharted. This was caught by Gamespot, as can be seen below
“I’ll always stay focused on the gaming world and see what’s coming up,” he said. “The new Uncharted I’m really excited to see how that’s going to be and obviously both new gaming systems.”
Naughty Dog games have lately been revealed at VGAs and they are hosted by Spike TV. The Last of Us and Uncharted 3 also got their first reveal at VGAs. It is entirely possible that the “new” Uncharted might also debut there. So does this mean we are going to see the next Naughty Dog game, which will be a “new” Uncharted at this year’s VGAs? We can’t say for certain but this latest news along with the earlier interview leak has sure made us curious.
Also read:
What do you think of this rumor? Do you believe that Naughty Dog’s next game is a new Uncharted? Let us know in the comments.
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LABOUR leader Iain Gray yesterday unveiled radical plans for a single police force and fire brigade to cover the whole of Scotland.
And he wants to reduce the number of health boards from 22 to 14 to help protect frontline services from spending cuts.
Gray also promised 1000 new teaching jobs to boost reading and writing skills as he revealed the policies that will form the foundation of his party's manifesto for the Holyrood election in May.
Speaking at the Scottish Labour conference in Oban, he said: "I believe the time has come for a Scottish national police force but with strengthened local accountability for local policing.
"We can save headquarter costs, protect frontline policing."
Gray said organised crime, drug smuggling and terrorism were already tackled at a national level.
The idea of a single Scottish police authority has split forces.
Strathclyde's chief constable Steve House said in July a single force for the whole of Scotland would be the "most effective" use of finances.
But Grampian and Northern police boards have spoken against centralisation.
Gray also called for a shake-up of other public services yesterday.
He said: "We should have a national fire and rescue service too.
"The SNP say they will cut the number of NHS managers. Why so timid? They increased the number of managers in the first place.
"Labour will cut the number of health boards to protect frontline services.
"Scotland has 22 health boards. That is too many. They all have their own IT systems. That is daft.
"We will reduce the number of health boards, starting with the eight specialist boards."
Services such as NHS 24 and the Scottish Ambulance Service would be taken over by other health boards.
Gray also vowed to hire 1000 new teachers to improve child literacy.
He said: "The SNP have cast 2900 newly qualified teachers on the scrapheap.
"And I want to show that we mean business. So I will offer as many of those teachers as possible the chance of training and a contract to join our national literacy and numeracy drive.
"I want to recruit up to 1000 of those teachers and send them in to our schools, where they should be.
"They will use one-to-one teaching and specialist programmes to stop the scandal where kids in Scotland today can leave school unable to read, write or count.
"I will make sure that some of the best teachers Scotland has ever trained will be working in our schools, not sitting at home."
Gray also unveiled plans to merge NHS and social services' care for the elderly.
A single body, the National Care Service, would combine health and social services so OAPs would get more streamlined care.
Today, shadow Scottish secretary Ann McKechin will launch an attack on the Tories for targeting families with the brutal spending cuts.
She will criticise the Government for slashing child benefit as banks get a multimillion pound tax cut.
She'll say: "Over £4billion a year is being cut from direct support to children.
"Does that sound like David Cameron's promise that this would be the most family friendly government ever?"A $2.25 billion plan to expand two north Queensland military bases for Singapore troop training will be a massive boost for the region's economy, Townsville Mayor Jenny Hill says.
The 25-year agreement, expected to be announced by the federal government on Friday, will allow some 14,000 Singaporean troops to train in Australia as part of an expansion of defence and strategic ties with the Asian city state.
Around 14,000 Singaporean troops will train at bases at Townsville and Shoalwater Bay, north of Rockhampton, under a new deal. Credit:ADF
Bases at Townsville and Shoalwater Bay, north of Rockhampton, are in line for expansion with troops expected to train in the state for 18 weeks a year.
Ms Hill hopes the plan will lead to direct flights from north Queensland to Singapore.Three faculty members admit sharing disparaging messages about students
CUMBERLAND, R.I. — Three teachers have resigned from Blackstone Valley Prep after the charter school confirmed allegations that they posted hurtful messages about some of their students.
The school has not identified the teachers who left. The messages were shared in a Google Doc with the entire school community on Monday.
Jeremy Chiappetta, executive director of the BVP network, said the school has not completed its internal investigation and there could be more disciplinary measures taken.
The teachers who resigned were trained by Teach for America (TFA), an alternative teacher training program that places young adults in schools across the country. They were suspended by that program.
Teach for America offers five to seven weeks of summer training before someone is hired by schools. Typically, these students are recent college graduates. TFA requires a two-year commitment.
Chiappetta said the school launched an investigation, suspended the teachers, and, on Tuesday, confronted them. The school accepted their resignations after confirming the allegations were true.
In the expletive-ridden messages, teachers spoke casually about students, calling them "idiots," and "dumb [expletives]."
In an interview Wednesday, Chiappetta said school leaders met with high school students Tuesday morning and offered counseling to teachers and students reeling from the teachers' actions.
"What I heard at the meeting was a strong sense of anger, disappointment and sadness that this took place," he said. "The youth feel like they have been building this high school. They feel deeply wounded by the actions of a few."
"I cannot express my sadness, my disappointment and my frustration with this entire situation," Chiappetta added. "I am a parent of three kids [at BVP]. I tell my faculty at the beginning of every year, every one of you has to be good enough for all of our kids. We fell short."
The school has scheduled two meetings with families on Monday to "begin the process of repair and rebuilding," Chiappetta said. They will not be open to the public.
Chiappetta said he told the school's board of directors Wednesday that the school was reviewing all of its policies to "prevent this very tragic thing from happening again."
Asked if any parents had withdrawn their children from BVP because of this incident, Chiappetta said not to his knowledge.
At about 9 a.m. Monday, students, faculty and staff received an email from a teacher's email address with a link to a Google Doc. The document includes 18 pages of screenshots from the inter-office messaging application Slack. The school said the teacher's email was hacked and he did not intentionally share the messages.
Among the excerpts of what teachers allegedly texted on Slack:
"Man I wish we could hit them," writes one teacher. Another responds, "Move to Arizona... Start your own charter and commence with the flogging." She responds: "lol"
"I want to be crystal clear, many of the comments written are deeply disturbing and offensive," Chiappetta wrote in an open letter shared with The Providence Journal. "... I am deeply saddened and disappointed. Parents put their trust in teachers and the school, and that trust has been violated."
In an email Wednesday, a Teach for America spokesperson said the language and actions of the teachers are "not reflective of Teach For America’s core values that we expect our teachers to uphold."
The email also said that, "These teachers are employed by Blackstone Valley Prep and we support the action they are taking to investigate and address their conduct, and the corps members who have resigned have been suspended from Teach For America."
—jtempera@providencejournal.com
(401) 277-7121
On Twitter: @jacktemp
—lborg@providencejournal.com
(401) 277-7823
On Twitter: @lborgprojocomI spent some of my weekend with the ladies of the Mom 2.0 Summit, a new conference targeted at women who do business online. All indications are that the event, organized by my good friends Carrie Pacini and Marla Trevino of opmom.com as well as some other awesome local women, was a smashing success and will likely become an annual event.
Among the products and services showcased, Eye-Fi caught my eye in particular. As a geek who is also married to a geek, gadgets, cameras and other toys are fixtures in my house, and while I have read about the availability of memory cards with built-in Wi-Fi capability for a while, I had not yet played with one. Obviously, a girl like me will gravitate toward the person in the room with the coolest toys, so I struck up a conversation with Ziv Gillat of Eye-Fi. I had witnessed the wonders of Eye-Fi the night before at the big Mom 2.0 conference party where he captured me in a moment of stealthy iPhone photography, and yes I did have a Burger King bag on my head and a pink feather boa. It's how I roll.
The party photos were instantly uploaded to Flickr, and projected on the wall, which is a pretty cute party trick.
When I ran into him the following day and could properly interrogate him about his product after a nights' rest, I asked him how it all worked. The story got pretty good when he told me stories of all the cool Linux geeks working behind the scenes over at Eye-Fi, but sort of took a turn for the worse when I found out the SD cards require a software client that only runs on Mac or Windows. When asked the obvious question of "Why not offer a Linux client?" the answer was sadly, "No one uses Linux." But... but... I do!
I understand where companies like Eye-Fi are coming from. There is a long tradition of knee-jerk answers of "That's not our target market" or "our people don't use Linux." Ultimately these companies conclude that the Linux market will not help their bottom line, and while Eye-Fi seems to have a pretty great product, the shortsighted exclusion of a growing market segment can't possibly be the right answer.
I am increasingly aware of more and more "regular" people using Linux. They bought a netbook, their son or daughter installed "this thing called Ubuntu" on their aging hardware, or maybe they just thought they'd try something new. There is indeed a quiet, but sizable group of Linux users out there who want to buy consumer products that "just work" with Linux. Frankly, I am one of them. I would be ecstatic to use the Eye-Fi card with my Acer Aspire One on the road, but someone thought I was not a viable part of the consumer market.
What say you, Linux Journal readers? We have many camera geeks among us, do we not? I have met so many of you in person, so I know you are there in massive numbers. I bet you'd really enjoy an Eye-Fi card too.
Incidentally, there are people out there trying to make this work with Linux, but if this were my company I think I'd prefer the Linux community have a positive experience with a product completely of my own creation rather than trying to make do with a hack.Hex looks poised to beat Magic at it’s own game.
Magic: The Gathering Online launched in June 2002, and has been absolutely terrible ever since. Despite accounting for 30-50% of Magic’s total income, the online game client has been neglected, showing its age and doing nothing to innovate on the gameplay of Magic: The Gathering.
But don’t take my word for it. Look at this recent screenshot of Magic: The Gathering Online and let your inner geek weep for a moment. It’s like staring directly into the ‘90s.
Maybe it’s excusable that Wizards of the Coast hasn’t kept their online client up to date. With no major competition in the market, there hasn’t been much incentive to invest in improvements. But Cryptozoic is about to change all that with their newly announced, soon-to-be-released, and digital-only TCGMMO, Hex.
First of all, what the heck is a TCGMMO and is it an unholy union of genres that’s bound to doom us all to eternal hellfire? Yes, it is. No, just kidding–the MMOTCG tag simply means that this card game offers a lot more variety in activities than your standard Magic get-together.
Things like raids, which are giant monsters with powerful decks that require three players working together to take it down. If that sounds familiar, you’ve probably played the World of Warcraft TCG, which was the brain-child of Cory Jones—Cryptozoic’s founder and CEO— while he worked at Upper Deck Entertainment. Jones eventually left Upper Deck and founded Cryptozoic, where he’s continued development of the WoW TCG, alongside tons of other branded card and board games.
I got the chance to speak with Jones and watch him play a match of Hex at E3 recently. As he described the impetus behind his desire to make Hex, his situation reflected the lives many gamers find themselves in nowadays: “Eventually, I aged out of the ability to go into a card store and play against other people, because I have a job and family. So, late at night is when I’d want to play… I wanted to jump on and play a real TCG, and it just doesn’t exist for me.”
The reason why he wasn’t playing Magic should be obvious from the screenshot above, but he said it anyways, “Because the product that is out there now…[laughs] I don’t enjoy.” Many games spokespeople try to pretend they’re a gamer building something they want to play, but I absolutely believe it with Cory.
Jones’ enthusiasm and passion for card games is evident as he bounces and waves his arms around, telling me about all the cool features Hex will have. And, man, there are a lot of them.
Playing together
The first key to building an MMO is social structure, and Hex is using the standard concept of guilds. But guilds are more than just a chat channel in Hex–they’re more like a club. Guildmates can practice with and against each other’s decks, leaving notes on how they think the owner can improve it. Guild teams can compete for rankings by playing against each other internally and against outside teams from other guilds. Winning in tournaments will level up your guild and increase its rankings in the global system.
And of course all the tools–guild banks, deck builders, auction houses, etc.–will be there to let players min-max to their hearts’ content.
Those features sound great, but I was still a bit skeptical of the “MMO” label. What about dungeons? What about a huge world? What about quest and factions to earn reputation with? What about rage-inducing lawless PvP where anything goes? Hex has all of that too.
Jones pulled a massive 3D-rendered globe that rotated on the screen–the world of Hex. Then he pointed to one small section of one peninsula of one continent on the whole thing and told me that the entire first block would be taking place in this area. The world may not be huge at launch, but it will be over time. Jones said they already have 7 years’ worth of story content mapped out that will take players all over the globe.
The world
You can’t run around the world like you’d expect to in a third-person RPG like World of Warcraft, but the world is beautiful nonetheless. Clicking on a region of the globe, brings up a region area–which isn’t in-game yet–and within each region are cities, which deposit you into a 3D parallaxed panorama view (pictured below), built of traditional art with moving parts like waterfalls and birds to make it feel alive.
The art is gorgeous, and Jones is very proud of how well it looks, boasting that they’ve spent more than $1 million on art for Hex over its two years of development.
I wasn’t able to see any of the promised story-driven content, designed for solo and co-op play. Jones told me, “Dungeons are more like board games, almost. They’re lit up, but they’re paintings still. So you’re exploring them and unlocking pieces and there are all these little glowing symbols.” He also promised that there will be “actual narrative”–not just some throwaway dialogue in between card matches, like some other card games have produced.
It’s obvious that Jones is a long-time card game player who’s tried most every game out there, and he’s not shy about criticizing the competition. When another journalist brought up examples of card games they’d played on their tablet that they didn’t enjoy, Jones reassured him, “We’re a real TCG company. Putting your art on an oblong square does not f***ing make you a f***ing TCG company, or a TCG.”
Customization
And while I may still need convincing on some of the MMO elements of Hex, I walked away from my demo absolutely convinced that Hex will be an incredible card game.
Hex takes extreme advantage of its digital-only status and, as Jones puts it, “all of the design space that opens up.”
Each card has sockets that can hold any of the 20 gems in-game at launch. Each of the gems will change the card in a different way, adding effects or swelling its existing power. Each creature card has two equipment slots that can be used to toss armor and weapons onto them, which customize them further.
Your keep (aka home base) will house Champions, which you can choose to lead your army into battle each time you play, granting special perks and hero powers to your deck for that match. Those champions can level up and specialize through RPG-style talent trees, and the samples already shown range from silly to grisly to high fantasy.
Below, we have two exclusive reveals of Troop (creature) cards decked in full gear to highlight some of the changes the customization can make.
But what about balance?
Traditionalists are probably having a heart attack right now. It sounds like it would be impossible to find a balanced PvP game with all of these upgrades and customizations. And it would be, which is why all that customization restricted to PvE content.
In PvP modes, players will choose from a standardized list of Champions and play with standardized versions of all the cards. That is, unless you opt to play in the PvEvP mode Jones describes as “the Wild West”, where anything goes and all card upgrades are legal. But that’ll always be a choice you can make–you’ll never be forced into it.
That seems to strike a good balance, giving plenty of things to hunt, collect and upgrade on the PvE side of things, while preserving the integrity of the PvP game. Jones stressed the importance of PvP balance to me, telling me that the team spent over six months balancing Hex’s first set just for draft mode.
Digital Fancy Things
At this point I was already sold on Hex, but then Jones dropped another awesome idea that hadn’t even crossed my mind: trophy cases. Every card in Hex is completely unique in the database, meaning they can do cool things like add a trophy case to the back of each card that keeps track of when you used that card to win the finals in a tournament or other big achievements.
Because cards can be sold to other players, Jones expects things like the exact removal spell that wins the 2014 pro player match to sell for decent money to collectors and eSports fans in-game. Even if you’re not interested in collecting pro player cards, it’ll be neat to be reminded of big draft tournament wins when playing with those same cards later.
The completionist inside of me squeeled with glee and committed suicide simultaneously when Jones explained to me that every single card in the game will have three achievements on it, for using it different ways or accomplishing particularly cool feats with it.
Unlock all three achievements, and the card borders retract, revealing an extended version of the art that will often add new elements that change what’s happening in the scene. It reminds me of the stretching paintings in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride, and gets me more giddy than I care to admit.
I could go on and on about all the cool tricks Cryptozoic is doing with card assets in this game, but you should have a good idea of their expansive creativity by now. (And you can always check out their Kickstarter, which raised almost $2.5 million dollars for more examples.)
This sounds intimidating
Jones is fully aware that there are a lot of mechanics going on in his game that might scare away players new to TCGs, and he says he’s fully committed to making a good new player experience. He described his plan to me: “I felt like a game that had a single-player experience where I could bring you in and give you very little bites of a TCG until you understand what the hell a TCG is and how to play it. That it would be this amazing opportunity to actually take the [TCG] industry and make it bigger. So that’s what this game is going to do.”
Hex has a lot going for it at this point. The concept is brilliant—and much-craved by gamers if the Kickstarter is any indication—and Cryptozoic seem like an ideal company to tackle the rigors of making a brand new, balanced TCG. The biggest question for me is how well Cryptozoic can migrate into the video game space and tackle the myriad of technical hurdles a massive online game can throw at you. Jones said that they brought on experience MMO devs to help with that, and the pre-Alpha version of the game I saw in action looks promising.
Everything I’ve seen so far has me convinced that Hex has a very, very good chance of becoming the next big card game–digital or not. I can’t wait to play it.Three albums – that’s what it’s taken Maybeshewill to reach this point.
The Leicester post-rock group have been refining their sound, honing their ideas, rejecting and accepting new influences as they go. Battle-hardened – upcoming tour dates include a stint in China (!) – by the road, Maybeshewill represent one of the tightest, more searing live experience you will come across.
Which brings us to ‘Fair Youth’. Released today (August 25th) via Superball Music, it’s perhaps the band’s finest hour to date. Riffs are sharpened, electronics are deployed with rare voracity... the whole thing (post) rocks, in other words.
Clash is able to stream the entire album as a Bank Holiday treat. Check out an introduction from John Helps:
"We're really pleased that people can finally hear Fair Youth in full. It's been a labour of love for all of us, and it's something we're really proud of. What people take from instrumental music is always open ended, but for us this record is about a lot of things. A constant feeling of motion, the dreamlike states you find at the end of extreme tiredness, absence and distance and, importantly, positive reactions to difficulties and barriers - using music as a way to get past real life problems I suppose."
"It's been our little adventure seeing how far we can go with our DIY ethos - We recorded it with our bassist, Jamie Ward, and roped in a tonne of friends to fill in the many instruments we couldn't play ourselves - amongst them a 100 year old piano, strings, brass, accordion... Hopefully we've proved you can make this kind of record on a shoestring. Now we get to take it on tour across three continents before the end of the year. We are hugely excited and terrified at the same time."
Listen to ‘Fair Youth’ below.
Enjoy what you hear? Purchase 'Fair Youth' via iTunes or the Superball store.Melting of glacial ice will probably raise sea level around the globe, but how fast this melting will happen is uncertain. In the case of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the more temperatures increase, the faster the ice will melt, according to computer model experiments by Penn State geoscientists.
"Although lots of people have thought about sea level rise from the ice sheets, we don't really know how fast that will happen," said Patrick Applegate, research associate, Penn State's Earth and Environmental Systems Institute.
If all the ice in the Greenland Ice Sheet melts, global sea level would rise by about 24 feet. In the last 100 years, sea level in the New York City area has only increased by about one foot. However, storm surges from hurricanes stack on top of this long-term increase, so sea level rise will allow future hurricanes to flood places where people are not ready for or used to flooding. A vivid example occurred during Hurricane Sandy when parts of the New York City subway tunnel system flooded.
Greenland might be especially vulnerable to melting because that area of the Earth sees about 50 percent more warming than the global average. Arctic sea ice, when it exists, reflects the sun's energy back through the atmosphere, but when the sea ice melts and there is open water, the water absorbs the sun's energy and reradiates it back into the air as heat. Arctic sea ice coverage has decreased over the last few decades, and that decrease will probably continue in the future, leading to accelerated temperature rise over Greenland. Floating ice does not add to sea level, but the Greenland Ice Sheet rests on bedrock that is above sea level.
Feedbacks in the climate system cause accelerated temperature rise over the Arctic |
London.
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Wenger, though, is of the opinion it will be beneficial for the right back to clock up more first-team football elsewhere, in the meantime.
MORE: Paul Merson: ‘Absolutely phenomenal’ Dennis Bergkamp is Arsenal’s greatest-ever playerIndian Women thrash hosts Sri Lanka
The Indian Women’s national team has won its second match at the 2012 SAFF Women’s Championship on Sunday. India defeated Sri Lanka in an one-sided match 5-0.
Suprava Samal opened the scoresheet for India in the 16th minute, while Salam Rina Roy Devi increased the lead just six minutes later.
India continued their strong performance in the second half and Irom Prameshwori Devi hit the target twice to seal India’s win.
Pinky Bompal Magar added another goal to secure India a convincing 5-0 win.
India won their first group match against Bangladesh on Friday and are now up-front with six points on their side.
The Indian team will face Bhutan in the last group match on Tuesday.
Please LIKE www.facebook.com/cpd81 to get all the latest (Indian) football news as they happen!
2012 SAFF Women’s Championship
at Colombo, Sri Lanka
INDIA 5-0 SRI LANKA
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GOALS
1-0 Suprava Samal (16′)
2-0 Salam Rina Roy Devi (22′)
3-0 Irom Prameshwori Devi (50′)
4-0 Pinky Bompal Magar (52′)
5-0 Irom Prameshwori Devi (65′)
AdvertisementPatch Notes v1.0.5.039
Here are patch notes for our latest round of updates.
The Collector’s Deck – Sunsoul Phoenix is now available in the store
The Auction House now defaults to sorting by lowest buyout instead of lowest bid
Card Sleeves from account leveling are now correctly displayed in the reward window
Items rewarded from account leveling now have improved layering in the reward UI
Adventure Packs can once again be opened from the reward window in the campaign
Cards with triggered abilities now display properly on the chain
Decks now load correctly when entering or returning to the Collection Manager
Set icons on chests now display properly in the Wheels of Fate
All packs in the store are now correctly centered
The hit box for the Void portal has been fixed
Expiring tournament tickets will now be taken before non-expiring ticket in all cases
Got any questions? Want to chat with other players? Then discuss this article in our Forums! You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook, or enjoy regular streams on our official Twitch channel.Some of the more interesting Android fragmentation issues (to us anyway) have nothing to do with screen sizes or CPU speeds — instead, we usually find them rooted in something as arcane as provider- or hardware-specific implementations of what you could reasonably assume are “standard” parts of the stack. As your Android app (or in our case, our library) gets deployed to hundreds of millions of devices you’ll see more & more things start breaking. Things that you never expected could even break in the first place… Here’s a particularly “fun” one we encountered recently.
The Bug
Realm supports AES256 encryption out of the box: add one method call when you create your Realm —.encryptionKey(key) - and Realm will encrypt your data as you save it, and decrypt it as you read it. (We didn’t write our own crypto implementation, instead preferring to piggyback on the standard crypto libraries provided with Android.) Mysteriously we recently noticed that our encryption calls were failing 100% of the time for a subset of the end-users of one of our biggest apps. Specifically it only seemed to happen to users of the relatively recent LG G3 running KitKat, but not all of them… After a bit more digging, we found that only models delivered to a certain country were affected. What the hell?
The Hunt
After working with the affected app, we finally got our hands on a device, helping us reproduce an issue we otherwise could only see in the Crashlytics dashboard. Using the strace tool we were able to determine that the OS was attempting to load a file called libXYZdrm_sf.so (where ‘XYZ’ are the initials of a major telecommunications provider), instead of the original crypto library that ships with Android OS. Upon further analysis, we found references to the telco’s name in the libXYZdrm_sf.so file. As noted previously, this bug only surfaces on this telco’s specific model of the phone. We initially suspected that the telco did some manual customization that created a deadlock creating the issues our user were seeing when trying to use Realm. What we ended up finding out is that there are various messy incarnations of this crypto lib that were getting loaded based upon devices/versions/etc. We decided to resolve the issue by including the crypto library that we need in Realm directly. (Thankfully this library has a very small footprint, so the impact was not substantial.)
The Lesson
You could think this is a one-off, but through the many apps using Realm with 9-figure install counts, we’ve been lucky to observe weird conditions like this happen on almost every part of the stack, from CPU families to WebView implementations.
Get more development news like this
Let’s be real — we have entered an era where traditional Android components (OS, Kernel, Hardware, etc) are no longer as stable as they once were. They’re becoming fragile. As an app developer this elevates the need to treat everything in the stack with suspicion during such debugging cases. Telcos are also in this arena. It’s old news that Telcos modify the OS to suit their branding needs, but it is fairly rare for telcos to modify low level components such as cryptographic libraries. However, it is happening and developers need to keep a sharp eye out for every possible root cause nowadays.
What’s the worst bug you’ve found in an unexpected part of the stack? Leave a comment or follow the conversation on HN.Are you a fan of small, fast Hondas, but think $40,000 is a little rich for a front-wheel-drive compact car? Honda has a vehicle for you. The Japanese automaker announced pricing and release information yesterday on the more reasonably priced Civic Si.
Honda's Focus ST rival will set you back at least $23,900 for either the coupe or sedan model and should be available to order right freakin' now at Honda dealerships across the nation. For comparison's sake, the aforementioned Focus ST costs at least $24,775 and a base version of Volkswagen's GTI will run you $25,595.
For your nearly 24 large, you get the first Civic Si to come turbocharged from the factory producing 205 horses and 192 lb-ft of twist, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, a short-throw 6-speed manual transmission, more aggressive front bodywork with glossy black trim, bolstered seats, red stitching throughout the interior, 18-inch wheels, low-profile tires, and a center-mounted polygonal exhaust that looks rad as hell, man.JNS.org – The British Labour Party is under pressure to suspend Jackie Walker, a well-known supporter, for suggesting that Holocaust Memorial Day is not inclusive enough, The Telegraph reported earlier this week.
According to the report, Walker, vice chair of left-wing organization Momentum, can be heard on a recording at a Labour Party antisemitism training event saying, “I still haven’t heard a definition of antisemitism that I can work with…and in terms of Holocaust Day…I would also like to say, wouldn’t it be wonderful if Holocaust Day was open to all people who experienced Holocaust.”
Walker was previously suspended by the Labour Party earlier this year for a Facebook post linking Jews to the slave trade, but was later reinstated.
Gideon Falter, chairman of UK watchdog Campaign Against Antisemitism said, “Jackie Walker is in denial about antisemitism at the same time as perpetrating it. It is beyond disgraceful that she was readmitted to the Labour Party and remains vice chair of Momentum.”
Falter also questioned Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s promise to fight antisemitism.
“Until Labour matches its rhetoric with action, we remain of the view that the Labour Party is not safe for Jews,” Falter said.
Walker also expressed concern over the suggestion that the Jewish community is under “such a threat that it has to use security in all its buildings.”
The Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ) said Walker is wrong for suggesting that “security in Jewish schools has nothing to do with antisemitism.”
“Across Europe, Jewish institutions — including schools — have been targeted and attacked simply because they are Jewish. Jewish children have lost their lives as a result. It is vital that society recognizes the threats that face the Jewish community in the UK and that we all work to strengthen community relationships and expose antisemitism wherever it is found,” a CCJ statement said.The biggest catering company in the Middle East called Dona International Catering Company was inaugurated in Tehran on Sunday, Irna reported.
Iranian Minister of Road and Urban Development Abbas Akhundi, Austrian Ambassador to Tehran Friedrich Stift and Managing Director of Iran Railways Mohsen Pour Seyyed Aghaei were present in the ceremony.
The first phase of the project was put into operation with the capacity of providing 40,000 Iranian and foreign catering services a day.
On the inaguration ceremony, Akhundi said that the project is a joint investment between Iran and Austria.
The mentioned catering will be capable of supplying the needs of Islamic Republic of Iran Railways and its affiliated companies in 10 years.
Catering, a business which is known in transportation industry, refers to providing food services at a place and offering them in another.Top diplomats from the United States and Europe have begun a last-ditch international push to avert a looming showdown at the United Nations over Palestinian statehood that could crush already dim Mideast peace prospects.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton held talks Sunday as part of an increasingly desperate effort to bring Israel and the Palestinians back to direct negotiations. Clinton said she and Ashton met to discuss "the way forward," but she declined to reveal if mediators are making progress.
Senior envoys from the Mideast Quartet - the U.S., EU, U.N. and Russia - also met in New York Sunday.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has said he will seek full U.N. membership for an independent Palestinian state later this week - despite strong U.S. and Israeli opposition to unilateral moves on the statehood issue.
The U.S. says it will veto such an application in the Security Council. But former British Prime Minister Tony Blair - who serves as a Quartet envoy - said Sunday that a deal could still be reached.
Mr. Blair told ABC news that mediators will be looking for a way that allows Palestinians' "legitimate aspirations" to be recognized while renewing talks with Israel. He said direct Palestinian-Israeli negotiations are "the only thing that will produce a state."
Mr. Abbas said in Ramallah Friday that U.N. membership is a legitimate right for Palestinian people. But, in talks with his Cabinet Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicted the Palestinians' U.N. statehood bid will fail.
Even with a loss in the Security Council, the Palestinians are expected to take their case to the 193-member General Assembly, where a simple majority could grant a more symbolic recognition. The Palestinians currently hold observer status at the United Nations.
U.S.-mediated peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians stalled a year ago, after an Israeli moratorium on West Bank settlement construction expired. Palestinians oppose construction on land they want as part of a future state.
Mr. Abbas has said a Palestinian state must have the borders in place before Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
American envoys have been shuttling between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in an attempt to revive direct talks and forestall the Palestinian statehood bid.
U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to meet with Mr. Netanyahu when both are at the U.N. General Assembly this week.
Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.We’ve reported that it’s the best-selling game of 2017. Now, it’s aiming to take over Steam’s Stats page.
Following yesterday’s major update, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has surpassed 500,000 concurrent players on Steam. This figure makes it the second most popular title on Steam, conquering Counter-Strike: Global Offensive despite still being in Early Access.
PUBG has also ranked second on Twitch during the past two weeks, regularly turning out more than 110,000 active viewers.
Also Read: PUBG Surpasses 500,000 Concurrent Players, Reaching #2 On Steam
Yesterday’s update added a wide range of content, including a new rewards box with collectible vanity items, and a first-person view only mode that we’ve found to be a big deal.
From August 23rd to the 26th, developer Bluehole will host a PUBG eSports tournament at Gamescom, which will likely have high turnout with its $350k prize pool.The devastating flooding that pummeled Colorado the past week, also inundated a main center of the state's drilling industry, temporarily bringing production of natural gas to a halt.
The mix of floodwaters and drilling operations has also spurred environmental and health concerns that industry and government officials say they are closely monitoring, and that activists have seized on as another demonstration of the dangers posed by hydraulic-fracturing.
Pictures and videos that cropped up on anti-fracking sites and in local news outlets in recent days show inundated oil pads, flooded wells, and, in some cases, overturned tanks and ruptured lines. Many were reportedly captured in Weld County, an area northeast of Denver and Boulder that was hit hard by the flooding.
With nearly 18,000 active wells, it's also a main drilling center in Colorado, a state that increasingly relies on hydraulic-fracturing for its energy production.
A photo from an anti-fracking activist shows a flooded Colorado drilling site. Industry officials caution that such photos lack data and specifics. Cliff Willmeng/East Boulder County United
"Water pollution is the biggest concern," said Gary Wockner, the Colorado program director for the anti-fracking group Clean Water Action.
"Our biggest fear is that oil and gas hydrocarbons and hydrofracking chemicals will get into the water supply, and that the flooding will spread the pollution over a large swath of the landscape."
While industry representatives have downplayed what one executive called the "social media frenzy" of photos and videos due to lack of information, they have taken steps to mitigate concerns, including stopping the flow of oil at potentially affected wells, a process known as shutting in.
Doug Hock, the director of public relations for Encana Oil & Gas which operates a number of wells in the area, said that of the 1,241 wells Encana operates in the energy-heavy Denver-Julesburg Basin, 397 were shut in last week. Since then, 99 of those shut in have returned to production.
A photo from an anti-fracking activist shows a flooded Colorado drilling site. Industry officials caution that such photos lack data and specifics. Cliff Willmeng/East Boulder County United
"We still have not found any spills of any reportable quantity, but cannot rule out future discoveries until we get to everything," Hock said Tuesday.
For their part, Colorado officials have been "aggressively assessing the impacts of the flood to oil and gas facilities," Colorado Department of Natural Resources spokesman Todd Hartman said in a statement.
Officials note that there's still limited information concerning the status of the area's oil and gas locations, but are warning about the potential health risks associated with hazardous materials in the flood water.
"The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment is advising Coloradans that many contaminants, such as raw sewage, as well as potential releases of chemicals from homes, businesses and industry, may be contained in the floodwaters," Hartman said in his statement.
"People are encouraged to stay out of the water as much as possible."
Specialists in the hydraulic fracturing field offered mixed assessments of the situation.
"They're being overly cautious," said William Fleckenstein, the interim department head of petroleum engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, referring to the activists' concerns about flooded wells.
Most natural gas wells, Fleckenstein said, are designed to withstand large amounts of pressure, and to stay sealed under all conditions. Though he noted that it's hard to predict the potential damage posed posed to a well site by rushing water combined with debris.
"With just inundation -- unless the ground is structurally being damaged -- the wells should be in fairly good shape," he said.
"The biggest concern is open-wastewater pits," said Robert Jackson, a professor of environmental sciences at Duke University, who lead a study earlier this year linking fracking to water contamination. The hazardous fluid waste from hydraulic fracturing, also called flowback water, is sometimes stored in open-air pits that Jackson said can possibly overflow if inundated.
In Colorado though, according the the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, the wastewater is generally stored in holding and treatment tanks before disposal or reuse. A June 2012 Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission presentation on regulating pits includes pictures of open-air pits in Weld County.
Colorado officials said that they are assessing the impact to open pits, but that generally there are fewer pits in the Wattenberg Field area where the floodwaters struck than in areas further east, which were mostly unaffected by the floods.
In response to a inquiry from CBSNews.com, CDNR's Hartman said: "It's important to remember what's in the pits, and their purpose. Pits are rarely used in hydraulic fracturing operations in northeastern Colorado. Fracturing and flowback fluids are held in storage tanks and then are either recycled or transported to a disposal well. The pits that are used during hydraulic fracturing store fresh water. It is also quite rare to have a drilling pit in the western part of the DJ Basin as companies have moved toward closed loop drilling as a way to reduce the size of their surface disturbance and in order to reuse the drilling fluids."
Jackson also said chemicals on inundated oil pads where drilling occurs could present a health and environmental concern, though Fleckenstein said regulations would have kept oil and gas companies from storing those chemicals in an unsafe manner.The Face Of David18 x 24 inchesGraphite on Smooth BristolFor those that do not recognize this face it is a small part of the sculpture by Michelangelo titled "The David". After seeing a recent TV show of his work I decided to try a drawing of the face of David.I started work on this 2 foot drawing 1-3-11 and finished on 1-26-11. The reference was small but very clear so I was able to work from it. I used a 2 inch grid, have to say working on such a large drawing can be difficult so that grid was a huge help. Since the David statue is made out of solid marble I needed to visualize the smoothness, the slight imperfections, the veins, and most of all the depth of the carvings....it is the carvings along with the cast of light that make up the shapes I needed to draw. Take the eye for example, the eyelid is very deep so you know that this shadow needs to be VERY dark and slightly lighter in the foreground, light as you know fads to black in shadow. I used a 4b mechanical pencil for the lid of the eye and the pupil, I kept the pencil strokes very tight and used medium to hard pressure (not hard enough to indent the paper). I layered the area until it was as dark as the shadow depth.Another example is the eyebrow shadows. I could see from the reference the carvings under the brow are not as deep as that eyelid so the shadows will be drawn lighter, I used a B pencil for most of that area. Since the light is cast down from above part of the eyebrow that protrudes out is lit up, but there are some shallow carvings on the brow that needed to be shadowed.... I used a blending stump that had a little graphite on the tip to color in those light shadows on the brow.Have to say this drawing has the greatest shadow play so I enjoyed working on it. I layered the face with B many times, and then layered a bit more. One thing I wish I had done differently was to give it a border.Wip image: [link] EDIT:I wanted to say a sincere thank you to everyone that stopped by, left a comment and also favored!EDIT 12/14/11:Here's a little side news on this one...I entered this and a few other drawings into an art show (my very first). The show was 7 months long and traveled all over the region. I'm happy to say I won! It was such a great experence!!Many years ago I went to an isolated village in Switzerland to report on a renegade Freudian psychiatrist and analyst called Dr Silvio Fanti. Fanti, now deceased, had developed a controversial technique – micropsychoanalysis – that was highly criticised at the time, but in retrospect, makes a huge amount of sense. He believed, quite simply, that life was too short to spend in analysis. So he cut the time frame drastically.
Fanti would have two patients stay in his sprawling home for several months. There, they had analysis three hours a day, three days a week, rather than the traditional Woody Allen-style analysis of lying on the couch talking about one's mother for 40 years. He reported that nearly all of his patients emerged "cured" or at least relieved of their symptoms.
The Hoffman Process, which has become more and more popular in Britain in the past five years, takes the Fanti approach without the Freudian spin. It has been going since the 1960s but has grown drastically in the UK, especially since various celebrities have come out and said they did it.
The Hoffman uses various techniques, from Eastern mysticism to deep meditation, Gestalt, group therapy, visualisation, and allegedly condenses a lifetime of analysis to eight days. It has become, for many people, a life-changing experience that surgically removes their negative habits. Many who finish The Process, as it is known, become evangelical, as with Alcoholics Anonymous.
But proselytising, in fact, is not the intention of the American founder, Bob Hoffman, who started teaching in 1967 to help people lose their "negative love patterns". Negative love is all that bad stuff those two people ("They fuck you up, your mum and dad...") pass on to you, intentionally or unintentionally.
I found myself on a freezing train platform in Sussex very early one Friday morning with a clear personal goal: I never want to pass on to my six-year-old son all the dysfunctional stuff my own parents had generously passed on to me. Also, to address the unrecognised trauma of 20 years of reporting conflict, which occasionally manifests itself in my life in unexpected ways. I was sceptical, to say the least. I resist any "reaching out" and I am not good at "sharing" my problems.
But a writer friend, who had gone through The Process, kept prodding me. "It works, it just works," she said. Over lunch, she talked me through it – although like all Hoffman graduates, she could not tell me details of what goes on. I guess if you knew what was going to happen, you probably would not go. You sign a confidentiality agreement promising not to disclose others' private stories. The one thing she told me was: "Listen. Don't intellectualise everything. They will ask you to do stupid stuff. Your brain will say: I am not doing this. But just do it. There is a reason. And, remember, it works."
Another friend's 22-year-old daughter with "issues" had come out of it "totally and utterly changed". I did not need utter changing – but I did realise where my traumas lay, and thought it would be nice to shed them. Long fascinated by psychoanalysis, I also wanted to go as an anthropological exercise.
So off I went with my little backpack. I thought I was prepared, having spent hours filling out forms about my emotional and psychological life, my family history, my history of trauma. I thought I was prepared: I had "done" boot camps before – yoga boot camps, ashrams, detox (of toxins, not drugs) boot camps, even SAS military boot camps to prepare me for hostile environments.
But the thought of The Hoffman and all that sharing left me unnerved. AA regulars say there is nothing more powerful than a group to guide you through difficulties, to make you stronger. But I come from a long line of deniers. My mother's father died of alcoholism in his 40s and she has never once uttered the word alcoholic in connection with him. She says, "Darling, Daddy liked a drink or two." As for me, only my tiny band of intimate friends ever know what is really going on. The rest get: "Life is wonderful." It's just how I was brought up, like Scarlett O'Hara: lie about what you feel and what you think. It's not very feminine to do otherwise. Or, as a young Hoffman colleague said: "I lie to everyone. Even the taxi driver who brought me here."
Inside the house where I was to spend the next eight days, I met my 23 "comrades". We sized each other up. There were businessmen and women, poets, playwrights, writers, students, an actress, a mother of five. My roommate was a quiet, northern red-headed businesswoman, who looked as freaked out as I was. There were days when we were meant not to utter a word, but both of us burst out laughing and decided to bin that behind closed doors.
That first day, we sat in a circle where we would spend a lot of time that week. I looked around the room – here was a "buttoned-up public school boy"; there was an "attention-seeker"; and that woman in the corner was "a woman who does not like other women". This is part of the learning curve too: nothing was as it seemed. The readiness to judge is so linked with the negative patterns all of us had come to lose.
The women on either side of me both later admitted they loathed me on sight. One, whom I grew to love dearly, said: "I thought you had no sense of physically boundaries, you kept wiggling in your chair and knocking into me." The other – a fierce-looking poet who scowled but who ended up making me laugh and laugh – thought me aloof. "But I love you now," she said. Three seats down was another woman who, like me, did not utter a word more than she had to for the first 48 hours.
Later, I would realise that everything was intentional – where we sat, who our roommates and teachers were. Our teachers – we were each given one who would guide us through the week ahead – had carefully read our histories. So carefully, that when I was not "getting into it enough" during a Gestalt exercise, my teacher came over and whispered something so painful in my ear that I responded, uncharacteristically, like a maniac. Which is exactly what he wanted: to push my buttons, or to break me down, so to speak, in a controlled environment, and then to rebuild me. I think I actually saw him smile as I went nuclear.
We worked long hours – from 8am until 10pm. There was no time for reading, walking or DVDs. We were meant to hand over computers, magazines, sleeping pills and telephones. I lied and kept my BlackBerry and my sleeping pills. After three days, guilt took over and I went to Matthew, my teacher, and handed them over. And that was the end of my contact with the outside world.
Most of the work is in the form of powerful meditation. Visualisation plays a strong part in it; as does journal-writing and drawing, and, of course, the group sessions, which grew less painful but more challenging: admitting transference, it seems, is important.
The first four days were excruciating and exhausting. No getting around it. Then it got – while not exactly easier, because every day unearthed some new layer – lighter. The final days were spent on how to deal with the outside world. By that point, I wanted to get out.
It is advised that you spend the weekend after The Hoffman by yourself, listening to tapes and meditating. I knew that was not going to happen. I decided to stay with my best friends. So I got a ride with one of my comrades but when she dropped me off in London, I suddenly felt incredibly shaky. The noise was so much more potent; the people shoving and pushing on the pavements more menacing. I wished I had listened to their advice and stayed holed up in a B&B in Sussex.
Months on, can I say my life is drastically different? No. Partially it is my fault. I would like to say I followed the instructions and did my meditations; checked in with my emotional, physical and spiritual self every day; and stayed in touch with my comrades. I tried, but found it another techno burden, like checking Facebook, BlackBerry and email. I don't meditate as much as I would like to. I did not go to follow-up meetings.
But I did maintain something that is hard to describe. Peacefulness, more awareness, and, very specifically, the very thing I had come to lose, I did. It was – as my teacher Matthew told me – surgically removed. Or more to the point, spiritually removed.
And, stranger still, on the train back home to Paris, I thought of that trip 20 years ago to Dr Fanti's mountain village. I was a young girl at the time, and not very self-aware. The analyst had grown attached to me and, at the end of my stay, we spoke for a long time. Even though I was not a patient, he had whispered some advice to me about the life that lay ahead of me: "Until you address this about yourself," he had said, about a certain "issue" of mine, "you will never find true peace." When I got home, he had sent me three dozen roses for my birthday with the message written out again in his careful script.
On the train home, I realised I had at last got over the issue Dr Fanti had talked about all those years ago. So, as strange as The Hoffman is – as the devotees say, whatever works.Perhaps looking to avoid the stumbles of last year’s snow removal, Mayor Muriel Bowser arrived at the Fort Totten salt dome Friday morning to announce that the city will have more than 20 new plow trucks at its disposal this year.
Despite no trace of snow yet, the army of agencies in charge of snow removal did the annual test run Friday, with plow drivers driving their routes and other staff members overseeing logistics and administrative tasks. The city has purchased 14 new heavy plow trucks and six new light plows, rented 15 additional plows, and implemented “new technology to track the plows and new traffic cameras to monitor progress.”
“We've taken a close look at previous snow seasons and improved on them,” Bowser said in a press release.
This winter will be the first in 11 years without longtime Department of Public Works chief Bill Howland, who resigned in June. In a release, Acting Director Christopher Shorter said "the DC Snow Team began preparing for winter weather this spring."
Bowser is urging people to join the Resident Snow Team, a volunteer group that helps shovel snow for seniors and those with disabilities, just as new penalties are expected to begin this winter for those who don’t shovel their front sidewalk.
Back in August, DPW released proposed rules to fine residents $25 and businesses $150 for not clearing their sidewalk within 24 hours, after the D.C. Council passed legislation in 2014 to crack down on snow scofflaws. Residents over 65 won’t have to pay a fine if they prove the city their age; residents with disabilities qualify for an exemption if they have been "determined to have a disability pursuant to a government assistance program" or can provide a doctor’s note. Public works spokesperson Linda Grant said final rules are set to be released within the next “week or two.”
Time to put that shovel to good use, Jack Evans.
Photo by Darrow MontgomeryThe National Investigation Agency's (NIA) supplementary chargesheet against Moinudheen Parakadavath, filed on August 11, was the final piece of the puzzle in their case against the Omar Al Hindi ISIS module. The case had had its share of twists and turns, a plot to drive a truck into a crowd in Kochi in Kerala last year, aborted when its seven-member cell was arrested last October-and a deadly twist, the ringleader's death in a US airstrike in Afghanistan this year.
Parakadavath, deported from the UAE on February 15 this year, was the seventh member of the ISIS cell busted by the NIA last year. At least 54 Keralites are believed to have joined the radical Islamist group over the last three years, the largest number from any Indian state. The NIA chargesheet in the Omar Al Hindi module was a revelation because it showed how in less than a year ISIS has gone from attracting recruits to its territories in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, to one where overseas handlers encouraged new converts to carry out deadly attacks on Indian soil.
Security agencies are not sure how many such cells are out there. The uncovering of the Omar Al Hindi module worried the Kerala Police enough to launch 'Operation Pigeon', a surveillance programme, in May this year. The operation has revealed the existence of at least 60 other potential ISIS recruits in the state. The low-key operation has added to Kerala's already crowded threat matrix-Maoist attacks in the north (two top Maoists, Koppam Devarajan, a CPI (Maoist) central committee member, and Ajita alias Kaveri, were killed in a police 'encounter' in the Nilambur forests last November) and the RSS-CPI(M) political violence, which has seen the death of 17 people since May 2016.
ISIS recruits had till now managed to stay ahead of the state police. Najeeb Abdul Raheem, 23, an MTech student from Malappuram, became the latest Malayali to join the ISIS ranks in Afghanistan. On August 26, his mother Khamarunnissa received a terse message on social media app Telegram, the same one received by families of ISIS recruits reaching territories controlled by the group in the Khorasan province of Afghanistan: "He is in the way of the Jihad."
Kerala's public tryst with ISIS began in May 2016. The state was mortified by news that 21 educated, upper middle-class youth had upped and left for ISIS-controlled territories in Afghanistan. The incident caught the police and central intelligence agencies completely off guard. And this was because India had thus far resisted ISIS's poisonous appeal. The world's third largest Muslim population had contributed just 60 recruits to a global volunteer army that human rights agencies estimated to be 100,000-strong.
On June 3, Union home minister Rajnath Singh listed the banned terrorist organisation's inability to get a toehold in India as one of the achievements of the Narendra Modi-led BJP government. Over 90 ISIS sympathisers have been arrested across the country. But of the Indian recruits to travel to ISIS territories, a majority hail from Kerala. They are also well-educated, most are engineers, doctors and MBA degree holders. Kerala's strong undercurrent of radicalisation could be one reason for this-between 1977 and 2006, the state has seen the emergence of Islamist groups like the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), the banned Islamic Sevak Sangh floated by Abdul Nasser Madani and the National Development Front, now rechristened as Popular Front of India (PFI). The transnational ISIS, however, is a new challenge.
Of the 54 people from Kerala suspected to have joined ISIS, four are believed to have already been killed in Afghanistan. Investigations have found that ISIS had struck roots in the state as far back as 2014 with modules sponsoring religious conversions and trying to motivate professionals to join its fold in Afghanistan and Syria.
The tipping point from indoctrination to plotting mayhem came in July last year when intelligence agencies began tracking an individual named 'Amir Ali' who had been posting violent messages in Malayalam on Facebook. Ali, investigators discovered, was none other than Shajeer Mangalassery Abdullah, 36, a bright civil engineer from Sulthan Bathery in Kerala's northern Wayanad district. A former PFI member, he had worked in Dubai for 12 years. In June last year, he left Dubai for Afghanistan, travelling via Iran. He took an associate along with him, Moinudheen Parakadavath, 25. Parakadavath, a native of Kasargod district, was working as a sales executive in Abu Dhabi and had been an active member of the Mangalassery group. The two had gone to Mashhad in Iran, hoping to reach ISIS territory in Afghanistan, but Mangalassery then directed his companion to return to Abu Dhabi and coordinate activities in Kerala. The NIA has unearthed frequent communications between Mangalassery and Parakadavath over the encrypted service, Telegram. From his Afghan redoubt, Mangalassery had launched a social media group, 'Ansar ul-Khilaaf-Kerala' on Telegram.
The Kerala ISIS module was launched in October 2015. Shajeer created 'The Gate', another Telegram group, and frequently posted about ISIS activities. He also coordinated the activities of the ISIS module in the state. As the module's 'amir', he directed the youth to carry out terror operations in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The group communicated using Telegram's encrypted messaging software or the Tutanota secure, encrypted e-mail.
The first warning of an imminent attack came on September 9 last year when police requested a Jamaat-e-Islami-organised peace and harmony conference to shift venue from the open Marine Drive public grounds in Kochi to a nearby school. Surveillance of the Omar Al Hindi cell had revealed a possible plot to drive a truck into the crowd. The inspiration, apparently, was the July 14, 2016, attack in France where an Islamist attacker drove a truck into a crowd watching Bastille Day celebrations in Nice, killing 87 people.
Moinudheen had wire transferred Rs 3.8 lakh to the ISIS cell in September 2016. The members purchased a Maruti van for an attack in Kodaikanal but it got involved in a road accident. The funds proved insufficient to buy a truck.
On October 2, the NIA and state police moved in as the five-member ISIS module met at the Kanakamala hilltop in Kannur. Those arrested included 30-year |
journalists. Also copied were Leoinel Kemp Ensor, the NSA’s security chief, and other NSA officials.
“As requested we, ADS&CI [the NSA’s associate director security & counterintelligence] and FBI, have conducted extensive research into [Snowden’s statement to the European Parliament],” the NSA counterintelligence official wrote. “This included a review of all interviews and case material to include all paperwork and interviews collected/conducted with contractors Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton.”
In several emails, Snowden, as a systems administrator for Dell in August 2012, provided NSA officials with tech support on FISA templates.
“Our findings are that we have found no evidence in the interviews, email, or chats reviewed that support his claims,” the NSA official continued. The official did, however, acknowledge that Snowden had at the very least brought up privacy while at the agency. “Some coworkers reported discussing the Constitution with Snowden, specifically his interpretation of the Constitution as black and white, and others reported discussing general privacy issues as it relates to the Internet.”
Because none of the people interviewed by the NSA in the wake of the leaks said that “Snowden mentioned a specific NSA program,” and “many” of the people interviewed “affirmed that he never complained about any NSA program,” the NSA’s counterintelligence chief concluded that these conversations about the Constitution and privacy did not amount to raising concerns about the NSA’s spying activities.
That was the basis for the agency’s public assertions — including those made by Ledgett during a TED talk later that month — that Snowden never attempted to voice his concerns about the scope of NSA surveillance while at the agency.
* * *
Snowden declined to answer a number of very specific questions for this story. His attorney, Ben Wizner of the ACLU, told VICE News that Snowden is “ambivalent” about discussing the issues raised by the NSA documents because he doesn’t trust the NSA’s motives for releasing them.
“[Snowden] believes the NSA is still playing games with selective releases, and [he] therefore chooses not to participate in this effort,” Wizner said. “He doesn’t trust that the intelligence community will operate in good faith.”
Due to the review process conducted by the government before releasing requested documents, FOIA releases are “selective” by their very nature. A series of guidelines determines what the government can and can’t keep from the public, but ultimately the interpretation of those guidelines can be relatively subjective. It is not a process unique to the NSA.
What’s remarkable about this FOIA release, however, is that the NSA has admitted that it altered emails related to its discussions about Snowden. In a letter disclosed to VICE News Friday morning, Justice Department attorney Brigham Bowen said, “Due to a technical flaw in an operating system, some timestamps in email headers were unavoidably altered. Another artifact from this technical flaw is that the organizational designators for records from that system have been unavoidably altered to show the current organizations for the individuals in the To/From/CC lines of the header for the overall email, instead of the organizational designators correct at the time the email was sent.”
* * *
Snowden’s email, which would go on to spark so much debate at the highest levels of government, from the NSA to the Department of Justice (DOJ) to Congress to the White House, was inspired by a question on a training test. The NSA portrayed it as an innocuous question that elicited a direct response when it released the email in 2014. But the declassified documents tell a somewhat different story, with multiple people from different departments becoming involved in formulating an answer.
On April 5, 2013 — a year before the Vanity Fair story came out — Snowden clicked the “email us” link on the internal website of the NSA’s Office of General Counsel (OGC) and wrote, “I have a question regarding the mandatory USSID 18 training.”
United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) encompasses rules by which the NSA is supposed to abide in order to protect the privacy of the communications of people in the United States. Snowden was taking this and other training courses in Maryland while working to transition from a Sysadmin to an analyst position. Referring to a slide from the training program that seemed to indicate federal statutes and presidential Executive Orders (EOs) carry equal legal weight, Snowden wrote, “this does not seem correct, as it seems to imply Executive Orders have the same precedence as law. My understanding is that EOs may be superseded by federal statute, but EOs may not override statute.”
About 20 minutes after Snowden sent the email, an OGC office manager forwarded it to the Signals Intelligence Oversight and Compliance training group — the people who had designed the test.
“OGC received the question below regarding USSID 18 training but I believe this should have gone to your org instead,” the office manager wrote. “Can you help with this?” The office manager also cc’d Snowden.
But the next working day, April 8, the email and question were sent right back to the OGC. The woman who did this would later explain to NSA investigators, “Although I felt comfortable answering his question, I thought it was more appropriate for OGC to respond since the authority documents include legalities and the individual wanted them ranked in precedence order.” So she forwarded the email to two OGC attorneys who “had recently provided the hierarchy of the authorities” in the training program to which Snowden was referring.
Snowden’s email was unusual, the lawyer recalled. Indeed, a Security & Counterintelligence official said in an email a year later that officials had spoken to “the lawyer who responded to Snowden’s inquiry and she remembered considering calling Snowden since the inquiry was out of the ordinary. However, she decided not to and instead in her email invites him to call her if he wanted further discussion. She does not recall any actual telephonic contact by Snowden.”
When one of the lawyers responded to Snowden that Monday, she cc’d five people: three in the Oversight and Compliance Office (referred to at the agency with the acronym SV), as well as two other OGC lawyers.
The lawyer who responded to Snowden explained to him in an email, “Executive Orders (E.O.s) have the ‘force and effect of law.’ That said, you are correct that E.O.s cannot override a statute.” Snowden read this email, then put it in a folder in his inbox.
In a recent interview with VICE News, Litt, who in 2014 had expressed misgivings about the email before reversing himself, said: “To the extent Snowden was saying he raised his concerns internally within NSA, no rational person could read this as being anything other than a question about an unclear single page of training.”
Less than six weeks after he sent the email, Snowden would be on a plane to Hong Kong with thousands of highly classified government documents. In a report on the subsequent investigation, a special agent pointed out what Snowden had already done by the time he sent his email.
“It should be noted this is four months after contacting Glenn Greenwald (according to Greenwald) and three months after contacting Laura Poitras (according to Poitras and Greenwald),” the special agent wrote. Poitras is the filmmaker Snowden originally contacted along with Greenwald and Gellman. “So this email is not evidence that he tried to raise concerns about NSA procedures through official channels before turning to the media.” It is not clear whether Snowden had yet shared any documents with the journalists.
* * *
In April 2014, the month after he testified before the European Parliament, Snowden again challenged the NSA’s public narrative about his failure to raise concerns at the agency. In advance of the publication of the Vanity Fair story, the magazine posted a preview online on April 8. “The NSA… not only knows I raised complaints, but that there is evidence that I made my concerns known to the NSA’s lawyers, because I did some of it through e-mail,” he said. “I directly challenge the NSA to deny that I contacted NSA oversight and compliance bodies directly via e-mail and that I specifically expressed concerns about their suspect interpretation of the law.”
Later that day, someone from the Media Leaks Task Force circulated an email with the subject line, “FYSA: Snowden Allegation in Pending Vanity Fair Article.” (FYSA is an acronym for “for your situational awareness.”) A day later, Rogers, who had been NSA director for only a week, stated that he favored openness and transparency in the agency’s response to Snowden.
“Let’s be ready to be very public here,” Rogers wrote in an email to Ledgett, De, Ethan Bauman (the director of the NSA’s Office of Legislative Affairs), Frances Fleisch (the agency’s executive director), and other officials whose names were redacted. “If [Snowden’s] claims are factually incorrect and we do not have security concerns with the subject matter we should be very forthright in stating his claims are factually incorrect. I want us to do the coordination ASAP [versus] waiting for an article and then spending three weeks debating our way ahead.”
This was easier said than done. On the morning of April 10, a day before the full Vanity Fair article was published, someone at the NSA sent an email to Arlene Grimes in the agency’s office of public affairs, cc’ing several other officials, to recommend “the best way forward” in light of Rogers’ directive.
“One of the key issues in any response will be the degree of certainty we express on the specific issue of outreach by Snowden to express concerns,” the NSA official wrote.
Henceforth, the Media Leaks Task Force’s main mission would be to take “more proactive actions to undermine future and recurring false narratives” by Snowden, as one NSA official wrote. The task force could use Snowden’s email, the official said, to accomplish that goal by “contacting Vanity Fair BEFORE they publish and let them know that we plan to immediately and publicly challenge that assertion AND make clear that we warned Vanity Fair that the facts are wrong.”
To go forward with this plan, the NSA needed two things: Absolute certainty that Snowden had not communicated his concerns, and approval from the DOJ to release the email.
The NSA appeared to have neither.
Emails show that the DOJ preferred that Snowden’s email not be publicly released. In addition, some in the NSA believed that additional investigations were necessary to ensure Snowden had not raised concerns.
“We need great certainty about whether or not there is/was additional correspondence before we stake the reputation of the Agency on a counter narrative,” a person from the task force replied in an email addressed to counterintelligence, the legislative affairs office, and the office of general counsel on April 9. “I am going to trigger an action for the appropriate organizations to do an e-mail search [redacted] to affirm that there is no further correspondence that could substantiate Snowden’s claim.”
A little before 6:30 the next morning, someone from the task force sent an email to the chief of the NSA’s counterintelligence division.
“One last question that woke me up last night, do you know if [redacted] who received the April [2013] e-mail from Snowden was specifically asked if she received any further correspondence?” the person wrote. “I ask only because there probably isn’t anyone checking her e-mail queue since she is now retired. I’m just trying to be as sure as possible we’ve asked the right people and checked the right places for any potential surprises.”
The woman in question was the lawyer at the OGC who had addressed Snowden’s email and its query about legal hierarchies. (She had indeed retired from the NSA in the interim.) The counterintelligence chief wrote that the woman had not recalled any interaction when she was questioned by the NSA in the wake of Snowden’s leaks, but that he would “triple check.”
The counterintelligence chief got in touch with the retired lawyer, and about an hour after their conversation, sent another email.
“Spoke with [redacted] at home,” the chief wrote. “She said no telephonic contact after the email. Also confirmed that Snowden did not reply to her response which matches what we see in the email. Our review of his email did not turn up any additional emails that match the description in the [Vanity Fair] article. I truly believe we have the right one. I have asked DOJ to call me so we can discuss the release issue [of the email]. I have heard that [redacted] is not happy that I am talking to DOJ, but I am not too concerned with that right now.”
“Thanks,” the task force official replied. “I’ll visit you when they put you in prison for talking to DOJ.”
Bauman sent an email on the afternoon of April 10 to David Grannis, then the staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and other congressional staffers alerting them to the pending Vanity Fair article. Bauman also provided them with a redacted copy of the Snowden email.
On April 11, Vanity Fair released its story. That afternoon, Ledgett sent an email to Teresa Shea, the director of signals intelligence — or SIGINT, which is responsible for decoding electronic communications — and a number of officials whose names were redacted. (Later that year, Shea left the NSA after BuzzFeed reported that she and her husband ran a SIGINT “contracting and consulting” business out of their house in what appeared to be a conflict of interest with her official NSA duties.) The email, with the subject line, “Vanity Fair Article With Fugitive – May Cause Additional Work,” said “the much anticipated Vanity Fair article with the fugitive is out…. Probably the most concerning issue in the article is the fugitives [sic] assertion that he raised complaints with NSA lawyers and oversight and compliance personnel.”
The scramble in the lead-up to the article’s publication to make certain Snowden hadn’t logged his concerns within the agency is especially notable in light of one fact: Ledgett had already said unequivocally that Snowden hadn’t raised any formal concerns — and he had said it in the article itself, having been interviewed well in advance of its publication. He added that if Snowden made his concerns known to anyone personally, they had not stepped forward to alert the NSA during the agency’s subsequent internal investigation.
The article, and Snowden’s assertion in it that he had repeatedly made his concerns known in email, was the catalyst for VICE News’ initial FOIA request, filed the same day the preview was released. But the assertion did not prompt widespread coverage in the media, which may have given NSA officials the impression that the agency could move on.
“The good news is that this article has not received any bounce and there have been no media queries today,” Grimes wrote on the afternoon of April 10.
Grimes spoke six weeks too soon.
* * *
On the morning of May 23, 2014, Matthew Cole, then an investigative reporter with NBC News, sent an email to NSA public affairs. He wished to alert them to NBC’s exclusive on-camera interview with Snowden, which would be his first with a US television network. (The interview had first been revealed by the Washington Post a day earlier.)
“As you may have seen, NBC News will be airing a long interview with Edward Snowden,” Cole wrote in an email addressed to NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines and ODNI spokesperson Shawn Turner. “Given that he makes plenty of claims in the interview, I have the enviable job of checking the veracity of said claims. Is it possible to discuss by phone at your earliest convenience?”
Vines asked him to put what he needed in writing.
“Let’s start with this one, but I will still need to have a follow up phone conversation,” Cole responded. “Can the NSA and/or DNI confirm or deny that Mr. Snowden sent emails to the NSA’s OGC or any other internal/agency legal compliance body? NBC News is aware that in the past NSA has denied that they can find any such emails.”
The same day, Cole submitted a short FOIA request to the NSA, asking for “any and all emails, documents, or any other form of communication” between Snowden and any legal authorities within the agency. Although VICE News and a number of other media outlets had already filed FOIA requests for the same documents, the NSA now began to discuss taking quick action because of the pending broadcast of NBC’s interview.
Vines was part of the team that had spent several weeks dealing with identical claims Snowden had made to Vanity Fair a month earlier, so she was well aware of the existence of Snowden’s lone email. But she was coy with Cole.
“What do you mean? An email about *what*?” Vines wrote to him before repeating an NSA statement from December 2013 saying that investigations found no evidence that Snowden ever brought up his concerns.
Cole responded by asking for the documents again, “based on more detailed claims in our interview.”
Vines immediately forwarded the exchange to De, the NSA’s general counsel.
“[With] its story done, NBC is asking us to fact-check. Incredible,” Vines wrote. “We’ll get more info soon from the producer. In the meantime, there’s apparently a fresh claim about email the leaker [Snowden] allegedly sent to OGC or a compliance official.”
De, a staunch advocate for releasing Snowden’s email, informed Vines that the NSA had already been speaking to the White House about Snowden’s claims. He asked Vines to see if she could ferret out additional details from Cole about the interview.
Later that day, Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sent word over to the NSA that she expected a “forceful NSA response” to Snowden’s claims.
“You can help temper expectations by making clear [to Feinstein] that we were not aware of this story before it was publicly advertised and until yesterday had not been contacted to respond to any issues,” the person wrote. “We have not been and don’t expect to be given much if any detail beyond the public ‘teaser.’ We can only crystal ball so much, especially when the protagonist is not bound by facts or the truth.”
Vines sent out a “situational awareness” email alerting NSA officials that NBC News had an “‘agreement’/relationship with Mr GlennG [Glenn Greenwald]. It has been working w/him on stories in recent months.” A separate email was sent by another NSA official to Fleisch and others at the agency that said Greenwald, Poitras, and Greenwald’s husband, David Miranda, “may also be involved in the broadcast.” Fleisch then informed Rogers, Ledgett, and Elizabeth Brooks, the agency’s chief of staff, about the pending broadcast; intense discussions were held to determine how the agency, and the Obama administration, would respond.
The following morning, De sent someone at NSA an email with the subject line “NBC/email.”
“I need very senior confirmation [Kemp/Moultrie) [a reference to the NSA’s director of security and Ron Moultrie, then the NSA’s deputy SIGINT director] that all possible steps have been taken to ensure there are no other emails from [Snowden] to OGC,” De wrote.
Those assurances apparently could not be provided — even though the agency had publicly been saying over the course of a year that no other relevant communications from Snowden existed.
“Raj, if you are looking for 100% assurance there isn’t possibly any correspondence that may have been overlooked I can’t give you that,” an NSA official, whose name was redacted, wrote in response to De. “If you asked me if I think we’ve done responsible, reasonable and thoughtful searches I would say ‘yes’ and would put my name behind sharing the e-mail as ‘the only thing we’ve found that has any relationship to [Snowden’s] allegation. Give [sic] Snowden’s track record for truth telling we should be prepared that he could produce falsified e-mails and claim he sent them. The burden then falls to us to prove he didn’t (you know how that will end).”
That morning, Hayden, the National Security Council spokesperson, sent an email to Vines, Stuart Evans at the DOJ, and Litt at the ODNI, which is entirely redacted. At about the same time, De emailed someone asking, “Why is DOJ weighing in on our obligations under privacy act,” an indication that Justice was interfering in the NSA’s decision to release Snowden’s email.
“I have no idea,” the person responded to De.
In the early evening of May 24, Rogers suggested that the NSA finally release Snowden’s email, which Rogers mistakenly said Snowden had addressed to the agency’s Inspector General (IG).
“I’d love to share the specifics of the only e-mail we have that [Snowden] sent to the IG which asked a very broad question on the hierarchy of law vs the direction in regulation and other publications and which never mentioned privacy concerns once,” Rogers wrote.
An NSA official offered up several options for dealing with NBC News, only one of which was left unredacted: “Option 1 – Engage NBC in dialog before their program airs about our factual understanding (a single outreach [from Snowden] noted, barely relevant to his claims.”
That’s the option Rogers chose.
Vines then sent a note about whether the NSA should release Snowden’s “ONE email to NSA OGC (and OGC’s response to his very benign question.” Included on the correspondence were officials from the NSA, the DOJ, and the White House. Vines noted that a number of news organizations had filed FOIA requests for any emails in which Snowden raised concerns, and if the NSA were to release the single email the agency said it found, it would need to be released “to all.”
Several responses by Hayden, De, and Litt followed and continued throughout the weekend; Hayden appeared to have enormous influence over whether the NSA could release the email.
On Tuesday, May 27, a day before NBC aired the first part of its interview, Cole emailed Vines and asked her to respond to seven very specific questions about Snowden and his work, though none touched on whether Snowden raised concerns at the agency.
Vines forwarded the email to officials but didn’t respond to Cole’s queries.
It appears that during the weeklong exchange between officials at the NSA, DOJ, ODNI, and White House, someone went above Cole’s head and reached out to executives at NBC. In an email Vines sent to Hayden on May 28, she said that Cole once again contacted her seeking a response to his inquiries.
The NSA’s release of a 2013 email to employees marks the first official confirmation that Snowden had also worked with the CIA.
“Matthew Cole, the ‘investigative producer’, assigned to NBC’s project, again asked… about the e-mail today,” Vines wrote. “I’m guessing that execs above him have not filled him in.”
Hayden’s reply was redacted, but it appears that NBC was informed about the email, possibly by Hayden. In another email on May 28 to Vines, De, and other senior White House and DOJ officials, Hayden said NBC contacted her and asked “whether our search was just of e-mails to OGC or also to the Compliance Office. Can folks confirm?”
“EVERYTHING email and registry wise was checked,” someone whose name was redacted responded.
That evening, NBC News aired the first part of its interview with Snowden, which included his claims that he raised concerns and complaints about NSA surveillance programs before he made off in May 2013 with thousands of classified documents.
“We should release the Snowden email ASAP,” De wrote in an email late that evening to Ledgett and another person whose name was redacted.
Unlike the Vanity Fair story, the NBC News report generated widespread media interest. Just before midnight on May 28, Vines sent a “situational awareness” email to Hayden, De, and others.
“Reuters is now pounding the pavement over the email issue,” she wrote. “[Brian] Williams clearly said multiple sources confirmed at least 1 email” that Snowden had sent raising his concerns.
Vines had been hoping the NSA could immediately respond to the claims by releasing the email, thereby undercutting Snowden. Hayden, however, said the administration would not be able to resolve that question “tonight.” Hayden added that she saw “relatively little Twitter discussion on the interview.”
By the following morning, the NSA was hastily arranging to have the email released. The agency prepared a rough Q&A for officials there and at the White House and DOJ focusing on questions to which they would have to be prepared to respond, such as: “What is the training and awareness provided to gov’t and contractor employees about reporting activities they perceive to be inconsistent with law or ethics?… Did we receive correspondence from Edward Snowden about his concerns?… How was our search for any correspondence from him conducted?… Is it possible there is correspondence we overlooked, didn’t record?”
Also on the morning of May 29, Litt, in an email sent to high-level officials at the NSA, White House, and DOJ, shared a communication he received from Grannis, the staff director for Feinstein at the Intelligence Committee, about Snowden’s email:
FYI received the attached from David Grannis, which I believe may reflect conversations he had with others as well.
Is there any reason not to make public the one email that NSA/FBI have located between Snowden and NSA people involving a legal question? That email is certainly not what Snowden described in the interview…. The only reason that I can see not to release the email exchange is if people are concerned that there are other emails out there, so I suppose that is a question of how confident are people in their ability to search old records. That shouldn’t be too difficult.
(By the way, Sen. Feinstein spoke last week to [White House Chief of Staff] Denis McDonough and [Obama’s counterterrorism adviser] Lisa Monaco about this very thing, having been tipped off it would be part of the interview. I followed up with NSA OLA [Office of Legislative Affairs] to make sure there was a response in place. I haven’t seen anything yet.)
De appeared to be exasperated.
“OK. I seem to be the only one who thinks we should do something, so I will back off if everyone disagrees,” he replied.
“Raj: This is still an active discussion,” Hayden responded.
About three hours before Snowden’s email was publicly released — and while Hayden, De, Litt, and the NSA’s public affairs team continued to debate the merits of the release — a special agent assigned to the NSA’s counterintelligence division sent an email to other counterintelligence officials about additional Snowden emails found within divisions at the NSA Snowden said he had contacted with his concerns.
There were about 30 emails discovered from the security office that Snowden either sent or received. The special agent said many of them were “blast emails” from a redacted source to an email list to which Snowden belonged. There was an email thread asking Snowden to call and discuss an issue he was having with his access card. And there was a thread in which Snowden wrote that his girlfriend had been invited to a pole dancing competition in China; presumably, he queried security officials about whether they could attend.
They were “counseled against… going,” according to the special agent.
A special agent assigned to NSA counterintelligence provides a breakdown of emails the NSA said it found from offices Snowden said he contacted.
The special agent said there weren’t any emails that Snowden sent or received from the Office of Inspector General. But there were seven emails discovered in the OGC, five of which were “regarding the ability to open certain documents.”
“Strictly a technical trouble shooting email thread,” the special agent wrote.
The confidence that the NSA would soon display publicly that it discovered only one email was not reflective of what was taking place behind the scenes. De was still looking for assurances that it was the only communication from Snowden — but no one could confidently say there weren’t other emails that had been overlooked.
“I would encourage you to work with your staff to give yourself confidence that requests of your folks to check for records are/were sufficiently robust to underpin your personal level of confidence,” someone at the NSA said in an email to De hours before Snowden’s email was released. “l am not in any way suggesting that people did not take the requests seriously — they did, but they did so under time pressure.”
Rogers was informed via email by someone at the NSA whose name was redacted that the plan, which was based on “dialog with the White House,” called for White House press secretary Jay Carney to read a prepared statement and indicate that the one email Snowden wrote, “the same benign email that you and I discussed,” would be released later in the day.
Carney was scheduled to give his daily press briefing at 12:30pm and would read a statement the NSA sent over characterizing Snowden’s email. He would also be prepared to answer questions, if any were asked, about how the NSA planned to respond to Cole’s FOIA request.
Vines said she intended to contact Cole and other journalists and would provide them with the email and the NSA’s statement. Yet even as Carney’s briefing was taking place, NSA officials were still trying to locate additional correspondence.
In the two years since the email was released, the NSA has not walked back its insistence that Snowden failed to raise concerns internally.
* * *
The NSA, of course, had not waited for Snowden’s public comments in the spring of 2014 to start looking at his emails and investigating him. They started shortly after he leaked the documents in 2013.
On June 10, 2013, one day after Snowden revealed that he was the source of the leak in a video interview posted on the Guardian’s website, the NSA sent an email out to its workforce seeking information from employees who’d had contact with Snowden. The email identified Snowden as a “current NSA contractor and former CIA affiliate”; the NSA’s release of this email to VICE News marks the first official confirmation that Snowden had also worked with the CIA.
The email the NSA sent to its workforce the day after Snowden revealed himself. In it, the NSA identifies Snowden as a former CIA affiliate.
In a declaration filed last year in US District Court in response to our FOIA lawsuit, the NSA’s director of Policy and Records, David Sherman, said that after Snowden leaked details about NSA surveillance programs, the agency collected and searched each and every email Snowden sent.
During a hearing in the case, Justice Department attorney Steve Bressler told US District Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson that “there were many searches very carefully conducted by human beings. These were manual ‘eyeball on every email’ searches conducted by people.”
“My staff searched for any records expressing concern about NSA programs by reviewing each individual email in context to see if it was responsive,” Sherman said.
What they were looking for were communications from Snowden in which he expressed, in email, a “worried feeling or state of anxiety about NSA programs rather than bringing up for discussion or consideration a matter of interest or importance.” Whether those search parameters would encompass any emails in which Snowden was “raising concerns” isn’t clear.
* * *
Though the NSA publicly expressed confidence it would have found among all of Snowden’s emails ones that more directly involved his concerns with domestic spying, it appears the agency did not obtain all of Snowden’s emails. On April 10, 2014, a member of the media leaks task force asked the chief of the Counterintelligence Division whether “we had a clean capture of all of his work e-mail related to high-side [classified] email — to include any engagement with his Booz chain?”
The response notes that “we have his [Top Secret] NSANet email and his UNCLASSIFIED NSA.gov email,” but is followed by several redactions, one quite long.
In June, the chief of staff of the Associate Directorate for Security and Counter Intelligence corrected a document for accuracy to clarify they had “reviewed all of the email and NSANet social media posts authored by Edward Snowden which we have been able to obtain,” seemingly suggesting they were not confident they had obtained them all. Yet several other emails suggest NSA officials were confident they had gotten everything from Snowden’s “final acts in government.”
The same chief of staff also admitted, “it remains possible that unrecorded verbal communication existed between Snowden and one of the offices he cites, but we have not located any individual who remembers any such hypothetical conversations.”
As it would turn out, more communications were located. But a person or people at the agency withheld these details, which contained important context about Snowden’s correspondence, from the media — and initially even from Rogers.
* * *
About an hour after the email was released, and a few hours after Carney said only one piece of correspondence from Snowden had been located, a member of the Media Leaks Task Force sent an email to a dozen people and offices at the NSA saying the Office of Director of Compliance “reminded us of some other ‘interactions’ with Snowden that may need to be considered.”
“[Redacted] dug this one out of the SSCT files for us…. It displays 2-3 additional contacts with the SV [Oversight and Compliance] contingent that we need to consider… but they do not appear to have any ‘alarm’ or ‘concern’ for illegal pr [program] questionable activities on the part NSA,” the email said.
The emails found included the one that had been released, a “personal exchange” with an Oversight and Compliance official Snowden had when he “appeared at her desk with concerns about ‘trick questions’ in the test he was taking being the reason why he failed the test.” And the technical email exchanges related to a FISA “document template” in August 2012 while he served as a systems administrator with Dell. (FISA, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, dictates a legal framework for wiretapping and other surveillance.)
The task force “does not see these as items that show his ‘concerns’… but they do show interaction with the Compliance elements [that Snowden said he had and which the NSA denied] for NSA, albeit administrative in nature,” the email said.
About 10 minutes later, a special agent from NSA’s counterintelligence investigations division replied and said, remarkably, that they were unaware that Snowden had a verbal discussion with compliance.
“The in person contact is news to me, but again, not an actual complaint about the law or authorities (just that we use trick questions in our tests),” the special agent wrote.
An NSA counterintelligence investigations official reveals in an email, nearly one year after Snowden’s leaks, that they were unaware Snowden had an in-person discussion about his concerns.
Forty-five minutes later came another reply, this one from the chief of the signals intelligence directorate’s strategic communications team, a lieutenant colonel in the US Army, who asked his NSA colleagues to do a bit of soul-searching, and perhaps admit that they should shift their focus away from trying to hold Snowden accountable and instead focus on repairing the NSA’s “brand.”
“The contentions by the fugitive that he had umbrage with programs are not apparent, in any fashion, in these communications,” the lieutenant colonel wrote.
The lieutenant colonel went on to say that the type of test Snowden had been taking when he asked about legal hierarchies was a standard test given to junior analysts or so
meone new to working signals intelligence at the National Threat Operations Center (NTOC). This, he argued, proved that Snowden was not working in a senior capacity at the NSA.
“Complaints about fairness/trick question are something that I saw junior analysts in NTOC (and I had about 8 of them on my team in 20 months) would pose — these were all his and positional peers: young enlisted Troops, interns, and new hires,” the officer wrote. “Nobody that has taken this test several times, or worked on things [redacted] for more than a couple of years would make such complaints.”
Despite the discovery that Snowden had additional contacts with other divisions within the NSA — which the agency did not inform the media about, and which officials did not disclose to Rogers — a decision was made not to make mention of it in a final Q&A document prepared for the White House.
“There are obviously lots of contacts Snowden had with folks in various organizations of NSA while he was in access,” wrote the NSA’s deputy associate general counsel for administrative law and ethics in an email later on the afternoon of May 29, 2014. “So long as the Q and A remain fashioned about correspondence regarding ‘his concerns’ — i.e. reporting of violations; questions of lawfulness, etc… then it seems like the planned approach will still be accurate.”
Later that day, Rogers sent an email to several officials and the public affairs office stating that the NSA should be proactive and transparent with the public “as long as we don’t endanger any follow-on legal action.”
“SEN Feinstein adding her thoughts to the public would be of value to the public I believe,” Rogers said.
In a statement Feinstein posted to her website that afternoon, she noted that she was the one who had released the email and that the NSA told her committee it found no other “relevant communications from Snowden… in email or any other form,” which turned out to be untrue. The email, her statement said, “poses a question about the relative authority of laws and executive orders — it does not register concerns about NSA’s intelligence activities, as was suggested by Snowden in an NBC interview this week.”
Shortly after the email was released, the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman published an interview with Snowden, who responded to the release of the email by saying it was “incomplete.”
It “does not include my correspondence with the Signals Intelligence Directorate’s Office of Compliance, which believed that a classified executive order could take precedence over an act of Congress, contradicting what was just published. It also did not include concerns about how indefensible collection activities — such as breaking into the back-haul communications of major US internet companies — are sometimes concealed under E.O. 12333 to avoid Congressional reporting requirements and regulations,” Snowden said.
Snowden’s statement resulted in a barrage of media inquiries to the Office of Public Affairs and dozens of FOIA requests seeking any additional material showing that he raised concerns. However, the NSA refused to entertain any additional questions, instead providing reporters with a copy of their prepared statement and the released email.
A day after Snowden’s email was released, the public affairs office asked the NSA’s office of general counsel to clear a statement to be sent to the NSA workforce. Grimes, one of the public affairs officials, explained in an email that “several questions” were submitted to the media leaks internal communications website since Snowden’s NBC News interview had been broadcast two days earlier. The message to the workforce contained the prepared statement Carney read at the White House briefing along with a statement directed to NSA employees.
“We understand the frustration many must feel,” a draft copy of the statement said. “Please understand we are making every effort to ensure that NSA continues to be transparent with the public while protecting sources and methods and the integrity of the investigation.”
That evening, a special agent with the NSA’s counterintelligence investigations wrote an email to others at counterintelligence, whose names were redacted:
“It’s going to need to be crystal clear that we denied having correspondence containing any complaints, not that we denied having any correspondence period.”
* * *
There were reasons to doubt the completeness of the NSA’s search for Snowden’s emails within an hour of the NSA’s release of Snowden’s one email.
At 1:13pm on the day the email was released, someone in OGC identified a new version of the OGC contact, which appears to have been missed because OGC (like SV) alerted the counterintelligence people about the contact after Snowden came forward, not MLTF. By 3pm |
never take place in most American towns - but it did in this one. It is a public challenge not to let it happen again. The cautionary prologue seems to refer to the hooliganistic, violent behavior of the cyclists, but it also decries the reactions of the townspeople and their repressive, backlashing, vigilante-style behavior towards the outsiders. A voice-over narration of the main character introduces the story: It begins here for me on this road. How the whole mess happened, I don't know. But I know it couldn't happen again in a million years. Maybe I could have stopped it early. But once the trouble was on its way, I was just goin' with it. Mostly, I remember the girl, I, I can't explain it - sad chick like that. But somethin' changed in me. She got to me. But that's later, anyway. This is where it begins for me right on this road. Gradually, the tiny blurs on the horizon and the low rumble that is heard turn into figures of 40 black leather-jacketed cyclists who roar directly into the stationary, low-angled camera. The motorcycle gang rides in a tightly-knit squadron formation, led by sideburned Johnny (Marlon Brando), the narrator. He is a surly, sneering and rebellious sort, wearing the trademark black-leather jacket (with Johnny scrawled on the left chest), round dark shades, white T-shirt, bulky aviator's cap, skin-tight jeans, black gloves and boots. Looking for trouble, his free-spirited motorcyle gang, the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club (BRMC) (with the symbol of a skull above two crossed pistons on the backs of their leather jackets), roars into a legitimate, weekend motorcycle race competition/meet in the town of Carbonville. The group plows through a roadblock, disrupts the race by strolling across the track, and taunts officials of the Sage Valley Motorcycle Races. Accused of being an "outlaw outfit," they are quickly thrown out of the competition by Sheriff Singer (Jay C. Flippen) and told to "Hit the road...get goin'," but not before stealing the second-place prize trophy (the first place prize trophy was too big to carry and "two feet high"). The prize is handed to the swaggering leader Johnny, who stashes the trophy inside his jacket - and later has it strapped to his handlebars. When the Sheriff asks where the gang is from as they speed away, a race official replies: I dunno - everywhere. I don't even think they know where they're goin'...Ten guys like that give people the idea everybody drives a motorcycle is crazy. What are they tryin' to prove anyway? The Sheriff answers: "Beats me. Lookin' for somebody to push 'em around so they can get sore and show how tough they are...They usually find it someplace, sooner or later." They invade the next small, sleepy California town of Wrightsville. Their arrival is greeted by waves and star-struck gazes of young boys. Various locales in the town that become important later on are identified - Mildred's Beauty Salon, Bleeker's Cafe, Hannegan and Thomas' Hardware, and the Ace Gasoline Station. The opportunistic owner-merchant of the local bar/cafe, Uncle Frank Bleeker (Ray Teal) is pleased with the gang's arrival and instructs his elderly dishwasher/bartender helper Jimmy (William Yedder): Jimmy, you better put some more beer on ice. The gang continues to cause havoc by dragging on the main street for beers. One of the gang members tells everyone to race for Bleeker's: "Last guy to the door of that joint buys beers. Last guy in buys." During the drag race, they force old man Art Kleiner's (Will Wright) car to careen out of control, and one of the bikers breaks his ankle when he collides with the car. The town's weak-willed Sheriff Harry Bleeker (Robert Keith) is overwhelmed by the disturbance and ineffective at stopping the escalating rowdiness ("It was an accident, I saw it"). In fact, Johnny confronts the Sheriff and demands that the law officer arrest the reckless, elderly driver: There were guys all over the street tryin' to miss him...and he's alright, but he's got one of my boys all busted up. While his fellow bikers are out on the street, Johnny is drawn to the young attractive, clean-cut cafe waitress, Kathie Bleeker (Mary Murphy) in Bleeker's Cafe/Bar - the local restaurant and bar owned and operated by her uncle. Following her into the restaurant, Johnny whistles nonchalantly as the prize trophy dangles from his arm. He sits at the counter, watches her intently, and orders a bottle of beer: Kathie: Do you want something?
Johnny: (inhaling) Yeah. I'd like a bottle of beer.
Kathie: The beer's just in the bar. (She twists her head in the bar's direction.)
Johnny: Oh, alrighty. In the adjoining bar, he puts money in the jukebox and selects a jazzy tune (while snapping his fingers), as she follows him and serves him a bottle of beer. Acting coolly, he drinks his beer straight from the bottle, and follows her back into the restaurant. Outside, Kathie's father - Sheriff Bleeker refuses to honor Art Kleiner's complaint to arrest any of the bikers: Art - that's silly. Your car's OK, you're OK. And that's lucky - the way you drive. The conversation between Kathie and Johnny reveals much about their two opposing lifestyles (a square, stable hick vs. a hip wanderer). He offers her his stolen trophy, hoping to impress her, but she refuses, even though she is attracted by his forbidden freedom: Johnny: Say, you live here all the time?
Kathie: All my life.
Johnny: We've been over to Carbonville at the meet.
Kathie: A bunch of motorcycles came through this way yesterday. They didn't stop. (Gesturing toward his trophy) Is that what they give you in those races for killing yourself?
Johnny: That's right. You want it? Hmm?
Kathie: No.
Johnny: (He pushes it towards her on the counter.) Well, go on, take it, go ahead.
Kathie: No!
Johnny: Go on.
Kathie: Can't do that. You won it. You have to get your name engraved on it, or whatever you do. It's important to you. You don't - you don't give something like that away just like that, not unless you knew a girl real well and, well, you liked her. When one of his gang members asks if they are going to stay around town or leave ("Are we gonna get out of this dump?"), Johnny tells them that they will remain a while longer - and then looks up at Kathie, obviously attracted to her and interested in spending more time to get to know her better. His gang members drink and carry on outside (pogo-stick races, and slaloming around beer bottles on their bikes). The bar owner encourages their beer-drinking and invites them into the bar and restaurant: "Plenty more where this came from. It's ice-cold too...We'll take good care of ya." At the bar, the bikers are entertained by Jimmy and his conventional, old-fashioned, small-town attitudes. For example: - "What do you hicks do around here for kicks?"
- "The roses grow. People get married. Crazy as anyplace else." - "What about TV? Do ya like TV?"
- "Oh, pictures! No, no pictures. Everything these days is pictures. Pictures and a lot of noise. Nobody even knows how to talk. Just grunt at each other." Johnny engages Kathie in conversation in the restaurant, pressing her for a date that evening and an invitation to Carbonville's dance. In response, the hard-working waitress questions the untamed leader of the gang about where the bikers are going, and what they do when they ride around. He is incredulous as he teases her about her conventional lifestyle and attitudes: Kathie: Where are you going when you leave here? Don't you know?
Johnny: (scoffing) Oh man, we just gonna go.
Kathie: Just trying to make conversation. It means nothing to me.
Johnny: Well, on the weekends, we go out and have a ball.
Kathie: And what do you do? I mean, do you just ride around? Or do you go on some sort of a picnic or something?
Johnny: A picnic? Man, you are too square. I'll have to straighten you out. Now, listen, you don't go any one special place. That's cornball style. You just go. (He snaps his fingers.) A bunch gets together after all week it builds up, you just...the idea is to have a ball. Now if you gonna stay cool, you got to wail. You got to put somethin' down. You got to make some jive. Don't you know what I'm talkin' about? Envious of his ability to move on whenever he wishes, Kathie tells him she knows what he means: "My father was going to take me on a fishing trip to Canada once...We didn't go." Her life has been one of stultifying, small-town repression, denial, and restriction. As he and his boys are guzzling beer and dancing with some of the ladies in the bar, one female dance partner questions Johnny: Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against? While tapping out a jazzy beat on the top of the jukebox, he raises his eyebrow and drawls his amorphous reason for rebellion: Whaddya got? Johnny pulls Kathie toward him and tries to dance with her, but she walks away, explaining that she doesn't dance very well. Sheriff Bleeker enters the restaurant, sits next to Johnny at the counter, and tries to appease the surly leader: Out there, I think you got me a little wrong. I've got a job to do here but I'm not hard to get along. It's generally just a misunderstanding. If it looks like anything might develop into real trouble, why, it can be decided if folks just sit down and talk it over. (Johnny refuses a light.) When she calls the Sheriff "Dad" and Johnny learns that Kathie is the sheriff's daughter, she asks why he tried to act so rudely toward her father ("Why are you trying to be so rude?"). He leans toward her and snaps back: "I don't like cops," grabs the trophy from the counter, and prepares to leave with his gang. Just as they are beginning to depart, an outlaw bike gang arrives, led by a crazy, vulgar biker named Chino (Lee Marvin) - a former member of Johnny's gang who broke away and formed his own rival group (the Beetles). The dirty, ape-like, loud-mouthed, cigar-smoking, stubbly-faced Chino taunts his ex-leader by stealing the trophy off Johnny's bike (and putting it on his own bike's handlebars) and issuing crude insults: I love you, Johnny. I've been looking for ya in every ditch from Fresno to here, hopin' you was dead. Chino initiates a conflict over the award's ownership - and the "girlfriend" that he has found at Bleeker's. After Johnny swaggers over and authoritatively orders him to take it off his bike, Chino merely dusts off the trophy and refuses to relinquish its ownership. Johnny pushes his rival off his bike and takes back his prize, as Chino accuses Johnny of stealing the trophy rather than winning it: Aw, don't take that away from Chino. It's so beautiful. Chino needs it. Makes Chino feel like a big strong man. Chino wants to be a big racetrack hero with all these girls. Pow, huh! Look, I didn't win it, Johnny. I just gleeped it. But I gleeped it off a guy that didn't win it either. Look, Johnny, you want one? How about you go gleep one someplace yourself, huh? Realizing that Johnny has tried to win the affections of Kathie, Chino hands the object to her just before preparing to fight Johnny. He overdramatically describes what will happen to the maiden's 'hero': This lovely young lady over here shall hold this beautiful object signifying absolutely nothing. Now watch closely, see how the timid maiden of the hill clutches the gold to her breast, and see how she fights back a tear, while her hero bleeds to death in the street.Disclaimer: Ben’s “It’s the Little Things” post earlier today inspired me to write this.
One thing that took a little getting used to in my BMW 328i (E36), is the way the volume control works.
In all of the previous cars I’ve owned (Nissan, Subaru, Toyota) with both OEM and aftermarket sound systems, when you turn the volume knob on the dash the volume level is shown on the stereo adjusting in real time.
What’s the REAL point of that?
For people with mild OCD we’re always trying to make sure the volume level is set at an even number – say 14 or 28. Some people need it to feel even “more even” at 10 or 20.
Everyone (myself included) is always trying to find the “right” sound level, often multiple times throughout a drive. You have to change the volume when your windows are down, when they’re up, when you’re on the highway, if people are talking, etc.
But are we adjusting the volume based on sound, or are we first adjusting it based on an arbitrary number we see on a screen, that comes close to an appropriate sound level?
My BMW does not display a sound level.
At first it sort of bothered me – it felt like something was missing.
Now that I’ve gotten used to it, I love it. When I turn the volume knob I use my ears to determine when the sound is “right” – not my eyes.
There are a few counterpoints that can be made, for example “I set my volume to 32 to this CD because I know it’s right and I set it to 27 for the radio. That way I can quickly adjust the sound to the level I already know is right.”
I’m not sure if BMW is still doing this in their current models, as they seem to be conforming more to the masses (e.g. moving the window switches back to the doors instead of the center position near the gear shift).
But I think BMW had it right – even if only for a limited time.After four years at the helm, Pointe-Claire Mayor Morris Trudeau announced he would not be seeking re-election in the upcoming municipal elections in November.
Pointe-Claire Mayor Morris Trudeau announces he isn't running for re-election Nov. 5. @Global_Montreal pic.twitter.com/iAKNuX7l8g — Billy Shields (@billyshields) May 18, 2017
In a prepared statement, Trudeau lauded the city’s numerous achievements and high standard of living.
“Ninety-eight percent of Pointe-Claire residents say they are satisfied with their City, and Canadian real estate experts have identified Pointe-Claire as the best place to live in the Greater Montreal area,” Trudeau said, adding the data was independently gathered.
READ MORE: Pointe-Claire marks Earth Day with giveaways and tree planting
Trudeau also touted the Pointe-Claire’s finances saying they were in “excellent condition,” and were an indication that the city was on the right track in terms of sustainable, economic and social development.
He pointed to Pointe-Claire Village and Valois Village, slated for re-development, as examples of projects combining economic development and sustainability.
READ MORE: Valois village may never look the same
Trudeau held elected office for 19 years — four as mayor and 15 as a city councillor.
Prior to that, he was a police officer with the City of Montreal — a career that spanned 35 years.
READ MORE: Pointe-Claire Village on track for a major makeover
Trudeau announced he was stepping away from politics to spend more time with his family.
Pointe-Claire residents head to the polls Nov. 5.There are now over one billion automobiles on the road worldwide. An explosion in the auto markets in China and India ensures that number will increase, with China supplanting the United States as the world's largest car market. It's fair to say humanity has a love affair with the car, but it's a love-hate relationship. Cars are at once convenience, art, and menace. People write songs about their vehicles, put them in museums, race them, and wrap their identities up in them. About 15% of carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels comes from cars. Traffic fatality estimates vary from half a million per year to more than double that. Gathered here are images of the automobile in many forms, and our relationship to and dependence on our cars. This is the second in an occasional Big Picture series on transportation, following Pedal power earlier this year. -- Lane Turner ( 40 photos totalEaster Sunday was on Sunday, April 8, 2012.
On Easter Sunday this year, aircraft records obtained by TheDC show that Melgen’s plane left Florida the morning of Easter Sunday, stopped at the Teterboro private airport near Menendez’s home in New Jersey, and flew on to the Dominican Republic. Two days later it returned to the United States, from a private airport near Casa de Campo.
While he was there,
Two women from the Dominican Republic told The Daily Caller that Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez paid them for sex earlier this year. In interviews, the two women said they met Menendez around Easter at Casa de Campo, an expensive 7,000 acre resort in the Dominican Republic. They claimed Menendez agreed to pay them $500 for sex acts, but in the end they each received only $100.
You would think that politicians would know by now that they ought to pay hookers.
On April 17, 2012
Sen. Menendez was interviewed by NJ Today Online and was asked about what the consequences should be for the secret service agents who were involved in the sex scandal in Cartegena, Colombia.
(video above cue at 1:54)
He answered, “If the facts are true, they should all be fired. The reality is is that the secret service not only protects the president of the United States, they represent the United States of America. They were on duty. If the facts are true as we are reading in the press, they shouldn’t have a job.”
The sex part is not the big issue,
1) Prostitution is legal in the Dominican Republic. This doesn’t make it right or any less sleazy, but it takes away the most vivid “senator accused of illegal acts” angle. Although I suppose paying only 20 percent of what you promised could get you in legal trouble… 2) Menendez is not married. 3) Most New Jersey residents have much bigger issues on their minds right now, thanks to Hurricane Sandy. In fact, this might be the very best possible time for this story to break for Menendez.
What I want to know if Menendez reports the free vacation(s) and free use of Salomon Melgen’s private jet.
It’s New Jersey Dems, folks.i've been anxiously awaiting my reddit rematch gift - and today it arrived! i picked up the parcel from the stoop, brought it in, set it on the table and it went 'vworp, vworp, vworp'. and that's when the screaming started!
my profile states that i'm an avid whovian, and especially a fan of david tennant and the tenth doctor. my AWESOME rematch santa said in her note that she knows nothing of the doctor, but her sleuthing skills are incredible. in my package were:
a TARDIS cookie jar filled with the most delectable little asian cookies. when you fetch a cookie and close the lid, it makes the most beautiful sound on earth - and the light on top blinks on and off!!!
an articulated tenth doctor action figure, in blue pin stripes & brainy specs, with a flock of tiny adipose (what do you call a group of adipose, anyway?)
an absolutely adorable adipose plushie
i'm so completely over the moon i don't know how to express it! santa had no way of knowing that partners in crime is one of my favorite episodes - donna's my favorite modern companion! i could not have imagined a better gift - it honestly brought me to tears. so thank you, soozling (and all rematch santas everywhere)! your generosity is amazing!
edit well crap - i just realized i mispronounced my secret santa's name in the video!!! sorry, soozling - i chalk it up to overwhelming excitement!!!A few days ago Victoria was trying to take some photos of a bridesmaid gift she received the night before. She was trying to take these images on her phone and was not having any success. After a few unsuccessful attempts, she had given into my suggestion of taking these photos on her X-T10. She then ran into the issue of having a couple of photos that were poorly framed and somewhat noisy. After some more convincing we had her camera mounted on a tripod. We spent the next few minutes rearranging the objects in the photo and adjusting the tripod to get the composition just right. She remarked about how so much effort was going into a single photo. I told her that for me a lot of the joy that comes from Photography is all of the problem-solving that you have to do on occasion. This can mean a few different things. For example, you might have to climb a fence to get closer to your subject. You might have to use a reflector to modify the available light in a scene. In the most extreme cases, you might have to fabricate an entire set or some props for your images.
Why You Should Build Your Own Stuff...
You should build your own stuff because it gives you the opportunity to add a unique and personal touch to your photos. Creating something such as this surface, from scratch allows you to add an extra element of control to your photos. For example, in product photography, it's important to have complete control over the technical aspects of a photo. So why not take things a step further and be in control of the surroundings as well. Imagine being able to custom build a prop for your clients on an individual basis. In a competitive marketplace, everyone wants something that will help them stand out.
How I Built This Surface
The individual boards are a part of our fence that was damaged in a storm back in August. They had been sitting in the garage for the last few months, waiting for someone to put them to good use. Some of the pieces were longer than others so I started by cutting them all down to the same length, 20 Inches.Manchester United midfielder Henrikh Mkhitaryan has told SFR Sport it is "hard to play" without the injured Paul Pogba.
France international Pogba suffered a hamstring injury in last week's Champions League win over Basel and will undergo further tests this week.
United had hoped to have him back in time for the clash with rivals Liverpool on Oct. 14, but could be without him for longer.
Although they beat Everton 4-0 in his absence on Sunday, Mkhitaryan said: "It's hard, because he's a top player for us.
"It's going to be very difficult, but the coach knows how to make up for that and we're going to help him come back stronger."
Mkhitaryan was among the scorers as United eventually overpowered Everton, for whom Wayne Rooney featured on his first return to Old Trafford.
Rooney, United's record scorer, received a standing ovation when he was substituted eight minutes from time, and Mkhitaryan said: "Rooney is a legend. He's an exceptional player. It's a shame that he's at Everton now.
"You saw the fans treated him as if he was one of their own. Good luck to him for the rest of the season.
"It was a very good match, a bit difficult, but happily we won."Happy Thursday everyone and welcome to another installment of the Halo Community Update. This week we've got another jam-packed serving of Halo goodness spanning Halo Wars 2, Halo 5 REQs and helmets, Warzone, a new team spotlight, community egg hunters and more. Let's do this!
Halo Wars 2 Blitz Beta
Wow, it’s hard to believe that ten full days of the Blitz Beta have come and gone so quick! Many, many players jumped at the chance to take Blitz for a test drive on Xbox One and Windows 10 and we’ve gathered a ton of great feedback, bug reports and game data to help the development team.
As the beta fades into the distance Dan Ayoub, 343's Studio Head of Strategy Games Development, passed along the following note for our community:
“On behalf of the entire Halo Wars 2 team I want to extend a huge thank you to everyone who participated in the Blitz beta! Your feedback and the data we gathered during the beta is critical to helping us make Halo Wars 2 as awesome as possible when it launches on Feb. 21. I hope you’ll continue to share your thoughts and feedback for the rest of Halo Wars 2 when you experience the full game in just a few short weeks. See you online!”
I don’t know about you but I love a good infographic. Thankfully the team has us covered with this sweet snapshot of some of the more memorable statistics from the Blitz Beta:
Top Players
A huge shout out goes to RTS YODA VIDS for earning the title of the player with the most wins of anyone in the entire Blitz Beta! That is a SERIOUSLY IMPRESSIVE amount of wins. I’d also like to give a shout out to our top standing players on our playlist leaderboards:
Windows 10
1v1 Playlist : Nib7221 w/ 279 wins
2v2 Playlist: SoH 44 Instinct w/ 226 wins
3v3 Playlist: S1E3P1E5SX77 w/ 204 wins
Xbox One
1v1 Playlist: xSSx Cryptic w/ 511 wins
2v2 Playlist: COOL Skidda w/ 370 wins
3v3 Playlist: RTS YODA VIDS w/ 598 wins
You can check out the final Top 10 for each leaderboard over in our forums right here.
Halo Wars 2 Live
With the beta behind us it's time to focus our full energies ahead and towards the impending release of Halo Wars 2. In case you missed it, we announced a special live event on Feb. 16 to celebrate the launch of Halo Wars 2. Save the date and plan to join us on Twitch, Youtube or Beam and help us usher in the next chapter in the Halo saga. More to come!
Halo Wars 2 ORIGINAL Art COLLECTION
As we get closer to launch the Halo Wars 2 marketing machine is going to start picking up steam. Case in point - today's kick off of an awesome original art series in partnership with three incredible world-class artists - Grzegorz “Gabz” Domaradzki, Craig Drake and Kevin Tong. I encourage you to head over to Xbox Wire and read the full article including insights into each artist and these amazing masterpieces. Here's a sneak peek of the Atriox and Cutter pieces created by Kevin Tong.
Here's a sneak peek of the Atriox and Cutter pieces created by Kevin Tong. Read more and check out more amazing art at Xbox Wire.
halo 5 REQ changes
Let's change gears now and jump to some noteworthy news and updates for Halo 5: Guardians. First up we've got more incoming REQ changes to look forward to in Warzone but before we go over new changes, here's a recap of REQ changes made last week:
Jan. 27 Halo 5 REQ Changes
Vehicles reduced energy cost:
Oni Gungoose to 3 from 4
Anti-Air Wraith stays the same REQ energy level but is more common in packs (modified to be Rare).
Banshee and Mantis to 5 from 6. (Note: should look at Mantis rarity, currently Ultra Rare)
Weapons reduced energy cost:
River of Light to 5 from 6.
Base Spartan Laser to 4 from 5.
All Turrets down by 1 EXCEPT Jorge's Chaingun and except level 2 turrets (no turrets become level 1).
Last week the team put out a call for feedback asking fans to share their answer to the question, "If you could change the energy level of any one REQ item, what would it be?" Many of you took to our forums to share your thoughts and we thank you for giving us feedback!
After pouring through feedback and reviewing game data, the team is preparing for another round of REQ changes. Before we go over the specifics, I asked the team to share some insights on the methodology used to arrive at these changes.
What prompted the team to look at adjusting the energy cost of REQ cards?
We routinely look at REQ card usage to understand how cards are used, the effectiveness of REQs, and how the cards balance against each other. After the holidays, we wanted to do a full pass in REQ balance taking into account all the new REQ content released in the past few updates.
Can you walk us through the overall process – how does the team come to a decision on what changes to make in-game?
We collect a LOT of data and have an excellent team of data scientists to help us analyze the data we collect. The main report we look at when analyzing REQ balance is our “Warzone Balance by Cost” chart which shows us kills per use and damage per use segmented by energy cost. We look at outliers in each energy band and decide to move them up or down. We also pay close attention to the weapons and vehicles available in the energy band before that level. In other words, “if we changed this REQ from 5 to 4, what’s available in 3 to counter/balance the REQ being pulled in a few minutes earlier?”
Data is just a part of it. We have experts from Sandbox, Progression and Multiplayer weighing in on a ton of different gameplay factors.
What role does fan feedback play when the team is doing this type of work?
We check Waypoint, Reddit and YouTube and do pay attention to the feedback we get. We were on the fence about increasing Wasp energy cost. In general, we prefer to lower energy of weaker weapons/vehicles rather than increase the energy of effective REQs. Ske7ch’s posts about REQ energy and the HUGE outpouring of feedback around the Wasp helped us make the decision to increase the Wasp energy levels by 1. We even sorted the Reddit thread by “controversial” to make sure the upvote/downvote brigade didn’t drown out the voice of the people.
After decisions are made and a plan is agreed upon, how do you go about implementing the changes into Halo 5?
REQ energy balance is controlled entirely server-side. We are able to make the changes in our system and push them out without a patch to download. It’s about the same process as updating the message of the day.
Should players expect more REQ energy changes in the future?
You bet! We have a cadence of “balance, analyze, re-balance”. Keep that feedback coming!
Some fans might be upset to find that “their” suggestion didn’t get included in this latest pass. What would you say to them?
Don’t despair! Some REQs will stay the same energy level but may have better uses in the context of all the other changes. If not, let us know!
Upcoming REQ Changes (ETA Friday, Feb. 3)
Now, on to the changes! Here's what you can expect to change with Halo 5 REQs in the very near future (changes are targeted to go-live on Friday, Feb. 3).
Here a Wasp, there a Wasp, everywhere a Wasp Wasp...
Wasps 3/4/5 -> 4/5/6 On some maps, a combination of the base assault and first boss can get most of a team to level 3 once the first armoury is captured. Moving the T1 wasp up a level avoids seeing half a team immediately spawn them. The Hannibal wasp’s armament and dodging ability make it competitive with a sword banshee or scorpion, so it fits well at level 6
Base Phaeton 8 -> 7 Given its low health and the introduction of the Helios, the base phaeton fits better with the tier 3 banshees at level 7.
Gunfighter Magnum 3 -> 2 We saw that players were preferring BRs to the gunfighter magnum.
Tactical Magnum 4 -> 3 Level 4 has a silenced BR, so moving down to level 3 invites debate between the silenced pistol and non-silenced BR.
Morph Sight : AR 4 -> 1, BR 6 -> 3, DMR 8 -> 6, SMG 7 -> 4 (to the same as hybrid [carbine] sight) Puts these sights in-line with the other sights of their REQ energy level
(to the same as hybrid [carbine] sight) Base Plasma Pistol 3 -> 2 This will hopefully provide a better counter for players at REQ level 2 battling players at level 3 or above who are in vehicles
We’re also changing the Random Weapon and Random Vehicle cards on Friday. Here's what's changing:
Random Vehicle (Ultra-Rare) 6 -> 7 Moving up a notch allows greater differentiation from the Random Vehicle (Rare) at 5
Random Weapons & Random Vehicles (All) Tweaked probabilities to avoid over- or under-powered REQs for their levels
The team mentioned that the Ultra-Rare random vehicle REQ is a great way for players who haven't yet unlocked all of their certs to get their hands on the best vehicles in the game (including a particularly high weight for the Phaeton Helios).
Lastly, there will also be a number of changes coming to Armor Mods across the board. From the team:
We’re spreading out the Armor Mod options across multiple energy levels to give players more choices as they level up in each Warzone game. Our team expects to see some fun combinations and some serious strategies arise from these changes, so make us proud!
REQ Energy Level 3 Death From Above Grenadier Patrol Case
REQ Energy Level 4 Auto-Medic Speed Booster Frag Grenade Expert Plasma Grenade Expert Splinter Grenade Expert
REQ Energy Level 5 Reflex Enhancers Upgraded Thrusters Increased Strength
REQ Energy Level 6 Advanced Sensors Wheelman Upgraded Shields
All of these changes are expected to go-live tomorrow, Feb. 3, but stay tuned to @Halo on Twitter for the final word once we've gotten the green light the work is complete. Once they're live, please take these REQ changes for a test drive and continue sharing your thoughts and feedback with us!
Halo 5 Classic Helmet REQ Pack
Last week we dropped more details on the upcoming Classic Helmet REQ Pack coming to Halo 5. In case you missed it, know that these sweet new helmets will be officially available in-game on February 9th. To help us spread the word and build up some excitement before launch we’ve asked Community friend Receptor17 to help us create some awesome screenshots to whet your appetite. Make sure to follow us @Halo for a new sweet helmet masterpiece every day leading up to launch. Here’s what’s been released so far:
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Put up your dukes! CQB returns to Halo multiplayer on Feb. 9 for more up-close-and-personal combat as part of the Classic Helmet REQ Pack. <a href="https://t.co/oloKor2QcS">pic.twitter.com/oloKor2QcS</a></p>— Halo (@Halo) <a href="https://twitter.com/Halo/status/826477481532157953">January 31, 2017</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Rock the Military Police helmet on February 9, and become the soldier we need you to be. <a href="https://t.co/zxTYgZPZxx">pic.twitter.com/zxTYgZPZxx</a></p>— Halo (@Halo) <a href="https://twitter.com/Halo/status/826839254810533889">February 1, 2017</a></blockquote>
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[tweet]<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">It doesn’t get more classic than Mark V. The helmet worn by Master Chief during the Halo conflict returns next week. <a href="https://t.co/CK3IfzDOpe">pic.twitter.com/CK3IfzDOpe</a></p>— Halo (@Halo) <a href="https://twitter.com/Halo/status/827216964724461570">February 2, 2017</a></blockquote>
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It’s great seeing so much excitement in the community and naturally the biggest question you all have is WHAT IS THE PRICE!? Last week I didn’t have the final details, but now I do!
The Classic Helmet REQ Pack will be available for $9.99 from the Marketplace Store or in-game for 150K RP. Best of all, all nine classic helmets will be exclusively available in the one, single REQ Pack. Get hyped, only one week to go!
Thar She Blows!
Speaking of helmets, many of you might have noticed the recent emergence of “Timmy,” a special helmet that guarantees a whale of a good time when adorned by your Spartan in Halo 5. Tom French has a thing for whales, apparently, in addition to a fondness for pigs. As John117Jr says on Twitter, all must pay tribute to Timmy the Whale:
[tweet]
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Oh great and powerful Timmy the Whale. show unto us the secret vale. To |
i Setsu Pai Sho for more details. Playing Materials Board The game is played on a circular board with an 18x18 square grid with the corners cut off. In the center is a diamond shape divided in to four quarters with white and red at opposite corners. A Pai Sho board has 256 spaces on it. Seating- Two players sit across from one another. The drawn tip closest to you is called “the Home Port”. The tip closest to your opponent is called “the Foreign Port”. The other two tips are call “East” and “West” Ports. The “Sides” are divided by the line in the center. Tiles Few tiles are known with certainty; those that are include the White Lotus, the Wheel, and others shown here. Thus, different variant creations utilise different tile sets. For more on these Variants, see Variations. Harmony Harmony plays an important part in many variations of the game; from accumulating points, to removing pieces, rules for Harmony fulfill many roles. While specific combinations for Harmonies vary, some similarities exist: Most often, Harmonies occur between two pieces, though occasionally those pieces can form a chain with other Harmonious pieces.
Generally, Harmonies have a value, differentiating valuable or difficult Harmonies from less valuable or simpler ones.
When Harmonies are present, the White Lotus tile generally produces them easily or increases their value. The Pot In games that utilise capturing, all captured pieces are put into a pile on the side of the board, which is called "The Pot". It can be worth a certain number of points; these points are often awarded to one player or another after the game, to keep it interesting. In addition, The Pot is often used to facilitate gambling, applying a monetary amount to total point value therein. See Also: Variations
Strategy
Rules Notes FrontPage Tip: To turn text into a link, highlight the text, then click on a page or file from the list above. Printable versionBreaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Oct. 5, 2017, 2:52 PM GMT / Updated Oct. 5, 2017, 4:16 PM GMT By Alex Seitz-Wald
WASHINGTON — House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday that he wants Congress to look into so-called bump stocks, joining a growing number of Republican leaders who have expressed interest in taking action on the modifications that increase a weapon's rate of fire.
"Fully automatic weapons have been banned for a long time," Ryan told MSNBC host Hugh Hewitt. "Apparently, this allows you to take a semiautomatic and turn it into a fully automatic. So clearly that’s something we need to look into."
Ryan said that even though he's an avid hunter, he had never heard of the devices before Sunday's mass shooting in Las Vegas. "I think we’re quickly coming up to speed with what this is," Ryan said.
Republicans typically draw a hard line against any new rules to regulate guns, which they view as violations the Second Amendment. But the circumstances of the Las Vegas massacre, in which a dozen bump stocks were found in the shooter’s hotel room, and the longstanding consensus against automatic weapons, may create an opening for action.
The second and third-ranking Republicans in the Senate also have said they want to look into bump stocks, as have several other prominent GOP members in the House. Many Democrats have already announced their support for legislation to make bump stocks illegal.
"I have no problem in banning those," Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., told reporters.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., who has led bipartisan efforts to expand background checks, told NBC News he was inclined to support a ban, too. "Right now my first instinct is to say yes, but I want to look at it more carefully," he said.
Still, as of Thursday morning, no Republicans had signed onto a bill to ban bump stocks introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., according to her office.
And both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa., who has jurisdiction over gun legislation, suggested it's too early to consider any new rules. President Donald Trump has said the same.
"The investigation into the Las Vegas shooting is still ongoing, and we need to get more information before making a decision on a hearing and what it might cover," Grassley said in a statement.
Bump stocks and related devices accelerate the rate of fire of semi-automatic weapons to mimic that of automatic ones, which are all-but banned in the U.S. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has ruled the devices legal under current law, because they do not alter the internal mechanism of gun.
Companies that sell the devices have reported brisk business as gun owners rush to purchase remaining supplies in case their sale is soon prohibited.
Watch more from Hugh Hewitt's interview with Paul Ryan on Saturday, Oct., 7 at 8 a.m. ET on MSNBC.What to make of Kuznetsov, Markov, Giordano and Toffoli after big nights, and more.
Boy, did Evgeny Kuznetsov ever benefit from Nicklas Backstrom’s offseason surgery. It opened the window enough for Kuznetsov to get a crack with Alexander Ovechkin and he’s absolutely running with it, leaving Backstrom to fill the proverbial second line duties.
A five-point night for Kuznetsov pushes him into the team lead for points with 11. He also grabbed his first three goals of the season for the hat-trick including this beauty.
It’s worth mentioning that when I checked last night, Kuznetsov remained available in 43% of fantasy leagues. I’ll guess that inches closer to 75% by the time you are reading this. But if you are an early bird and you can somehow still jump on him, Kuznetsov is pretty obviously a great pick up.
Of course, after a game like this you have to accept that that game is in the past. Focusing on future production, this is probably the high point of value for Kuznetsov. Even if this is all part of a breakout, that breakout probably looks like 60-65 points, not the 75-80 that you want to think he can hit. There’s just only so much offense to go around.
The big reason I pump the brakes is because Kuznetsov is not skating on the top power play unit. So his opportunity for easy points alongside Ovechkin aren’t there as much as they could be.
The flip side to that is how impressive it is that Kuznetsov has managed 11 points in seven games, while scoring only two points on the power play. Even more impressive is that even with all the even-strength scoring, Kuznetsov’s on-ice save percentage at five-on-five is not exorbitantly high at 11.11%. Instead, this is just Ovechkin, Kuznetsov and TJ Oshie absolutely beating on opponents for both volume and high scoring chances.
It’s really easy to get caught up in the scoring for the Capitals right now. Their power play is clicking at 27.8%, good for a tie for third in the league and overall they are scoring 3.67 goals per game, again good for third. They’ve got Backstrom, Ovechkin, Kuznetsov, and John Carlson all scoring more than a point per game, while Oshie sits at seven in seven and Justin Williams has six in seven. Just good times right now. Let’s see how they respond to some adversity.
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On the other side, Connor McDavid has a four-game point streak going and at eight points through eight games, is as advertised. Unlike the Capitals, the Oilers are scoring at a bottom-10 rate so the offense is really just McDavid.
It should be mentioned that Taylor Hall is generating chances like crazy, up to 37 SOG in those eight games, about 4.5 shots per game. His on-ice shooting percentage is at 5.08%. He’s leaving some points on the board. You have to figure that it won’t be long now. Also, the Oilers’ top goal scorer, Jordan Eberle, hasn’t played yet. You have to figure he’ll help get some of the other guys going.
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Another team that is just charmed right now is Montreal, now 8-0-0 after drubbing the Sabres.
Andrei Markov had a five-point night, which pushes him squarely into a sell-high position, with nine points on the season now. Markov’s 12.68% on-ice shooting percentage is far too high, particularly for a defenseman. Markov’s a 50-point defenseman so you need a really healthy return but there are some underwhelming guys to go after yet.
Another reason to sell high on Markov: he has just 10 SOG through eight games. At this rate, he’ll barely hit 100, which makes it extremely unlikely he’ll reach double-digits for goals for the second straight season.
Tomas Plekanec’s hot start is so for real. Getting to skate with Max Pacioretty and Brendan Gallagher full time is working wonders for him. His five goals on 24 shots (a 20.8% shooting percentage) would be more concerning if that line wasn’t producing so many scoring chances in general. Yes, the goals will dry up for Plekanec but he’ll replace them with assists, like he did notching three last night. Will he hit 80 points? No, but 70 looks inherently possible. It all depends on Pacioretty’s health.
They didn’t do so last night but the Canadiens are outshooting opponents by four shots per game, a great sign that it’s not just going to be Carey Price going full on Atlas. Mike Condon, put together a nice performance stopping 34 of 36 for his second win.
Looking like Condon might be this year’s elite backup. Make sure you check Goaliepost daily for updates on goalie starts. If you see Condon slated to go he should make for a great spot start in leagues with daily lineups and certainly makes for someone to slot into your daily fantasy lineup on the cheap.
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Sam Reinhart doesn’t look like he is going anywhere. I speculated that Brian Gionta’s return might push Reinhart down to the minors but Reinhart keeps sticking around, grabbing minutes in the top six. He has points in two out of the last three games, in all of which he’s seen his usage rise to about 15 minutes per.
Cody Franson notched a pair of assists but he’s off my list of interesting players. Rasmus Ristolainen is still grabbing more minutes overall and on the power play so he’s the only defenseman on the Sabres that I want at this point.
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The bizarro Bruins continue to be all offense, no defense. The average Bruins game has seen eight goals scored. Just a tremendous total. Great news if you own David Krejci or Patrice Bergeron. Not so much if you own Tuukka Rask, who didn’t even start last night.
Instead, it was Jonas Gustavsson in goal and he moved to 2-0 on the season. Goalie controversy? I’m kidding. But let’s say we reach the end of November and the Bruins still stink, Rask is still struggling and Gustavsson has a 5-1 record with his typically mediocre peripherals. Might Claude Julien start feeling the hot seat and grasp at something that looks like a lifeline out of desperation? Just remember, we’re another month away from hitting that.
The save percentage for goalies participating in Bruins games this season: 0.862.
The league average save percentage this season: 0.917.
Ryan Spooner has five points in the last four games after a pair last night. He skated just 10:24 but over three of those minutes were on the top power play unit. He makes for a nice waiver pickup if those top unit minutes keep coming. That’s especially true if the Bruins keep experimenting with bigger nets…
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The Cardiac Flames finally make an appearance this season, mounting a third-period comeback to defeat the Red Wings 3-2 in overtime. It’s little surprise that Mark Giordano led the way, with two goals and an assist. The Flames were really struggling with his slow start.
Somehow, Giordano still skated fewer minutes than either Kris Russell or Dennis Wideman, and he even skated fewer power play minutes than Dougie Hamilton. Giordano is still the number one guy though. But I guess the buy low window closes for a bit after this one.
I’m not buying Hamilton stock, by the way. He’s struggling too much and the Flames have too much depth to stand idly by and watch him work through it. More importantly, defensemen don’t score enough to be patiently waiting anyhow. Let’s say you sit on a defenseman through the highs and the lows and he hits 40 points. That might make him a top-40 defenseman in terms of scoring but you also sat through 40-50 scoreless nights. If you’ve got a defenseman tracking for that level, you might be better off playing the weekly waiver wire. Shoot for guys skating four or five games in the calendar week, with favourable schedules and maybe even happen to be on a hot streak. Especially great for those situations is if said waiver defenseman is filling in for an injury.
Obviously the number of moves your league allots factors into the feasibility of this strategy but in the majority of leagues you can make a couple of moves per week. Turning that last defenseman spot, especially if it’s filled by someone underperforming like Hamilton, into a rotating spot can be a great way to maximize production.
If you were to engage in this strategy starting today some good names to grab might be Jeff Petry, Andrej Sekera or Jared Spurgeon. I used, this week’s Looking Ahead column to develop that piece an absolutely invaluable resource if you are planning on engaging in this sort of roster maximization waiver pickup strategy.
Of course, if you read that column you’ll note that Calgary has five games in seven days starting Sunday, which makes Hamilton a decent option for roster maximization next week, even as he slumps heavily.
It also means we almost certainly see Joni Ortio’s debut next week, even after Jonas Hiller submitted a good start last night.
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Tyler Toffoli is smoking hot with five goals in the last four games. Milan Lucic is clicking with him and Jeff Carter as well. Give Lucic four points in those four games. I’m not sure this line will stick but someone has to lug Lucic around and Anze Kopitar’s hands are full with Dustin Brown’s cadaver.
Toffoli led the Kings in power-play ice time last night and scored a power-play goal but it doesn’t figure to last. The Kopitar group is still the top unit. I just don’t get why the Kings don’t use Toffoli with Kopitar on one loaded unit. It just seems obtuse to not use your top goal scorer with the rest of your top players, with the most minutes possible, especially as the team toils near the bottom of the league in power-play efficiency.
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It looks like Jaden Schwartz will miss tonight’s contest against the Islanders. Ty Rattie has been recalled and figures to see action, especially with Robbi Fabbri not due back until Tuesday. Kevin Shattenkirk is also slated to return for the Blues on Tuesday but that won’t help them against a high-powered Islander team. Maybe sit Brian Elliott tonight.
Rattie, it should be mentioned, has seven points in three games in the AHL thus far this season. He really has nothing else to prove at that level.
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Dobber answers your fantasy hockey questions, his latest Sportsnet column.
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Check out the latest DobberProspects ramblings.
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Thanks for reading! You can follow me @SteveLaidlaw.Will Obama's Plan Bring The Ebola Outbreak Under Control?
Enlarge this image toggle caption Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
It is the biggest anti-Ebola effort yet.
After months of calls by aid workers for the global community to do something about the escalating crisis, President Obama has announced plans for a massive international intervention.
Global Health U.S. To Send 3,000 Troops To West Africa To Aid In Ebola Epidemic U.S. To Send 3,000 Troops To West Africa To Aid In Ebola Epidemic Listen · 0:48 0:48
Global Health American Doctor In Libera Calls U.S. Ebola Response Plan 'Outstanding' American Doctor In Libera Calls U.S. Ebola Response Plan 'Outstanding' Listen · 3:39 3:39
Global Health Ebola Outbreak Presents Special Challenges For U.S. Military Ebola Outbreak Presents Special Challenges For U.S. Military Listen · 2:30 2:30
His $175 million proposal is more expensive, far-reaching and ambitious than anything else that's been thrown at this outbreak. Aid groups and health workers battling Ebola welcome the plan — but raise some concerns.
Obama made the announcement at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta on Tuesday afternoon. Stating that the Ebola epidemic in West Africa has become a global-security threat, he said rapid action is needed to bring it under control. Obama will send thousands of American military personnel to the region to build hospitals, train health care workers and deliver relief supplies.
In a Sept. 16 press conference from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta President Obama describes the escalated U.S. response to Ebola outbreaks in Africa. Associated Press YouTube
"At the request of the Liberian government, we are going to establish a military command center in Liberia to support civilian efforts across the region," he said.
The Defense Department is also going to set up a logistics base in Senegal to ferry personnel and relief supplies to the countries hardest hit by the disease. American troops will construct 17 Ebola treatment centers in Liberia. They'll also set up a health-care facility to train thousands of locals to look after people infected with the deadly disease.
An administration official, speaking on background, says the tab for the Defense Department's Ebola response efforts could run as high as a billion dollars.
In addition, the U.S. Agency for International Development will help distribute hundreds of thousands of personal protective kits to homes in the region, with gloves, masks and disinfectant.
Doctors Without Borders has been warning for months that this Ebola outbreak is out of control. Brice de la Vigne, the operations director for the group in Brussels, says the U.S. plan is a step in the right direction. He just hopes it can be put in place quickly.
"Time is a key element," says de la Vigne. "Whatever the deployment, it needs to happen very, very quick."
The Obama administration says military personnel are already being sent. The goal is to have much of the program up and running within weeks.
The tasks that lie ahead are daunting, says Fitzhugh Mullan, a professor of public health policy at George Washington University who has studied health care in Africa. The public health systems in the parts of West Africa where this outbreak is raging were incredibly weak even before Ebola arrived, he notes, and trying to train 500 new health-care workers a week in even the best environment would be a challenge.
Mullan calls Obama's plan unconventional and experimental, but says there aren't many other options on the table.
"I think it's ambitious, but I don't think you have a choice," he says. "The alternative — to do this by the book — will undoubtedly let the epidemic get way out beyond you."
After all, this is an unprecedented outbreak. There simply aren't enough health-care workers on the ground to treat all the people who are sick right now — let alone the tens of thousands who could become infected in the coming months.GENEVA (Reuters) - A United Nations peace envoy said a militant attack in Syria on Saturday was a deliberate attempt to wreck peace talks in Geneva, while the warring sides traded blame and appeared no closer to actual negotiations.
A still image taken from a video uploaded to a social media website, on February 25, 2017, purports to show air strikes in the rebel-held al-Waer area of Homs, Syria. Social Media/ via REUTERS TV ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY. EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVE.
Suicide bombers stormed two Syrian security offices in Homs, killing dozens with gunfire and explosions including the head of military security, prompting airstrikes against the last rebel-held enclave in the western city.
“Spoilers were always expected, and should continue to be expected, to try to influence the proceedings of the talks. It is in the interest of all parties who are against terrorism and are committed to a political process in Syria not to allow these attempts to succeed,” U.N. mediator Staffan de Mistura said in a statement.
De Mistura has met the two sides separately in Geneva while he tries to get agreement on how talks to end the six-year-old conflict should be arranged.
He has warned not to expect any quick breakthrough and to beware of letting the violence derail any fragile progress, as happened repeatedly in the past. A ceasefire brokered by Russia and Turkey with Iran’s support is increasingly being violated by both sides.
The jihadist rebel alliance Tahrir al-Sham, which opposes the talks — although it has fought alongside factions that are represented there — said that five suicide bombers had carried out Saturday’s attack. It celebrated with the words “thanks be to God” but stopped short of explicitly claiming responsibility.
Tahrir al-Sham was formed this year from several groups including Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, which was formerly known as the Nusra Front and was al Qaeda’s Syrian branch until it broke formal allegiance to the global jihadist movement in 2016.
After a 2-1/2 hour-long meeting with de Mistura, the Syrian government’s lead negotiator Bashar al-Ja’afari spoke to reporters and repeatedly demanded the opposition condemn the attacks or face the consequences.
“If anyone refuses to condemn this terrorist attack then he is an accomplice of terrorism and we will deal with them accordingly,” Ja’afari said.
He ruled out leaving the talks, saying he would meet de Mistura again on Tuesday, but he implied that some of the opponents that he had sat face-to-face with at Thursday’s opening ceremony were “sponsors of terrorism”.
Warplanes also carried out six raids on Douma in the eastern suburbs of Damascus, resulting in six deaths, and earlier, an air raid in Hama killed four people from the same family, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
BLOCKING TALKS
Speaking to Reuters earlier on Saturday, Basma Kodmani, a negotiator from the opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC), said groups backing the talks had abided by the ceasefire. But she questioned the government’s commitment and whether Russia, a key Assad ally, was ready to pressure it to curb the violence.
After Ja’afari’s comments, the opposition condemned the attack but accused the government of trying to use the events to derail the negotiations.
“We condemn all terrorist acts done by all terrorist groups. If the Homs operation was done by any of those, it is clear what I say,” lead negotiator Nasr al-Hariri told reporters.
“They just want to remain in power. The regime is trying to block the negotiations,” he added, saying they would not walk away from the talks.
Colonel Fateh Hassoun, a member of the opposition negotiating team, pointed the finger squarely at the government forces for the Homs attack.
“What happened today is an operation the regime has implemented to retaliate through another action against civilians besieged for the past 3-1/2 years, and this is to send a message to the people, societies and the world that he is fighting terrorism,” he said.
Although Assad’s government has controlled most of Homs since 2014, rebels still control its al-Waer district, which warplanes bombed on Saturday, wounding 50, the Observatory said.
De Mistura handed a working paper on procedural issues to delegations at the talks on Friday but there appears little prospect of things moving to the key political issues that he had hoped to be able to begin addressing.
Slideshow (2 Images)
The envoy is looking to lay the foundations for negotiations to end the conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions.
“In reality, nothing is happening,” said a senior Western diplomat. “The paper handed out yesterday by de Mistura is procedural. It is not the future of Syria.”Illustration by Jess Fink
When Richard Dawkins was named the world’s “Top Thinker” in a poll recently published by Prospect magazine, it was hard to avoid the suspicion that the world—or at least that part of it that votes in such polls—must have an impoverished sense of what constitutes a vital or transformative intellectual figure. Any list of “thinkers” that doesn’t feature one woman in its top 10 (Arundhati Roy opened the scoring for the gals at No. 15) probably shouldn’t be taken completely seriously anyway, but the fact that it was the result of public voting does offer an insight into the kinds of ideas contemporary Anglo-American culture values most highly.
Mark O'Connell Mark O’Connell is a Slate books columnist and a staff writer for the Millions. His book To Be a Machine is now available from Doubleday.
The author of The God Delusion is not a particularly momentous or provocative figure in the sense that he’s got much that is new or challenging to say about the world we live in. (Shorter Dawkins: Religion’s for mugs; science rules.) But his popularity and prominence, along with that of the other New Atheism figureheads, illustrate the extent to which science, and the inflexible ideal of reason, has usurped the place of philosophy and the humanities in popular intellectual culture.
One person who may well have been rolling his eyes pretty hard at the news of Dawkins’ apotheosis as Capo di Tutti Public Intellectuals is Curtis White, whose new book The Science Delusion is a series of targeted takedowns of key figures in this cultural hegemony of science. White is a nonbeliever, but like a lot of nonbelievers—me included—he’s frustrated with the so-called New Atheism’s refusal to engage with anything but the narrowest and most reductive understanding of religious experience, and its insistence on the scientific method as the only legitimate approach to truth. He starts out here by taking some well-aimed swipes at the Dawkins-Hitchens-Dennett Axis of Reason, but the book’s interest isn’t so much in the New Atheism per se as in the broader ideology of which it is the militant wing: scientism. Science often looks like the only show in town when it comes to considering things like the nature of consciousness and the meaning of human existence, and White is convinced that the demotion of the humanities—of poetic, philosophical, and spiritual approaches to truth—is a demotion of humanity itself. He’s aggravated, in particular, by the mechanistic model of personhood advanced by neuroscience, whereby consciousness is seen as something that can be “mapped,” explained in terms of “wiring” and “connections,” as though the mind were actually (as opposed to just metaphorically) a kind of computer. And so he’s arguing for a return to the spirit of Romanticism, to an intellectual culture that looks to poets and philosophers and artists, rather than scientists, for insight into what used to be called “the human condition.”
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As anyone who has read his previous book The Middle Mind will know, White is a mad-as-hell merchant. His anger can be rhetorically persuasive, particularly when he’s taking on sci-tech evangelists for ignoring the extent to which post-Enlightenment rationality has been responsible for at least as much human suffering as religion. “In spite of its obsession with Jews,” he writes, “the horror of Nazism was not a religious nightmare; it was a nightmare of administrative efficiency.” But his indignation has a tendency to curdle into sour, ineffectual derision. It isn’t that his targets aren’t richly deserving of his wrath; it’s that it’s so often channeled into puzzlingly irrelevant ad hominem attacks and hastily constructed straw men.
White has it in for the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, who insisted that “there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made from atoms acting according to the laws of physics.” But instead of seriously pursuing the troubling implications of this anti-humanist notion, he plunges us down the off-ramp and starts zipping along the low road at a ferocious clip: “I hope you will agree that this is a very disappointing conclusion for someone who was almost as famous for playing the bongos and going to strip clubs as he was for physics.” The next time Feynman appears, he’s introduced as “bongo man Feynman.” Maybe I’m missing something here, but it’s not apparent to me how a person’s enthusiasm for bongos and strip clubs has any bearing on whether his scientific ideas are worth taking seriously. This is about as clear a case as I’ve ever encountered of playing the man rather than the ball. And it’s frustrating not because you feel Feynman is being unfairly traduced but because this stuff is just not worth talking about in this context; it’s a pointless diversion, and it erodes your faith in White as a navigator of the territory.
A more serious problem is a tendency to oversimplify and caricature the views he’s engaging with. White has a very strong case against Jonah Lehrer (whose ideas, he points out, remain standing even though his journalistic reputation has been toppled). The version of creativity that Lehrer sells in his book Imagine is, for White, a trite and desiccated thing, the business of mere dutiful neurons; worse, it collapses any distinction between Beethoven and some guy who invented a new type of mop. Creativity, in the view of Lehrer and other biz-phil savants, is a means toward an end; it’s useful because it contributes to a “creative economy.” But White chooses to demonstrate the extent to which this kind of thinking has infected the culture as a whole by presenting us with an imagined dialogue “between an arts council board member and a ‘difficult’ person like me”:
“Oh! Art! We must save it!” she says.
“Really? Why?” I ask.
“Well! Because it’s so beautiful, of course!”
“Can you please stop talking with exclamation marks? You’re as bad as a Tea-bagger going on about the federal deficit.”
“Sorry! If not because it’s beautiful, then because our children ought to learn to be creative.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s nice, don’t you think? Are you trying to confuse me?”
If you have a bullshit detector, these “reasons” should set it off, even if you also think, “Oh, let her say what she likes, the moron, since it’s in my interest....”
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The readings are pretty high on the old bullshit detector here all right, but not for the reasons White wants to suggest. There are surely more effective ways to discredit a real set of assumptions than having an imagined moron coolly interrogated by an imagined Curtis White. But he does this kind of thing again and again; the book is so filled with reductive imaginings of ideas that are already sufficiently weak in their actual form that the whole enterprise seems in danger of becoming a Million Straw Man March on the citadel of scientism.
Courtesy of Melville House
There’s certainly a very real need to march on that citadel, because the idea that there can be only one kind of truth has to be deeply damaging to the intellectual development of a culture. You don’t have to devalue empiricism to believe that there are kinds of understanding that can’t be accessed in a controlled, peer-reviewed experiment. The problem, obviously, isn’t science; it’s the arrogance with which many scientists, and popularizers of science, dismiss the value of other ways of thinking about questions of meaning, about the world and our place in it. Lehrer, say, wants us to believe that, because neurologists can demonstrate how Observable Phenomenon X was happening in Part Y of Bob Dylan’s brain when he wrote “Like a Rolling Stone,” science can therefore “explain” the human capacity for creativity or imagination. This is like saying that the song itself is best appreciated by putting it on your stereo and then mapping the sound waves it creates. It doesn’t really tell us anything useful, or usefully true. But this is the kind of truth in which scientism, and the culture that accommodates it, puts most stock.
I’ve spent a good portion of my adult life in the academic study of English literature and, for me, there is no more painful—and painfully obvious—proof of the intellectual hegemony of science than how the disciplines of the humanities have been forced to adopt a language of empiricism in order to talk about their own value. If you want to do a Ph.D. on, say, the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, you will need to be able to talk about what you’re doing as though it were a kind of science. What you’re doing is “research,” and that research has to be pursued through the use of some or other “methodology.” In order to get funding for that research, you’ll need to establish how it will advance the existing body of knowledge on Bishop’s poetry, and how it will “impact” upon the wider public sphere. The study of the humanities, in other words, very often has to present itself as a kind of minor subsidiary of science.
This is just one, fairly specific, form of the devaluation of the humanities in an efficiency economy. Scientism is essentially the belief, the faith, that all problems and questions are potentially soluble by empirical investigation (and that if they’re not, they’re somehow not real questions, not real problems). But there are large areas of human experience for which science has no convincing or compelling means of accounting. I am, I suppose, more or less an atheist, but when I read the Book of Genesis, I find that there is something profoundly true about the picture of human nature in those verses—a picture of our perversity and self-alienation that neuroscience, for instance, has no way of getting at or talking about. Schopenhauer, Freud, and Heidegger all give us comparable forms of truth—truths that aren’t verifiable or measurable in the same way as those of science, but that are no less valuable. The most important truths are often untranslatable into the language of fact.
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By Priyanka Tikoo
Xiamen, Sep 4 (PTI) In a significant diplomatic win for India, BRICS countries today named for the first time Pakistan-based terror groups like the LeT and the JeM for causing violence in the region and said those supporting terror acts must be held accountable.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was joined by Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Brazilian President Michael Temer and South African President Jacob Zuma in strongly denouncing terror activities of such groups, as they expressed determination to collectively fight the scourge.
The 43-page Xiamen Declaration, adopted at the end of the five-nation BRICS plenary, stressed on the need for immediate cessation of violence in Afghanistan.
It expressed "concern" over the security situation in the region and the violence caused by the Taliban, ISIS, al-Qaeda and its affiliates including Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Significantly, the ETIM is active in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China and seeks to establish a separate "East Turkistan".
At the ninth Summit of the grouping, the BRICS leaders also condemned terrorism in all its forms and manifestations wherever committed and by whomsoever. They stressed that there can be no justification whatsoever for any act of terrorism.
"We reaffirm that those responsible for committing, organising, or supporting terrorist acts must be held accountable," the statement said.
Highlighting the primary leading role and responsibility of states in preventing and countering terrorism, the grouping emphasised on the necessity to develop international cooperation, in accordance with the principles of international law, including that of sovereign equality of states and non-interference in their internal affairs.
According to officials, Modi raised the issue of terrorism strongly at the BRICS Summit and was joined by other leaders, who expressed willingness to fight this menace.
"For the first time specific listing of terror organisations has been made (in the BRICS declaration)," Secretary (East) in the external affairs ministry Preeti Saran told reporters.
The inclusion of Pakistan-based terror groups in the declaration is also significant as it indicated a slight shift in the Chinese view towards terror groups operating out of Pakistan.
Ahead of the BRICS Summit, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson had said, "We noticed that India, when it comes to Pakistans counter-terrorism, has some concerns. I dont think this is an appropriate topic to be discussed at the BRICS Summit."
During the last BRICS Summit in Goa, China did not allow the inclusion of Pakistan-based terror groups in the declaration despite the fact that the Summit was taking place within weeks of the Uri terror strike carried out by a Pakistan-based militant group.
However, now it is to be seen that after being part of such a strongly-worded declaration on terrorism and indicting Pakistan-based terror group JeM, how China will act towards the designation of Jaishs chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist by the UN.
After the declaration was issued, the Chinese foreign ministry today parried questions on any change in its stand of blocking Azhars banning by the UN.
Currently, China has put a hold on the proposal to ban Azhar moved by the US and some other countries at the UNs Sanctions Committee.
The declaration referred to terrorism at least 17 times, apart from mentioning other forms of extremism and radicalisation. During the BRICS Summit here, India also offered to host a conference on countering radicalisation.
Talking about Indias position on terrorism, Saran told reporters, "Terrorism is a scourge that has to be addressed collectively by the entire international community. And, I think, increasingly there is a realisation that you cannot have double standards in tackling this scourge."
"You cannot have good and bad terrorists. It is a collective action," she said.
Saran said that prime minister Modi also raised the issue of speeding up the long-pending UN Security Council reforms during the Summit.
The BRICS countries also called upon all nations to adopt a comprehensive approach in combating terrorism.
They said that the approach should include "countering radicalisation, recruitment, movement of terrorists including Foreign Terrorist Fighters, blocking sources of financing terrorism including, for instance, through organised crime by means of money-laundering, supply of weapons, drug trafficking and other criminal activities, dismantling terrorist bases, |
and sail arrive at Alpha Centauri. Then the chip beams data back to Earth at the speed of light, giving scientists insight into another solar system just a quarter of a century after the mission was launched.
Instead of sending just one tiny spacecraft, the idea is to send hundreds or thousands — so many could be lost along the way, without the mission's being useless.
The Breakthrough Starshot project would support the research and development of a "proof of concept." It would be entirely in the public domain, Milner says, and cost about $100 million.
A full-fledged mission to Alpha Centauri, if it ever happened, would "require a budget comparable to the largest current scientific experiments," the team says. (For context, the budget for CERN, the international group that runs the Large Hadron Collider, is about $1.1 to $1.3 billion a year.)
Enlarge this image toggle caption Breakthrough Initiatives Breakthrough Initiatives
At the announcement of the project, Milner began by laying out the technological challenges of a trip to another star system.
"How do we go faster? How do we go further? How do we make this next leap?" he asked, before laying out the team's proposal for interstellar travel on a human time scale.
He described it as the "Silicon Valley approach to spaceflight." He invited experts and members of the public to look at the long list of challenges — from space dust to properly aiming the laser — still to overcome.
Then Hawking took the stage and, in his iconic synthesized voice, got philosophical.
"What makes human beings unique? There are many theories. Some say it's language or tools; others say it's logic or reasoning. They obviously haven't met many humans," he joked.
"I believe what makes us unique is transcending our limits. Gravity pins us to the ground, but I just flew to America. I lost my voice, but I can still speak, thanks to my voice synthesizer. How do we transcend these limits? With our minds — and our machines.
"The limit that confronts us now is the great void between us and the stars. But now we can transcend it. With light beams, light sails and the lightest spacecraft ever built, we can launch a mission to Alpha Centauri within a generation."Guy Ryder is an old hand at Davos. The director general of the International Labour Organisation has seen it all: the years when the global business elite is brimful of confidence and the years, such as 2017, when the top 1% of the top 1% is fretful.
Ryder detected parallels with 2009, when the global economy seemed to be heading for a second Great Depression. Eight years ago, the attendees were shaken by the banking collapse but showed little contrition. This year, they were alarmed by the populist anger that was evident in Brexit and Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House but couldn’t really understand why it was happening.
“The global elite has been saying all week that the public doesn’t really understand all the good things they are doing for it,” Ryder says. He is quite right about that. The 2017 Davos was a classic example of how people can be, at one and the same time, very bright and utterly obtuse.
There were two distinct camps. In the first group were the really dumb ones: those who think that what happened in 2016 was an aberration and that globalisation will be back on track as soon as voters in advanced countries come to their senses.
In the second camp were those – the policymakers rather than the chief executives of the big multinational corporations – who understand that the only way to save global capitalism is to reform it in a fundamental way, just as it was after the economic horrors of the 1930s.
This second group has sniffed the way the wind is blowing. Studies have shown that technological change rather than trade has been responsible for the vast majority of the jobs lost in manufacturing in the developed world. Put simply, machines have replaced humans. Robots have taken over factories.
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) mean a second wave of change is approaching – and this time the jobs at risk from the machines are going to be jobs in the service sector.
As Dhaval Joshi, economist at BCA Research, has noted, it is not going to be the low-paid jobs in the service sector such as cleaning, gardening, carers, bar staff or cooks, whose jobs are most at risk. That’s because machines find it hard to replicate the movements of humans in everyday tasks.
“The hard problems that are easy for AI are those that require the application of complex algorithms and pattern recognition to large quantities of data – such as beating a grandmaster at chess”, says Joshi. “Or a job such as calculating a credit score or insurance premium, translating a report from English to Mandarin Chinese, or managing a stock portfolio.”
Seen in this light, the looming threat is obvious. The first army of machines wiped out well-paid jobs in manufacturing; the second army is about to wipe out well-paid jobs in the service sector. In many cases, the people who will be surplus to requirements will have spent many years in school and university building up their skills.
Humans are still more innovative and entrepreneurial than machines, which means there will be rich rewards for the creative. They will be few in number, however, so the dynamic of recent years – exceptionally high rewards for those at the top, a hollowing out of the middle class, and the expansion of low-paid insecure jobs at the bottom – will not just continue but become more pronounced.
This fourth industrial revolution, just like all the others, will lead to a growth spurt. But the last big epoch of technological change was accompanied by political change that ensured those making the cars, the washing machines and the TV sets could also buy them. Full employment policies, capital controls, progressive income tax and strong trade unions ensured this was the case.
In Davos last week, one of Trump’s advisers, Anthony Scaramucci, made the point that Henry Ford was a ruthless, rich capitalist but he understood that there was no point in churning out cars that his workforce could not afford to buy.
There was, however, not much evidence that the bankers, the oil company executives and the Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs were listening. They know they are supposed to wring their hands about inequality and to say that something must be done to stem the tide of populism but they are not prepared to countenance anything that might help, such as higher minimum wages, more collective bargaining, higher taxes to pay for an expansion of education and training, and greater redistribution.
It was not all bad news. Prof Guy Standing said that after years of being ignored he had found that concerns about the impact of automation meant plenty of interest in the idea of a basic income to be paid to all citizens and paid for by rentier capitalists. “The returns to property, intellectual property and natural resources are going to a tiny majority and we must do something about that.”
The World Economic Forum, the body that runs Davos, is also trying to get its members to rethink the idea that all will be well, provided nothing is done to meddle with market forces. In its Inclusive Growth and Development Report, the WEF noted it was not much of a success to have an expanding economy if all the fruits of growth were going to the few and not the many.
“The ultimate objective of national economic performance is broad-based and sustained progress in living standards, a concept that encompasses wage and non-wage income (eg pension benefits) as well as economic security and quality of life”.
Noting that median incomes in 26 advanced countries fell by 2.4% between 2008 and 2013, the report added: “Many countries have had difficulty in satisfying expectations in this regard.”
The WEF’s argument is that the ecosystem that once ensured growth was translated into higher living standards has deteriorated as a result of technological change, global integration, domestic deregulation and increased immigration. It has a comprehensive list of remedies, including fair and efficient taxes to ensure adequate investment in education and physical infrastructure, action to tackle corruption and the concentration of rents, an adherence to core labour standard and worker protections.
Instead of ranking countries by GDP, the WEF has created an inclusive development index. Surprise, surprise; those countries that do well tend to have higher taxes, generous welfare systems and a stronger role for organised labour. Norway, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands fill the top seven places. Britain comes 21st, the US 23rd.
Judging by last week’s Davos, things will have to get worse before the WEF’s warning is heeded. But as the masters of the universe clambered into their helicopters last Friday watching Trump’s inauguration in Washington on their smartphones, they ought to have been smart enough to figure out that they just did.Austin Energy is systematically installing flat-glass fixtures in all of Austin’s 70,000 streetlights to direct light down rather than up and out into the sky. The fixtures will make our city’s streetlight system “Dark Sky” compliant, preserving Austin’s night sky while improving lighting and system efficiency. To date, the flat-glass fixtures have been installed on about 14,000 lights.
We also began a project in 2011 to install communications devices on all Austin streetlights. The communications device signals whether each light is turning off and on properly. It also signals streetlights that are out — or that stay on during the day. A huge benefit of the system is that crews are alerted to streetlight outages before customers call in and can make all needed repairs in an area, reducing the number of individual trips. The system will also allow Austin Energy to consistently fine tune throughout the year the time of day that streetlights turn on and off to more precisely match up with changing daylight hours. About 28,000 streetlights are outfitted with the devices thus far.
The goal is to complete all of these upgrades by 2015.
Read more about Dark Sky Compliance at http://www.darksky.org/
Images of work in progress:A winter storm arriving before dawn Wednesday is expected to bring several inches of snow to the Sierra. Because of the forecast, Highway 120 in Yosemite will be closed from 6 p.m. Tuesday.
The Lake Tahoe area is also expecting colder temperatures, rain and some snow, but the brunt of the wintry weather will be south of Highway 50. Snow is not expected to accumulate below about 7,000 feet in the Tahoe area.
A winter weather advisory issued by the National Weather Service forecasts two to five inches of snow above 6,000 feet Wednesday from Yosemite south to the Lake Isabella area. Motorists are warned of possible “treacherous conditions,” especially on passes from Ebbetts (Highway 4) southward.
Temperatures in Yosemite Valley are expected to dip near 20 Tuesday and Wednesday nights; Wednesday’s daytime high will be around 35. Snow is expected to decrease Thursday morning.
The Yosemite closure — Highway 120 east of Crane Flat — will remain in effect “until further notice,” the park information system says.
From 1970-2009, the average date on which the road was closed for the remainder of the winter was in mid-November, but this decade it has been trending later, according to figures compiled by the environmental group Mono Lake Committee.
Because of the government shutdown, Yosemite National Park itself remains closed. Through traffic will still be allowed on roads other than Highway 120, but stopping is not allowed.
The park’s website is inactive because of the shutdown; recorded road and weather information is offered at (209) 372-0200.
The National Weather Service website Weather.gov remains in operation.Lands Cabinet Secretary Charity Ngilu names directors of housing firm that 'grabbed' school land
Lands Cabinet Secretary Charity Ngilu (left) addresses a press conference at Ardhi House in Nairobi Thursday regarding the Lang’ata Road Primary School land ownership dispute. With her is NationalLand Commission commissioner Dr Rose Musyoka. The CS said together with NLC, they will repossess all public land grabbed by private developers. [PHOTO: ANDREW KILONZI/STANDARD]
Lands Cabinet Secretary Charity Ngilu has revealed the four directors of the housing company alleged to have grabbed the Lang'ata Primary School playground, even as the National Land Commission (NLC) threatened to recommend legal action against them.After days of probe trying to unmask the faces behind the Airport View Housing Limited, Ngilu Thursday produced documents from the Registrar of Companies giving details of the four, who are the registered directors, at least as at October 31, 2013. The CS named Mandip Singh Amrit, who has 1000 shares, Harbans Singh Amrit (3,000), Kamal Prakash Amrit, (1,000) and Manjit Singh Amrit, who as at the date did not have any share, as the directors of the housing firm. According to the response that Ngilu received from the Registrar of Companies, the four were registered as using the same postal address of 45403 – 00100, with their registered offices based at Jasmine Centre on Waiyaki Way in Nairobi. The CS said contrary to accusations levelled against her office that they were protecting the land grabbers, she only wanted to ensure she got the right information on the ownership of the housing company.
SEE ALSO :MCAs threaten to impeach Ngilu in unending wrangles
"I did not want to just name people carelessly. That is why I had to write to the Registrar to get the list of the directors," said Ngilu during a press briefing Thursday at her Ardhi House offices. Ngilu said together with the NLC, they were going to repossess all public land grabbed by private developers, urging institutions whose property has been encroached to immediately report to the Lands office. "The greatest loser is the person in possession of a title deed that was illegally acquired. We are not going to talk to those who have grabbed land but we will only swing into action," she said. NLC Vice Chair Abigael Mukolwe urged those who have grabbed public institutions' land to start bringing buildings down, saying the commission will swiftly move into action once such reports are filed with them. On the Langata land, Ms Mulokwe said the commission had revoked the title deed of the housing company after finding it to be illegal. She further said they could recommend criminal prosecution or further investigation of the directors of the housing firm. "We are given powers to revoke or regularise titles that we find were illegally acquired, but we can also recommend to CID to further investigate such a case like this or even ask the Director of Public Prosecutions to institute criminal proceedings against such characters," she said.
SEE ALSO :Wiper MCAs defend Kalonzo, ask 3 governors to account for funds
Ngilu further expressed outrage over the manner in which activists abused the rights of the pupils by urging them to take part in protests. "I am a mother and was deeply disturbed by the sight of children being tear-gassed. But questions must also be asked about the conduct of the activists who chose to use children. In their impatience and carelessness, they chose to violate the constitutional rights of the children and expose them to risk," said Ngilu.Fond du Lac auto parts manufacturer Wells Manufacturing has been sold to a Japanese firm for $257.5 million.
Wells Manufacturing in Fond du Lac has been sold to a Japanese firm for $257.5 million. Founded in 1902 in Fond du Lac, the company will remain in the city. (Photo: Submitted)
Wells Manufacturing, a Fond du Lac company in existence since 1902, was sold today for $257.5 million to the Japanese firm NGK NCT Spark Plug Co. Ltd.
The multi-million-dollar sale has an expected closing date of July 1.
The sale was part of the acquisition of UCI Acquisition Holdings Corp., the parent company of UCI International, owner of Wells Manufacturing, L.P. David Peace is the chief executive officer and president of Wells Mfg.
John Zochert, director of marketing and product development, said the company would remain in Fond du Lac, but could not provide more information at this time. He said the company has more than 600 employees throughout several locations. Of those, 250 are at Wells Vehicle Electronics, 385 W. Rolling Meadows Drive.
Inquiries were directed to Keith Zar, spokesman at UCI-FRAM Group.
"As we are the seller, we are excited for the Wells' folks, and we think this is a great opportunity for them," Zar said.
Wells is a U.S. supplier of more than 38,000 parts, including distributor caps and rotors, ignition coils, control modules, sensors, wire and cable sets, emissions components, switches, fuel system components and voltage regulators.
With headquarters in Nagoya, Japan, NGK Spark Plug Co., Ltd., is a ceramics processing manufacturer with 13,000 employees and holds shares globally of spark plugs and automotive sensors for internal combustion engines. They also offer a lineup of packages, cutting tools, bio ceramics and industrial ceramics, according to a press release from the company.
NGK issued the following statement: "Wells is an ideal candidate for our expansion efforts and is a well-known automotive parts manufacturer with more than 100 years of history in the United States. Wells has exposure to the growing segment of vehicle electronics with broad product lines, whose main products include switches, ignition coils and pressure sensors. Wells has built a leading position in the U.S. automotive repair market and is working to increase its sales outside of the U.S. We believe that the combination of the two will create significant synergies, including offering Wells products, in addition to our products, to the global repair market through our strong international sales network that we have built over many years."
According to the company's website, Wells Mfg. was founded "at the dawn of the automotive industry" by Robert Wells, and was a pioneer in the development and assembly of electrical parts for vehicle manufacturers and many of their largest component suppliers. The U.S. Army selected Wells as supplier of the revolutionary Norden bombsight, which played a crucial role in Allied success during World War II.
Following the war, Wells expanded its original equipment engineering and manufacturing operations and, in 1956, introduced the Wells brand to the automotive replacement parts market. Over the next half-century, Wells products became a leading choice of professional technicians and do-it-yourselfers in the automotive, motorcycle, marine, power-sport, commercial vehicle, and lawn and garden markets.
Wells Mfg. sales at fiscal year end, December 2014 were $222 million, with an operating profit of $25 million, the press release stated.
UCI International is a North American company servicing the vehicle replacement parts market.
Read or Share this story: http://fondul.ac/1H6QR0cAstronomers are crowing about the discovery of what they say just might be "the largest individual structure ever identified by humanity."
It's not a galaxy or a cluster of galaxies--nor even a galaxy supercluster. It's not even a structure in the usual sense. Rather, it's a vast cosmic bubble of sorts--a roughly spherical "supervoid" some 1.8 billion light-years across.
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The Cold Spot is in the constellation Eridanus. Graphics by Gergő Kránicz. Image credit: ESA Planck Collaboration.
What makes the bubble different from the surrounding regions of the universe? There's no barrier--it's just that the density of galaxies is significantly lower inside the supervoid than outside.
"Supervoids are not entirely empty, they're under-dense," Dr. Andras Kovacs, of Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, and one of the researchers behind for the discovery, told Popular Science. In fact, the Guardian reported, some 100,000 galaxies are "missing" from the supervoid.
A cosmic riddle. The discovery helps explain a mystery that dates back to 2004, when astronomers examining a map of the radiation left over after the Big Bang--the so-called cosmic microwave background (CMB)--noticed a big and unusually cold region of sky in the southern hemisphere constellation Eridanus.
It wasn't particularly surprising to discover a cold spot in the sky, according to a written statement released by the University of Hawaii. But this one--which astronomers dubbed, well, the Cold Spot--was far bigger and far colder than others.
Astronomers didn't know what to make of it.
"The Cold Spot raised a lot of eyebrows," Prof. Carlos Frenk, a cosmologist at the University of Durham in England who was not involved in the research, told The Guardian. "The real question was what was causing it and whether it was a challenge to orthodoxy.”
If the Cold Spot originated with the Big Bang, it might be a sign of some exotic physics that modern cosmological theory simply doesn't explain, according to the University of Hawaii statement. On the other hand, the Cold Spot might simply be evidence of a relatively empty region of space between us and the CMB.
It all lines up. The discovery of the supervoid suggests that the latter explanation is the likely one. As Dr. Istvan Szapudi, an astrophysicist at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy in Manoa and another of the scientists involved in the research, told The Huffington Post in an email. "While we did not establish a causal relationship [between the Cold Spot and the supervoid], the fact that two very rare objects are aligned makes it very likely that they have something to do with each other."U2 frontman Bono's tax avoidance 'depriving poor' BelfastTelegraph.co.uk U2 front man Bono came under fire today from campaigners who claim he his not putting his money where his mouth is. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/music/news/u2-frontman-bonos-tax-avoidance-depriving-poor-28509721.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/migration_catalog/article25636690.ece/867ec/AUTOCROP/h342/bono
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U2 front man Bono came under fire today from campaigners who claim he his not putting his money where his mouth is.
The human rights activist was accused of robbing the world's poorest people by storing some of his wealth in a tax haven.
Bono impersonator Paul O'Toole joined protesters outside the Irish Department of Finance on the eve of the launch of the band's new album No Line On The Horizon in the Irish Republic.
Campaign group the Debt and Development Coalition Ireland (DDCI) claimed the supergroup was depriving the Irish exchequer of much-needed revenue which could be spent on overseas aid.
It claimed that despite Bono's fight to help the world's poor, he had joined a list of individuals and corporations who have denied impoverished governments millions through tax avoidance or evasion.
DDCI's Nessa Ni Chasaide called on Bono to give his view on the impact of tax injustice on the impoverished world.
"We wanted to raise our concern that while Bono has championed the cause of fighting poverty and injustice in the impoverished world, the fact is that his band has moved part of its business to a tax shelter in the Netherlands," she said.
"Tax avoidance and tax evasion costs the impoverished world at least 160 million US dollars every year. This is money urgently required to bring people out of poverty.
"U2 is just one part of the problem. This is a much wider and systemic problem in our global financial system. Every company and individual has the responsibility to pay the right amount of tax."
The rock band moved the company U2 Ltd, set up to deal with royalty payments, to a finance house in Holland in 2006 after the Irish Government scrapped an artist income tax exemption scheme. The new limit was capped at 250,000 euro (£223,000).
Accounts for 2007 show U2 Ltd paid out more than 21 million euro (£19m) in wages.
Mr O'Toole also launched a mock version of one of U2's greatest hits, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, taunting the band for the move overseas.
Oxfam and Concern Worldwide are among 70 organisations involved in the coalition, which met Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan before protesters gathered.
"We have tax treaties with other countries that regulate where you pay tax," said Mr Lenihan.
"There is a problem with smaller countries that have to set up deliberate tax havens. We are raising that at EU level."
Andy Storey from justice group Afri said tax was a fundamental question of global justice.
"Lost taxes in impoverished countries far outweigh what they receive from rich countries in aid," he added.
"There are trillions of dollars stashed in tax havens. If that money was taxed in the countries where it was earned, governments would have their own resources to improve the lives of their people."
Belfast TelegraphA Missouri Republican has asked a federal court to exempt his family from contraception coverage through the state insurance plan, explaining that he doesn't want his three daughters to have access to no-cost birth control because it violates his Catholic faith.
Rep. Paul Wieland, R-Imperial, jointly filed the lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and two other federal agencies with his wife, Teresa. (See that? Women can hate women's rights, too. Equality!)
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“I see abortion-inducing drugs as intrinsically evil, and I cannot in good conscience preach one thing to my kids and then just go with the flow on our insurance,” Wieland remarked. “This is a moral conundrum for me. Do I just cancel the coverage and put my family at risk? I don’t believe in what the government is doing.”
According to a report from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Wieland had been able to opt out of contraceptive coverage in previous years but was recently notified that it had become a requirement in the state plan, which he qualifies for as a member of the Legislature.
“In July I got a letter saying that opting out was no longer an option for me, and it really kind of upset me because I’m a devout Catholic,” Wieland told the Missouri Times.
While refusing to comment on the specifics of the case, Wieland's attorney Timothy Belz acknowledged that the couple may be the only plaintiffs in the country currently seeking to be exempted as individuals. Belz told the Post-Dispatch that the legal precedent in cases filed by employers is mixed, but if Wieland prevails "it will be of great value to other families."
h/t JezebelAbout
CTHULHU: THE GREAT OLD ONE is a Lovecraft-themed quick-paced card game by Dann Kriss Games, a loving tribute to the works and legacy of H.P. Lovecraft, with hand-painted artwork by Ian Daniels.
Each deck contains 80 masterfully-crafted cards printed on high-quality gaming cardstock (black-core), to reverently evoke the themes of the Mythos into this soon-to-be-classic card game. With fun elements like Horror cards you can play on each other while matching up characters and elements from the works of Lovecraft, there are lots of fun games in store for you and your friends, family, and fellow cultists.
We at Dann Kriss Games hope you will treasure your decks for years to come, which is why we have painstakingly endeavoured to craft each deck with the highest available quality and durability, approaching each card layout with lovingly meticulous attention to detail, helping to bring each card to life with some of the most amazing Lovecraftian images we have ever seen.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…
"What I like about this game is the simplicity." - Eric Bryan Seuthe II (Full Review on Sleuth of a Seuthe)
"The real draw for the set is the exceptional artwork from Ian Daniels" - Andy Green (Full Review on FamousMonsters.com)
Each deck is printed on 300gsm black-core smooth stock, and contains 80 Tarot-sized cards (70 Story cards, 1 ‘Great Old One’ card, 1 ‘Cultist’ card, and 8 Horror cards, all 3”x5”), and one full-colour rules sheet which has a mini-poster on the reverse side. Each deck is shrink-wrapped in its own two-piece box with beautifully illustrated art adorning the box. Decks purchased at ‘Retailer levels’ will come with plastic hanger tags for easy merchandising and display.
Note: The Limited Edition deck has two additional cards as part of the deck. These two cards are available as the Promo Pack Add-On for people just wanting the Unlimited Edition deck.
For each deck you order, you will also receive one copy of the EXCLUSIVE Kickstarter promo card, "The Silver Key", which will only ever be available through this Kickstarter campaign.
The artwork for this deck is lovingly hand-painted by Ian Daniels, based on descriptions given in Lovecraft's individual tales.
Artwork for the Story cards (Green border) and the Cultist (Purple border) is presented in full colour, and the images for both cards in a linked pair come from the same painting. Artwork for the Horror cards (Red border) is presented in haunting red-sepia tones to add to the eeriness of the individual Horror.
Below are images of a selection of cards. You can click on each card to bring up a larger picture of that card.
Card Back
Story Cards
Horror Cards
The Cultist
To begin, deal the deck among the players, dealing one card at a time to each player face-down until all cards are dealt. It doesn’t matter if some players have more cards than others. Next, each player looks at the cards they hold and makes any pairs as they see fit.
Each green-bordered card (Story Card) has matching card in the game (except for The Great Old One), and has another card named at the bottom which the first card can ‘link’ to. Pairs are made by playing two cards of the same name (Matched Pair), or by playing two cards which link to one another (Linked Pair). In scoring, each Matched Pair is worth two points at the end of the game, while each Linked Pair is worth one point. After all players are done playing their pairs, the player with the least number of pairs takes their turn first. If there is a tie, the younger tied player plays first.
During a player’s turn, they take one card at random from any other player. If they make a pair with the card they took, they may play the pair. If playing with the ‘Deluxe Rules’, a player may also play any one Horror card or The Cultist from the cards they hold at the end of their turn. If a Horror card is played, then the effect described on the card takes place immediately. Once a player has taken an action during their turn, that turn is over, and the player to their left now takes a turn. Play continues until only one player is left holding a card, The Great Old One. That player loses the game, unless that player has The Cultist in their play area, in which case that player is the winner!
Once the game ends, each player tallies up their total score. Each Matched Pair is worth 2 points, each Linked Pair is worth 1 point, as is each Horror card. The Cultist is worth -1 point in scoring. If the player with The Great Old One lost, then the player with the highest score wins! In the case of a tie, the younger player wins!
Still not sure if you'll have enough fun with this amazing, beautiful game? Well give it a test drive! Here is a Print-And-Play PDF just for you! Now you can print out the deck, cut out the cards, and wow your friends! Mind you, this P-n-P is still the prototype version, but you'll be able to see just how much fun this game can be!
Remember, all pledge levels include FREE SHIPPING to any address in the US. International backers, please take note of your pledge level and add-ons, and add the appropriate listed amount to your pledge for international shipping.
As new Add-Ons are unlocked with Stretch Goals, new Pledge Levels will become available. Once a new Pledge Level becomes unlocked, you may easily switch your pledge to the new Pledge Level through the ‘Manage Your Pledge’ button near the top-right of this page.
Note: All images are mock-ups of the finished products, some variation will occur.
Certain pledge levels are designed for gaming retailers. These pledge levels are still available to anyone who wishes to select them, they are simply more geared towards getting multiple copies of the Unlimited Edition deck at a quantity discount. The highest levels also include a few extras that game shops can put on their shelves, while staying away from the more personal and diverse prizes that the other high-end pledges offer.
Note: Decks offered at Retailer Pledge Levels will come with plastic hanger tags for easy merchandising and display.
Our Portrait Level pledges are very special indeed. Have your face (or the face of someone you know, with permission) painted as the face of the character named in your Portrait Level pledge. This will be the official appearance of that character in this and all future printings of CTHULHU: THE GREAT OLD ONE. In addition to being immortalized as a character from Lovecraft’s haunted world, you will get to keep the ORIGINAL PAINTING painted by Ian Daniels himself! Also, it should be noted that each painting actually forms the art for two separate linked cards, for instance if you select the Zadok Allen Portrait, your painting will be “Zadok Allen and the Deep One”. I will list the paired images below, so you have a clear idea on what you will be receiving.
Asenath Waite and Edward Pickman Derby (from The Thing On The Doorstep )
and Edward Pickman Derby (from ) Crawford Tillinghast and his Luminous Machine (from From Beyond )
and his Luminous Machine (from ) Henry Wentworth Akeley and the Mi-Go (from The Whisperer In Darkness )
and the Mi-Go (from ) Keziah Mason and her pet Brown Jenkin (from Dreams In The Witch-House )
and her pet Brown Jenkin (from ) Nahum Gardner and the Colour Out Of Space (from The Colour Out Of Space )
and the Colour Out Of Space (from ) Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee and a Yithian (from The Shadow Out Of Time )
and a Yithian (from ) William Dyer and a Shoggoth (from At The Mountains Of Madness )
and a Shoggoth (from ) Zadok Allen and a Deep One (from The Shadow Over Innsmouth)
These aren't the only faces you'll be seeing in this eye-catching game! S.T. Joshi is a renowned writer and scholar, and has devoted much of his life to restoring and preserving both the writings and the history of H.P. Lovecraft, giving generations new insight into this masterful writer and tales. In honour of Mr. Joshi's contributions to the world of Lovecraft, we will be immortalizing him as the famous Abdul Al-Hazred, the author of the dreaded Necronomicon, as surely he is the keeper of lore on all things Lovecraft.
Another familiar face which will be joining us is that of the legendary Dr. Robert M. Price. Dr. Price is responsible for keeping Lovecraft's great Work alive in the hearts and minds of millions of people for the last 5 decades (or more), acting as both editor, publisher and author of many stories which kept Lovecraft's Mythos ever-renewing at the hands of countless fans and enthusiasts like ourselves. For discovering and sharing so many new treasures of the Mythos, finding the clues of inspiration which lead HPL to write his tales, he will be immortalized as the scholarly Professor George Gammel Angell, who pieces together the clues leading to he who sleeps beneath the waves, dead but dreaming.
Also, at my request, for his service to the world of Lovecraft by bringing these beautiful, haunting images to life, Ian will be painting himself as the ghoulish artist, Richard Upton Pickman; and if I'm not mistaken, that Cultist looks awfully familiar...
Note: The gender of each character is listed in the Pledge Level. This does not necessarily mean that you must select a character of your gender, but for example if you are male and select Asenath Waite, understand that she will still be painted as a woman, but with your very manly face. These characters will also be painted to match the descriptions given in Lovecraft’s tales as closely as possible, so if you select Wilbur Whateley for instance, expect to have your face painted with goatish features, etc.
This Kickstarter campaign has lots of wonderful Add-Ons available, and lots more waiting up in the Stretch Goals. You will notice that some Add-Ons have a discount depending on your Pledge Level, while others give a discount for multiple items. On certain categories such as T-Shirts, Dice, Posters, Buttons, Trading Pins, and Commemorative Coins, there may be a variety available by the end of this Kickstarter campaign as more Stretch Goals become unlocked, which will allow you to choose which version you desire, no matter if you added the item as an Add-On, or even if it came as part of your Pledge Level. Some Add-Ons that will come as we break through our Stretch Goals will even be added for free to Pledge Levels above a certain dollar amount.
Dann Kriss Games was founded in 2009, and strives to give you the best in board and card games. We make fantasy a reality! Dann Kriss designs the games himself, play-testing rigorously with his core group of gamers, and gives his stamp of excellence on every game he releases. With over 35 more games prototyped, and countless more ideas in the works, Dann will be working hard to put out new games for you and your friends and family to enjoy for years to come. This game is only the beginning, the first step in a long and wondrous journey. Look for our future titles in the coming months, right here on Kickstarter!
Cthulhu: The Great Old One Poker Deck (Fall ’13) A companion deck to Cthulhu: The Great Old One, this deck features some of the amazing art on a beautiful poker deck, for use in many different types of gaming!
A companion deck to Cthulhu: The Great Old One, this deck features some of the amazing art on a beautiful poker deck, for use in many different types of gaming! Realms Of Destiny (Spring ’14) A fantasy adventure board game for 1 to 8 players, set in the fantasy lands known as the World of Destiny. Co-operative play, team play, head-to-head, or solo play, each player quests, battles, trains, recruits allies and followers, and collects weapons and items to aid them in defeating the terrible monster which is plaguing the land. Build a party, serve a guild, drink some ale, |
on individual entities.
Symantec said it had identified three pieces of malware that were used in limited targeted attacks against financial institutions in Southeast Asia. (symc.ly/1sRNHc7)
One of the malicious programs has been previously associated with a hacking group known as Lazarus, which has been linked to the devastating attack on Sony’s Hollywood studio in 2014.
“There is a pretty hard connection now to the Sony attacks and the actor behind them” and the Bangladesh heist, Eric Chien, technical director at Symantec, said in an interview.
Another cybersecurity firm, BAE Systems, said this month that the distinctive computer code used to erase the tracks of hackers in the Bangladesh Bank heist was similar to code used to attack Sony.
Chien said that if North Korea was responsible for the hacks on banks via the SWIFT messaging network it would represent the first known episode of a nation-state stealing money in a cyber attack.
Policymakers, regulators and financial institutions around the world are stepping up scrutiny of the cyber security of the SWIFT payments system after hackers used it to make fraudulent transfers totaling $81 million out of Bank Bangladesh’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Symantec and other researchers have also linked the hack to a failed attempt to use fraudulent SWIFT messages to steal from a commercial bank in Vietnam.
In addition, Reuters reported last week that Ecuador’s Banco del Austro had more than $12 million stolen from a Wells Fargo account due to fraudulent transfers over the SWIFT network.
Bangladesh police are also reviewing a nearly-forgotten 2013 cyber heist at the nation’s largest commercial bank, Sonali Bank, for connections to the central bank heist, a senior law enforcement official told Reuters. The unsolved theft of $250,000 at Sonali Bank also involved fraudulent transfer requests sent over the SWIFT network.Shawn Staples said nothing as he stood on the sidewalk across from the charred apartment building. He kept his arms at his side as a relative gave him a long hug. He turned his face away from where his 7-year-old daughter had just died.
The child whose name he tattooed in cursive on his right wrist.
Shaniya Staples died along with her two younger sisters, Melanie Watson, 3 months, and Madison Watson, 4, when an extra-alarm arson fire spread through the two top floors of their South Side apartment building in the 8100 block of South Essex Avenue around 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, officials said.
Intense flames and heavy smoke kept firefighters from getting inside and trapped many residents in their apartments. At least two stairwells caught fire. Several people jumped from windows while others were rescued by firefighters on ladders.
CAPTION The three sisters' parents greeted more than 300 mourners on Sept. 10, 2016 at the Holy Temple Cathedral in south suburban Harvey, as Chicago authorities continued their investigation into finding the person who set the deadly Aug. 23 fire. (Alyssa Pointer / Chicago Tribune) The three sisters' parents greeted more than 300 mourners on Sept. 10, 2016 at the Holy Temple Cathedral in south suburban Harvey, as Chicago authorities continued their investigation into finding the person who set the deadly Aug. 23 fire. (Alyssa Pointer / Chicago Tribune) CAPTION The three sisters' parents greeted more than 300 mourners on Sept. 10, 2016 at the Holy Temple Cathedral in south suburban Harvey, as Chicago authorities continued their investigation into finding the person who set the deadly Aug. 23 fire. (Alyssa Pointer / Chicago Tribune) The three sisters' parents greeted more than 300 mourners on Sept. 10, 2016 at the Holy Temple Cathedral in south suburban Harvey, as Chicago authorities continued their investigation into finding the person who set the deadly Aug. 23 fire. (Alyssa Pointer / Chicago Tribune) CAPTION A 51-year-old man has been charged with arson and murder for setting a South Chicago apartment building on fire last month, killing four people, including three children. Sept. 14, 2016. (CBS Chicago) A 51-year-old man has been charged with arson and murder for setting a South Chicago apartment building on fire last month, killing four people, including three children. Sept. 14, 2016. (CBS Chicago) CAPTION Friends and family of fire victims gather in the 8100 block of South Essex Avenue to remember victims of a fatal fire. Aug. 23, 2016. (Terrence Antonio James/ Chicago Tribune) Friends and family of fire victims gather in the 8100 block of South Essex Avenue to remember victims of a fatal fire. Aug. 23, 2016. (Terrence Antonio James/ Chicago Tribune) CAPTION Keir Foley describes his escape from a fatal fire in the 8100 block of South Essex Avenue. Aug. 23, 2016. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune) Keir Foley describes his escape from a fatal fire in the 8100 block of South Essex Avenue. Aug. 23, 2016. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune) CAPTION Lanita Smith describes running past flames to escape a fatal fire on South Essex Avenue. Aug. 23, 2016. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune) Lanita Smith describes running past flames to escape a fatal fire on South Essex Avenue. Aug. 23, 2016. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune)
The infant died when her father, Michael Watson, grabbed her and jumped out their third-floor apartment, according to witnesses and fire officials. Fire officials said she suffered head injuries. Madison and Shaniya were found dead in the apartment. A man next door also died.
Relatives said Watson, 36, suffered severe burns and was in critical condition at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.
Crews were still dousing flames when police took a suspect into custody, authorities said. The man apparently had an argument with someone in the building and started fires in different locations, according to police and fire officials. Word of the arrest quickly spread among relatives gathered outside the building.
Staples, dressed in a black T-shirt and gray pants, began to swing his hands as he walked away from the crowd. “I’m going to the police station,” he said, breathing heavily. “I’m going to the police station.”
As he charged down the sidewalk, several family members followed him. One woman grabbed his arm. Another relative hugged him, keeping him in place.
The suspect's family, who lives down the street, acknowledged that he had argued with someone in the building Monday night over money owed for cigarettes. But they denied he had anything to do with the fire.
“(He) ain't perfect, but he ain't that type of guy,” said the suspect's brother, Dwayne Anderson. He said his brother left the area before the fire broke out.
Anderson said his brother is homeless and spends most of his nights finding refuge at area hospitals. He had been released from jail not too long ago.
Anderson said his brother was severely injured decades ago in a motorcycle crash, leaving him with a metal plate in his head. “Sometimes he goes in and out,” Anderson said.
Though his brother might be an aggressive talker, Anderson said his brother is not violent. No charges had been announced by Tuesday afternoon.
Police said they received reports around 1:35 a.m. that someone had set fire to the courtyard building. Responding firefighters called a 2-11 alarm as the fire quickly spread. That was followed within minutes by a 3-11 alarm with an emergency medical services plan 2, sending 10 ambulances and around 150 firefighters along with extra equipment to the fire.
Chicago Tribune Chicago Tribune
“We're getting reports of people trapped on the second floor and also jumpers,” a dispatcher told responding fire companies.
The first supervisor on the scene, chief of the 23rd Battalion radioed in, “Fire through the roof. Give me a 2-11 on this. I need all trucks available.”
Soon after, the supervisor reported, “We're doing CPR on an infant. Got another guy laid out. Again, fire looks like through the roof, back porches, second and third floor.”
The chief called for more equipment as residents gathered at windows. “Ground ladders until I say I got enough ground ladders,’’ he barked. “Yeah we need 3-footers, 35-footers. We’re still having trouble getting in. They’re trying to get all the patients that we can. We still have a large volume of fire. We are on the defensive attack.’’
More than four hours after the fire started, it was struck out at 5:39 a.m.
Relatives started gathering, watching the flames die down as the sky brightened.
“My nieces didn't deserve this,” cried Chantel Staples, who said she is Shawn Staples' sister. Addressing the suspect, she added, "You will get what you deserve."
Dressed in green pants and a shirt with Elsa from Disney's “Frozen,” Staples walked away, crying. “No!” she screamed as a relative hugged her. “This isn't happening.”
She walked back toward the crime tape. “I'm going to see my nieces. I'm going to see my niece,” she said. “She's gonna wake up, and we're gonna go to Chuck E. Cheese's.”
Clay Turner said he saw Watson lying on the ground and yelling for help, the 3-month-old next to him. Turner, who lives across the street, said he ran up and tried to help.
“I’m just speechless,” Turner said, standing barefoot in a white T-shirt and black shorts.
Jennifer Wainwright said she tried in vain to revive the baby after her family escaped the flames.
Awakened to the sound of “crackling” outside her first-floor apartment, Wainwright and her family — which included her fiance and her 2-year-old daughter — found themselves trapped, their escape blocked by smoke and fire.
Fire blocked front and rear entrances to her apartment, and flames whipped in through the kitchen window near the rear of her apartment. With no other options, the family escaped through a window — first the fiance jumped down to safety, then he caught Jordan and then Wainwright.
Before the 29-year-old had a moment to gather herself, she saw a man cradling a small infant outside the building who appeared to not be breathing.
“A guy was like, 'Please, somebody get the baby,’ ” Wainwright said Tuesday morning across the street from her former home. “So I just grabbed the baby after handing someone my baby so I could take care (of them).
“The man gave me the infant and I started CPR because the baby was not breathing at all,” said Wainwright, who is certified to perform CPR. “I'm soft on babies,” she told reporters.
“I did what I could do. The Fire Department took over,” she said. Soon emergency crews took the baby and rushed the child to the hospital.
The 3-month-old was taken in critical condition to Comer Children’s Hospital and was pronounced dead at 2:40 a.m., said Officer Ron Gaines, a police spokesman. Watson was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center, fire officials said. Two other people were taken to South Shore Hospital, one in fair condition and the other in a good condition, according to fire officials.
Wainwright said her family planned to stay with relatives in the area but will still coming to grips with the fatal fire.
“I'm trying to get my mind wrapped around it. I have to replace everything. I'm grateful that my family got out.”
She added: “Thank God for renters insurance. Hopefully everything will be taken care of.”Lowryder writes:
on January 23rd, 2011 at 10:26:02 PM
meh i dont care.
The Skippy Spartan writes:
on January 23rd, 2011 at 10:37:52 PM
That awkward moment when James Cameron meets the Wachowski brothers....and only one of the brothers has a penis!
redbluedevil writes:
on January 23rd, 2011 at 10:49:35 PM
Well they can hardly be worse than the 2nd and 3rd ones...or can they?
BadChadB33 writes:
on January 23rd, 2011 at 10:51:05 PM
Neo is dead, wtf?
otis writes:
on January 23rd, 2011 at 10:52:28 PM
Should've stopped at the original.
WV-Films writes:
on January 23rd, 2011 at 11:11:08 PM
Woah..
Actually I think this is pretty awesome.
Looking foward to it.
codeman_1216 writes:
on January 23rd, 2011 at 11:18:39 PM
Yeah, I can imagine them making Neo a program or something like that.
Phil writes:
on January 23rd, 2011 at 11:18:41 PM
Just don't shoot them back to back. We all know what happens then.
OneTime writes:
on January 23rd, 2011 at 11:23:05 PM
nice
OneTime writes:
on January 23rd, 2011 at 11:23:32 PM
when all else fails..run back to ur bread n butter
Ari Gold writes:
on January 23rd, 2011 at 11:27:51 PM
I could of done without the second and third movies.
beepboop writes:
on January 23rd, 2011 at 11:32:28 PM
After revolutionising the action genre with spinning slow motion shots, the next matrix films will revolutionise the action genre with sped up zoom shots.
telur writes:
on January 23rd, 2011 at 11:37:43 PM
it's time to break trilogy and make it 4!!!!
yeah we hope The Godfather 4
Man in Black writes:
on January 23rd, 2011 at 11:42:19 PM
This is akin to walking on thin ice the Wachowskis are 100% certifiably wacked out of their gourds, and
@ BadChad, you bring up a good point but think of neo as energy, it can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed from one state to another. thats all i got agter watching both my teams lose their asses f*ckin Steelers.
Ranger writes:
on January 23rd, 2011 at 11:53:00 PM
@BadChad - as Man in Black touched upon... Neo being energy, or they could just as easily write it in that he either wasn't dead, or he was IN The Matrix (as opposed to being hooked up to The Matrix) when he battled Agent Smith... thus, no death... and they tap-dancing around Morphius' line of the body can't live without the mind.
And I'm on the same page with most on here. 2 was tolerable... but anything good about it was running on steam from the first, but I wasn't crazy about it. The 3rd. sucked d*ck like Dina Lohan trying to get her daughter an acting role.
The first should have been a stand-alone flick. No sequels... but then the Wacked Bro/Sis duo wouldn't have bagged that last billion $'s (so I don't blame them for milking... his sisters tits).
Frank4969 writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 12:09:03 AM
What?
telur writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 12:17:39 AM
Martin Lawrence Says "Big Momma House 4" and "5" are coming too
sm00th_eskimo writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 12:25:03 AM
Not really sure how I should feel bout this. 2nd was ok and the 3rd was crap, but maybe the wachowskis might actually be able to pull the white rabbit out of their asses and do this right!!!
Zebastian von Kane writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 12:50:45 AM
To hell with Weirdo brothers. Obviously the ran out of ideas.
boogiel writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 1:16:38 AM
The first one is awesome but the rest are pile of garbage. We don't need another sequel. Period.
technoreaper writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 2:29:57 AM
Dear God, no, please no. Nothing but bad news all day.
Rambo writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 2:32:33 AM
I'm really excited about this.But for god sake bring the action back to the matrix and drop the whole zion crap,that ruined part of reloaded and most of revolutions which has to be one of the worst sequels of all time.
and please let the brother that still have a penis to helm this.the other can do make up.
Sleuth1989 writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 2:39:42 AM
@BadChadB33
In all fairness they left it kind of ambiguous of his final fate.
Sleuth1989 writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 2:45:29 AM
And I actually would watch this. When the Wachowskis helm something as directors or writers they can really kick butt in film. I'm excluding Speed Racer and mark that as them having a bad year. Point is they really try to put essence in their work and I support further Matrix entries. However, and this is a biggy, don't film both movies back to back. It drains the filmmakers. I mean I liked the third one and thought it was a nice entry but you could tell that by the time they got to the second half they were drained creatively.
avaela writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 2:49:40 AM
I think they might be able to do something amazing with 3D Action to "revolutionize" the action genre all over again
trailertrash writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 2:57:16 AM
Loved the first, The other 2 were just ok at best IMO.
I think Larry was on Blob when he wrote those 2 sequels....
trailertrash writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 2:59:18 AM
And please bring back Monica Bellucci (Naked) also
Rambo writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 3:17:24 AM
and get rid of jada smith.
Rambo writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 3:20:54 AM
this was the best part of revolutions:
http://cdn.mademan.com/chickipedia/images/0/02/Monica_bellucci_204.jpg
DaveThePhotoGuy writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 3:29:16 AM
rambo- it's Jada Pinkett Smith (that stupid slag wouldn't drop here name), and yes get rid of the bitch, she is/was a complete waste of space.
As I said on the Will Smith/Robin Hood thread, "Reloaded" and "Revolutions" sucked donkey ball sweet. So not keen on a 4&5.
supaflywill writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 3:30:16 AM
YIP WOULD DEF WATCH THEM - BUT ISINT NEO DEAD???
trailertrash writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 3:38:09 AM
Rambo- That was the best part of all 3 films!!
DaveThePhotoGuy writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 3:53:08 AM
With you on that one rambo....niccccccce
Freudian_Nightmare writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 4:22:21 AM
So not only will the new Robin Hood revolutionize technically and visually, but the Matrix-sequels will revolutionize action? That's a whole lot of revolution.
pH0u57 writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 4:57:33 AM
soo.. they are making the story even more complicated?
Devil writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 6:51:14 AM
Didn't he die at the end of the 3rd one?
No, it was his career. My mistake...
AYT BALL writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 7:21:38 AM
Neos dead but in the Matrix world i guess he could live on, dont see it as a huge stretch, its a bit of a Tron rip off if thats the case tho, just hope they go back to the first one for inspiration.
swoooop writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 8:08:36 AM
Oooooooooooooosh*tt. That sounds lame. They only manage to make one good damn Matrix movie, why the hell are they thinking of more. Ohh, money.
TheHerpesOnRangersDick writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 10:40:11 AM
Blake Lively's vagina predicted I was c*mming...it was right
minkowski writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 4:11:55 PM
"you bring up a good point but think of neo as energy, it can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed from one state to another."
You are forgetting something. Neo maybe energy in the Matrix and matter in the real world (they are requivalent regardless, e=mc^2), but he is also information in both, and information CAN be destroyed.
This happens all the time with black holes. Or just detonate a hard drive.
Of course, over the entire four dimensional space-time construct, there may be a total conservation of information as well. No one knows.
The situation is thus summed up this way: we do not know if he was truly dead at the conclusion to Revolutions. But if he was, there are in fact a myriad of ways to restore him, from whole-body regneration to reimplantation of neuronal backups.
Even then, because the Matrix systemically generates a 'Neo' as a solution to the machine-imponderable equation of humanity, another Neo is, as the Oracle stated, pretty much inevitable.
The REAL question, the one no one has asked, is whether WB is willing to take a huge gamble on the Wachowski brothers, given their past cinematic failures.
Does WB, in these tough economic times, have the cash to waste on two more films, when the last two destroyed the hopes of a good followup to the first?
doneehoward writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 5:12:48 PM
not true.
rabid writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 5:14:49 PM
It could work. Depends on if they get lost in the story like the writers did last time.
I always thought the proper way to write it would be to have Neo realize that the computers had it right, that the Matrix was the only way their two species could survive together. Then he installs Agent Smith as the new Architect and he and Trinity return to their lives in the Matrix with the added bonus of being able to write their own programming.
rabid writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 5:20:16 PM
It could work. Depends on if they get lost in the story like the writers did last time.
I always thought the proper way to write it would be to have Neo realize that the computers had it right, that the Matrix was the only way their two species could survive together. Then he installs Agent Smith as the new Architect and he and Trinity return to their lives in the Matrix with the added bonus of being able to write their own programming.
minkowski writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 5:22:14 PM
@doneehoward
Thank you for that brilliant and eloquent elaboration.
minkowski writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 5:24:53 PM
Rabid, I can only assume you are joking.
rocketman writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 5:42:54 PM
If its all set in the'matrix' then cool,if its Zion and all that transvestite bollocks then pinky and perky can f*ck off.
I did like Matrix 2 though (only person in the world?) the whole Alice in wonderland aspect need exploring,the bits with the doors were cool and the fight scene on the staircase was and still is f*cking amazing.
rabid writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 6:32:02 PM
I'm not joking. The ending they went with-- how horrible was that?
Fans wanted resolution to the story. Nobody says you have to give them the heroic selfless version.
The robots could have easily wiped them out had they wanted to. But the machines showed sympathy for them and gave them the gift of a normal life instead of armageddon. Brilliant idea, but in the end the Wachowskis didn't have the balls to face the reality of coming up with a solution.
Such a clusterf*ck cop-out ending to an exciting trilogy.
minkowski writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 6:35:12 PM
"and the fight scene on the staircase was and still is f*cking amazing."
I hear they ripped that off from a Metallica music video.
In fact, all three film's content was ripped off from somewhere else.
(the Reloaded scene where Morpheus fights the agent on top of the moving semi truck was ripped, motion for motion, from a Dragonball Z Android saga fight scene...)
So if you want to see what will happen in Matrix 4 and 5, just watch a bunch of action/sci-fi films from the last 6 years.
rabid writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 6:38:24 PM
Sure, it was one big rip-off... so name another film that features homages to masonic legend or artificial reality controlled by machines. There must be hundreds, right?
I want to see the original Matrix ABC tv pilot. It has to be out there in cyberspace somewhere.
The5thBeatle5 writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 6:49:27 PM
even though the 2nd & 3rd flicks were sh*tty, im definitely game for a 4th & 5th. As long as Weaving returns. and Bellucci (damn!)
minkowski writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 7:05:12 PM
"Fans wanted resolution to the story."
We would have been happy with the open-ended resolution presented at the end of the first film. But greed got in the way.
"Nobody says you have to give them the heroic selfless version."
Well, except the writers who decide what's in the story.
"The robots could have easily wiped them out had they wanted to."
They did, in fact, virtually wipe out humanity, but chose to retain some prisoners, and grow many, many others, for energy, and because they needed Zion to balance the equation of humanity that caused both the existence of Neo and the escape of a number of 'batteries'.
The entire film was flawed, egregiously, by one idiotic concept, a concept contrived so that the Wachowski's would have an excuse to do unrealistic things they had seen elsewhere.
The concept was that intelligent machines would retain humans for fuel, even though that concept is not only scientifically illiterate, it's irrational and downright silly.
And from there came the notion of a virtual world, even though if the machines had decided to enslave mankind for fuel, a simple lobotomy, or some other brain damage, would render the need for a pacifying virtual world entirely moot.
Not to mention the enormous energy needs that would have to be met in order to run the Matrix, energy needs that would far outstrip the mostly waste heat of energy the human body produces.
In fact, if you know anything about thermodynamics, you know that heat generates electricity only when it is used to boil water, thus generating steam, thus turning a turbine.
And humans produce far less heat than would be required. Never mind that the idea of machines using STEAM and turbines, when they already possess fusion, is just downright silly. Like you would need anything else...
But people were so amazed by the action scenes they didn't even stop to think. And I believe that was by design.
"But the machines showed sympathy for them and gave them the gift of a normal life"
No, they chose not to demolish Zion, breaking the cycle created by the enslavement of mankind as betteries, and they chose to give humans a choice to stay in the Matrix, rather than use force to keep them, which is what induces the creation fo Neo and the repeated creation/destruction of Zion.
Had the machines just eradicated them, then all the problems would have gone away, but the Wachowski Brothers started with a preposterous premise (machines absolutely need humans for batteries) and were forced to follow it to it's (il)logical conclusions. So here we are.
"instead of armageddon"
Armageddon had already passed. Mankind was already virtually destroyed.
"Brilliant idea"
Wrong. The first Matrix was brilliantly executed, but the story made no logical sense and all the good ideas therein were borrowed from better writers.
"but in the end the Wachowskis didn't have the balls to face the reality of coming up with a solution."
They did, and the solution was the (il)logical conclusion to the idiotic premise.
The only other solution would have been the destruction of the machines. I could have lived with that, but I feel that the Wachowski brothers are not the most socially well-adapted people and I believe they feel more comfortable with modern machinery than people, so a compromise was made with the machines in the story for the audience's sake.
I think the Wachowski brothers probably would have chosen to kill all the humans if they could have done so.
I recall someone had a better set of sequels, where all the humans were in fact machines, or that the machines lost the war and were in a matrix of their own where they only believed they won the war against the humans. Something like that and I thought that was far better than what we got.
"Such a clusterf*ck cop-out ending to an exciting trilogy."
The hero sacrifices himself in battle with a common enemy to save his friends...I think the ending was the least weak aspect of the two films.
At this point, the machines were probably tired of the Zion-iterations and the Neo-nonsense and wanted a way out too. They still get their batteries and the humans get to live. Win win for every one, really.
But like I said, the movies are structurally based on an extremely stupid premise, and that's why they ultimately fail the intelligence test.
minkowski writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 7:09:48 PM
"so name another film that features homages to masonic legend or artificial reality controlled by machines. There must be hundreds, right?"
No, there aren't because people usually choose, for integrity and the sake of pride, to at least come up with ideas inpired by other people, not wholesale shoplifted from other people's works. That's just lazy if not downright dishonest.
To steal from Dragonball Z, an entire action sequence...LMAO! What a bunch of lazy hacks.
And himage my ass. Superman Returns was an homage to Reeves, The Matrix films was the original packaging of stolen goods.
I mean, it's one thing to stand on the shoulders of giants, it's another to steal the giant's shoes.
Nihilistic Michael Maus writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 7:10:35 PM
He spoke briefly about "47 Ronin" and "Bill and Ted 3," but the big news came when Reeves revealed that he met with the Wachowskis around Christmas. They told him that they completed script treatments for two more "Matrix" installments. They are planning to make the films in 3D and have already met with James Cameron to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the technology.
So they are coming out with sequels that we never asked for? And they are taking advantage of the latest technology to create them with?
Wow.... why the f*ck does this sound familiar... hmmmmm
... Terminator : Salvation.... Star Wars : Revenge of the Sith and the other two f*cking movies I barely care to remember the names of...
Nihilistic Michael Maus writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 7:11:50 PM
*** Spoiler ***
Neo gets a boob job and intraverts his c*ck, so they split open the penis and makes it an artificial vagina.... all the while giving him hormone injections....
minkowski writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 7:18:51 PM
And changes his name from 'The One' to 'Both'.
Salvador writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 8:15:39 PM
No, please, just let it go.
No more Matrix films. And no F***'reboots' by the way!
rabid writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 8:23:11 PM
I guess that makes George Lucas a thief for stealing Star Wars scenes from Kurosawa.
minkowski writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 8:42:34 PM
Maybe, but him ripping off Arthur C Clark and especially Isaac Asimov certainly does.
As for Kurosawa, I'm more inclined Lucas was immitating the master's technique, and not the master's story ideas. But even then, it just adds to the notion Lucas wasn't very original at all.
And I don't like SW. No ideas there. Very bland universe. All the science fiction Lucas appropriated has been diluted down to light saber battles and star ships. Like an idiots understanding of the genre. Like a western in space but without the even morality.
photobuckets4 writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 9:00:24 PM
all the matrix films suck, complete utter garbage
Nihilistic Michael Maus writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 9:48:04 PM
rabid writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 8:23:11 PM
I guess that makes George Lucas a thief for stealing Star Wars scenes from Kurosawa.
@rabid
Read up on Lucas' and Spielberg's influences from The Hidden Fortress.
But it's not a remake of a Kurosawa story, like the Dollars Trilogy... or The Magnificent Seven
minkowski writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 9:53:40 PM
It's one thing to remake a foreign film for another country. That's a TRANSLATION, but to steal ideas from all over the place, even entire scenes, that's just PLAGIARISM.
And the Wackoffskis are blatant, but talented, plagiarists.
blahbla writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 9:58:51 PM
More Matrix, NO Wackochowskis, NO Jada and NO Carri Ann
murphyslaw93 writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 10:02:20 PM
I truly have no idea what to think of the Wachowskis right now. The Matrix, Bound, and V for Vendetta (the script) were amazing. The later Matrix installments and Speed Racer range from decent to god awful (Speed Racer being the worst of the bunch). I feel like they have 1000 projects planned including that sci-fi gay arab one. I feel like they have such good ideas and a great eye for visuals, but they lack consistency. Hoping for good things from these guys, but I do think the Matrix films are finished and should not be continued these mugs are just too old
blinkbomber writes:
on January 24th, 2011 at 10:27:28 PM
All these comments... and this frigging news post... and NOTHING about what Reeves actually said about Bill and Ted?????
lol. i'm out.
encoreyourface writes:
on January 25th, 2011 at 12:43:19 AM
i liked all the matrix's, i guess it's just me. i'd be happy to see a fourth if the plot is good enough and they get rid of the zin crap that plagued the third one
jigsaw23 writes:
on January 25th, 2011 at 4:58:56 AM
sweet
IHateR writes:
on January 25th, 2011 at 11:53:26 AM
All you peeps talking sh*t you know you will be waiting in line to go see it. Probably be ahead of me in the line too.
-Chewy- writes:
on January 25th, 2011 at 1:21:56 PM
If.....IF....they can make them as good as the first movie and actually took notes about all the god-awful stuff in the sequels that the fans posted on internet for years.....that would make for great movies.
I'm not gonna lie, I love the Matrix Universe as a whole, there is a lot of potential for some good stuff.
Even tough the Matrix SHOULD have stopped after 1 movie. Now that it is up to three, it doesn't matter.
P-S: Bring back the badass Twins!!!!
encoreyourface writes:
on January 25th, 2011 at 5:54:07 PM
^
agreed. loved it but it could have been way better.
Kindlegolas writes:
on January 26th, 2011 at 11:47:52 AM
I actually loved all three Matrix films and can't wait for more!!
Vlahka writes:
on January 27th, 2011 at 8:46:34 AM
You lot talk way too much. The news |
Bundesliga.
Their stay in the top flight was brief, but they had some fantastic results along the way, including a 3-1 win over Europa League-bound Eintracht Frankfurt, with Marvin Ducksch, Uwe Hünemeier, and Stefan Kutschke providing the goals, although it ultimately would not be enough to keep Paderborn in the top flight.
Three key players developed
Breitenreiter’s career is not quite long enough to say that he developed specific talents but he has had a distinct impact on the career of a few professionals who should be fixtures in German football. Elias Kachunga, Mario Vrančić (who Jürgen Klopp called “the brightest talent that Mainz has ever produced.”) and Lukas Rupp will all remain in the Bundesliga after being snapped up by FC Ingolstadt 04, SV Darmstadt 98, and VfB Stuttgart respectively. They got their chance in the top flight and showed that they can contribute after a tough season at Paderborn.
What remains to be seen is if Breitenreiter can revitalize a Schalke side that disappointed in 2014-15. Seemingly filled to the brim with young, bright talent, no manager in Gelsenkirchen has been able to solve the Schalke puzzle. Breitenreiter has a system that would seem to lend itself to a young, energetic side, but he’ll have to balance his counter attacking zeal with some level-headed defending and pragmatism. The future looks bright for Andre Breitenreiter, now that he’s making his own luck.
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NEXT ARTICLESignup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
A transgender woman felt “personally discriminated against” after security initially denied her access to a festive theme park for dressing as Ms Claus.
The woman, who did not wish to be named, encountered this at London’s Hyde Park Winter Wonderland earlier this month.
After queuing in the cold for more than 45 minutes, the woman and her friends reached security.
Her friend Daniel, who was with her at the time of the incident, called what followed a “transphobic attack.”
He said they “were stopped at the main gates by a security man who said: ‘He can’t come in dressed like that’, referring to my friend who was dressed as Ms Claus.
“When we asked him to specify why, he stated: ‘No-one is allowed to be dressed as Santa.
“‘The crazy Santa thing is not allowed here.'”
Daniel said that “we found that odd, as there were eight or nine people in the distance dressed like Santa.”
Security guidelines state that customers may be refused entry if they are in possession of certain prohibited items.
However, the official Winter Wonderland website noted that there is no dress code other than to “dress appropriately” in colder weather.
Daniel flagged this to the security guard, but he said the man “huffed and said: ‘We don’t want any of that here,’ before walking off.
“We asked for his name, and he rudely spat: ‘F*** off’.”
The woman, who said she had never before encountered problems with the way she dresses, was devastated.
“If this was my first time out as a woman, which in itself is a very hard thing to do, then I would not want to do it again,” she told PinkNews.
“Winter Wonderland itself was full of thousands of people where no-one battered an eyelid except this security man.”
She called for better education on trans issues, saying that the guard “should have been trained in diversity by his company and that should have included pronoun use.”
Though the group were granted access to the park afterwards, she said: “I felt personally discriminated against by this man.
“The police – who were quite frankly amazing – did not have issues with pronouns or asking me what I wanted to be called”.
In a similar case, seasoned drag queen Coral DeVille recently claimed she was denied entry to a Mariah Carey concert at the O2 Arena for being in drag.
In the US, a trans woman was banned from a theme park earlier this year for wearing a skirt.
PinkNews contracted Winter Wonderland and a spokesperson said: “We have looked into this incident and we can confirm this person was not denied access into the event as our CCTV footage shows.
“Hyde Park Winter Wonderland is a globally inclusive event.”A woman who the authorities said was in her 50s led police officers and firefighters on a chase through Midtown Manhattan on Monday for more than an hour, as she set at least 15 trash cans on fire.
Her accelerant of choice was a mystery, said Mark Rosenbaum, a Fire Department chief, but “whatever she’s using, she’s got to be running out of it.”
Photo
There were no immediate suspects or arrests.
The first fire, in front of the of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, was set at about 3 p.m. About the same time, a 911 call came in reporting a fire about a block away, at Madison Avenue. More reports followed in rapid succession, from Fifth Avenue to Lexington Avenue, from 41st to 45th Streets. Two fires were set in the Grand Central subway station before the woman apparently returned to street level, Mr. Rosenbaum said.
“We thought she left our area, but evidently not,” he said.
Dave Sinclair, who works for an airport bus service, said he saw her on Madison Avenue. “She’s like this short,” he said, holding his hand about five feet off the ground. “She had a little shopping cart, black jacket, brown pants and brown hat. She was walking up this way. All of a sudden, all the cans were on fire.”
Chief Rosenbaum said three engines and two trucks responded to the small fires, which left melted, twisted plastic barrels that Grand Central Partnership workers hurried to replace.
The suspect may have set similar fires in the area two weeks ago, the chief said.One of the City of London’s most important industries could lose more than half of its EU workers because of Brexit, according to a new survey.
Just 42 per cent of fund management professionals polled said they plan to continue working in the UK after its departure from the EU, according to research by the CFA Society UK, which represents the industry. The responses showed that 16 per cent are already planning to leave, with the remainder undecided.
The results suggest that companies managing hundreds of billions of pounds of assets, including many people’s pension funds and savings, could struggle to retain the skilled workers that they need to be able to operate.
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.
An overwhelming 91 per cent of respondents from EU countries said they believe the UK is less competitive as a financial centre because of Brexit, while 71 per cent of British respondents said that they think the same.
Only 15 per cent of EU nationals said that they would encourage non-UK citizens to come and work in the UK now. By contrast, 69 per cent of those from non-EU countries still envisage a future working in the UK.
The survey polled 1,109 investment professionals, about 330 of whom were EU nationals.
“While many of the outcomes of Brexit remain unclear, we can certainly expect a change in the profile of the investment management workforce in the UK,” said Will Goodhart, chief executive officer of CFA Society UK.
“Many EU professionals working here intend to move to other markets once Britain has left. We may see this increasing over the coming months.”
The fund management industry is the latest segment of Britain’s sprawling financial services sector to highlight the potentially negative impact of Brexit. Also on Wednesday, London Stock Exchange boss Xavier Rolet said that the country leaving the EU could spark the next financial crisis.
Shape Created with Sketch. Business news: in pictures Show all 8 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Business news: in pictures 1/8 Mahabis bust High-end slipper retailer Mahabis has gone into administration. 2 Jan 2019 Mahabis 2/8 Costa Cola Coca-Cola has paid £3.9bn for Costa Coffee. A cafe chain is a new venture for the global soft drinks giant PA 3/8 RIP Payday Loans A funeral procession for payday loans was held in London on September 2. The future of pay day lenders is in doubt after Wonga, Britain's biggest, went into administration on August 30 PA 4/8 Musk irks investors and directors Elon Musk has concluded that Tesla will remain public. Investors and company directors were angry at Musk for tweeting unexpectedly that he was considering taking Tesla private and share prices had taken a tumble in the following weeks Getty 5/8 Jaguar warning Iconic British car maker Jaguar Land Rover warned on July 5, 2018 that a "bad" Brexit deal could jeopardise planned investment of more than $100 billion, upping corporate pressure as the government heads into crucial talks AFP/Getty 6/8 Spotif-IPO Spotify traded publically for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday. However, the company isn't issuing shares, but rather, shares held by Spotify's private investors will be sold AFP/Getty 7/8 French blue passports The deadline to award a contract to make blue British passports after Brexit has been extended by two weeks following a request by bidder De La Rue. The move comes after anger at the announcement British passports would be produced by Franco-Dutch firm Gemalto when De La Rue’s contract ends in July. The British firm said Gemalto was chosen only because it undercut the competition, but the UK company also admitted that it was not the cheapest choice in the tendering process. 8/8 Beast from the east economic impact The Beast from the East wiped £4m off of Flybe’s revenues due to flight cancellations, airport closures and delays, according to the budget airline’s estimates. Flybe said it cancelled 994 flights in the three months to 31 March, compared to 372 in the same period last year. 1/8 Mahabis bust High-end slipper retailer Mahabis has gone into administration. 2 Jan 2019 Mahabis 2/8 Costa Cola Coca-Cola has paid £3.9bn for Costa Coffee. A cafe chain is a new venture for the global soft drinks giant PA 3/8 RIP Payday Loans A funeral procession for payday loans was held in London on September 2. The future of pay day lenders is in doubt after Wonga, Britain's biggest, went into administration on August 30 PA 4/8 Musk irks investors and directors Elon Musk has concluded that Tesla will remain public. Investors and company directors were angry at Musk for tweeting unexpectedly that he was considering taking Tesla private and share prices had taken a tumble in the following weeks Getty 5/8 Jaguar warning Iconic British car maker Jaguar Land Rover warned on July 5, 2018 that a "bad" Brexit deal could jeopardise planned investment of more than $100 billion, upping corporate pressure as the government heads into crucial talks AFP/Getty 6/8 Spotif-IPO Spotify traded publically for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday. However, the company isn't issuing shares, but rather, shares held by Spotify's private investors will be sold AFP/Getty 7/8 French blue passports The deadline to award a contract to make blue British passports after Brexit has been extended by two weeks following a request by bidder De La Rue. The move comes after anger at the announcement British passports would be produced by Franco-Dutch firm Gemalto when De La Rue’s contract ends in July. The British firm said Gemalto was chosen only because it undercut the competition, but the UK company also admitted that it was not the cheapest choice in the tendering process. 8/8 Beast from the east economic impact The Beast from the East wiped £4m off of Flybe’s revenues due to flight cancellations, airport closures and delays, according to the budget airline’s estimates. Flybe said it cancelled 994 flights in the three months to 31 March, compared to 372 in the same period last year.
Mr Rolet previously said that stripping London of the lucrative euro clearing facilities after Brexit could cost investors €100bn (£83bn) over five years.
Clearing houses hold collateral centrally and ensures transactions go ahead in the event of a default.
Dozens of large banks with bases in London have already outlined plans to move some jobs to the Continent in order to ensure they maintain full access to the European market after Brexit.
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 nowMANILA, Philippines — Presidential Communications Secretary Martin Andanar on Sunday said President Rodrigo Duterte’s order to bar Vice President Leni Robredo from attending Cabinet meetings was due to “irreconcilable differences.”
“Maraming polisiya at pananaw na magkasalungat kaya humantong sa order na hindi na padaluhin si vice president sa Cabinet meeting,” Andanar said in an interview with dzBB.
“Ito ay dahil sa irreconcilable differences between President Duterte and Vice President Robredo,” he added.
Andanar’s statement was seconded by Cabinet Secretary Leoncio “Jun” Evasco Jr. who, according to Robredo, told her of Duterte’s directive that she desist from attending Cabinet meetings starting December 5, Monday.
In her statement announcing her planned resignation from the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council, Robredo admitted that she has opposing views with Duterte but admitted that she hoped it would be patched by their mandate to serve the public.
READ: FULL TEXT: Robredo on why she is resigning from Duterte's Cabinet
Evasco: She's not fired
Evasco confirmed that she sent Robredo the text message indicating Duterte’s order. He said he tried to call the vice president but there was no response, leaving him to just relay the president’s message via SMS.
The Cabinet secretary, however, clarified that there was no instruction to fire Robredo.
“There was no instructions for VP Robredo's termination,” Evasco said in an interview with dzMM.
“If they cannot support what the president is doing, then they have to resign,” he added.
Andanar also said they have no plan to threaten nor remove anyone from office. He also denied the speculations that Robredo’s vice presidency is in danger saying only Robredo could answer that.
The Communications secretary said Duterte believes in the Constitution. He also said no one is eyed yet to take over Robredo’s housing post.
“Hindi namin trabaho na magbanta at hindi namin trabaho na magtanggal ng opisyal,” Andanar said.
“Ayaw naming pangunahan si Pangulong Duterte kung sino ang ipapalit kay Vice President Robredo sa HUDCC,” he added.
Last July, Duterte asked Robredo to “assist” him as he leads the country in the next six years.
RELATED: Leni to resign as HUDCC chief, vows to protect vice presidency | Rody to Leni: Stand by meThe Dudek Abides Journal Sentinel TV and film critic Duane Dudek looks at life on the small and big screen, and some of the cool stuff on both. SHARE
By of the
R.J. Mitte, who plays Walter White, Jr. on the acclaimed AMC series "Breaking Bad" will speak at Marquette University Thursday at 7 p.m.
Like his character Mitte has cerebral palsy, and will speak on overcoming adversity and bullying.
He previously appeared on "Hannah Montana."
Mitte will speak at the Varsity Theater, 1324 W. Wisconsin Ave. His appearance is free and open to the public.
Mitte plays the teenage son of the high school teacher turned meth manufacturer, Walter White, played by Brian Cranston, and his wife Skyler played by Anna Gunn.
Young Walt uses crutches on the show but Mitte has been quoted as saying he never used them. The character is often portrayed eating breakfast and heading off to or coming home from school.Several reports out of Ghana are claiming that the national team is preparing to stage a boycott of its final Group Stage match against Portugal if World Cup qualifying bonuses which were promised to the players aren't delivered.
According to Joy Sports, FA spokesperson and former BBC journalist Ibrahim Sannie Daara has confirmed that the players have not received any compensation since arriving in Brazil. The same report suggests that Ghana players are currently refusing travel arrangements from their team base in Maceio to Brasilia until the situation is rectified.
This has led to President John Mahama's intervention, including a personal promise from the Ghanian leader that the unpaid $75,000 guaranteed to each player will finally be delivered by the end of the day on Tuesday.
If the team was to boycott the match against Portugal, Ghana would be sanctioned with a 3-0 loss, which would mean only a German win over the United States by two or more goals would give Portugal a chance of advancement to the Round of 16.Although remarkable, the Le Rhône used a complicated slipper bearing system. Its master rod had three concentric grooves to take slipper bearings from all the other cylinders. The master rod was a split-type to allow assembly of the connecting rods. The remaining rods carried bronze shoes, shaped to fit in the grooves, at their inner ends. Counting the master rod as no. 1, the shoes of no's. 2, 5, and 8 rode in the outer groove, those of 3, 6, and 9 in the middle groove, and 4 and 7 in the innermost one.
The Le Rhônes employed an unusual method of valve actuation. A single rocker arm, pivoted near its center, was made to operate both the exhaust valve and the intake valve. Pulled down, it opened the intake valve; pushed up, it opened the exhaust. To do this, the rocker had to be actuated by a push-pull rod instead of by the usual pushrod. This in turn, meant that the cam followers had to have a positive action and a system of links and levers to accomplished this. The system worked well enough that some makers used it up to the late twenties, but its use made overlap of valve openings impossible. In an engine designed for high power and speed, the intake valve begins to open before the exhaust valve is quite closed, but on the Le Rhône, the rocker arm must clear the exhaust before it can contact the intake. While this puts a limit on power output, it is not necessarily a fault. As it was, most Le Rhône models produced all the power that their structural strength and cooling arrangements could cope with. Le Rhône 80-hp models were made under license in the United States by a Pennsylvania firm, Union Switch and Signal. Oberursel made the 110-hp model, supposedly without authorization in Germany. The Oberursel U.R. II was a straight copy of the Le Rhône but the Le Rhône was preferred over the Oberursel due to the superior materials used over the home product. However, there were reports in July, 1918 that there was a shortage of Castor Oil which the rotaries required. A new Voltol-based lubricant was substituted and was blamed for a rash of engine failures on Fokker E.V using the Oberursel U.R. II rotary engine. It has been suggested that without the proper lubricants, the Le Rhône rotary would have been equally failure prone. The largest wartime Le Rhône gave only 130 hp. As rotaries went, they were dependable engines.The Crusaders once again show that they’re a force to be reckoned with in Scotty Stevenson’s latest Super Rugby power rankings.
1. Crusaders
Rd 11: 38-5 v Reds
Last week: 3 (up 2)
The Crusaders decided it would be best if they used Friday night as an opposed training session. Did this team really ever get out of third gear against the Reds? I don’t think so. I mean, seriously, who plays with 30% of the ball and still outscores a team six tries to one? Matt Todd can probably take a bow as the best on show for the Crusaders. Yes, Jone Macilai scored three tries, but Todd made 18 tackles and won four turnovers, a defensive performance that was emblematic of the entire Crusaders defensive effort. The only major for the Crusaders was the penalty count – a by-product of spending so much time tackling. They’ll want to bring the defence-offence ratio back a little against the Highlanders.
2. Highlanders
Rd 11: 26-13 v Chiefs
Last week: 4 (up 2)
Every Highlanders fan under this fair sun will be saying, hang about – we just knocked off the top of the table team, on their home patch, for the fifth-straight time and you still won’t put us at number one. Avid Power Rankings reader, Peter Reidie Esq. will be particularly incensed by this perceived slight. So, let me say this: the Highlanders came to Hamilton with a perfect game plan, looked infinitely more comfortable going wide with Waisake Naholo back in the mix, and hustled hard on turnover ball. However, they still missed 28 first up tackles, were gifted a horrific unforced error rate, and played against 14 men for 20 minutes. I’ma let you Highlanders fans finish, after the game against the Crusaders next week.
3. Chiefs
Rd 11: 13-26 v Highlanders
Last week: 1 (down 2)
The Chiefs fall a couple of places this week, as they must, but fans can take heart from the fact that the foundations of this team are still strong. This was a major off-night in the Tron for the Chiefs – a result of trying to squeeze a little too much out of the pattern after a fortnight of hard-fought victories against the Hurricanes and the Sharks. The Chiefs just kept dropping the ball, and that meant for the first 40 minutes they failed to string more than three phases of attack together. Losing Charlie Ngatai for ten minutes cost them dearly. I can’t see the Chiefs being this loose with the ball again.
4. Sharks
Rd 11: 32-15 v Hurricanes
Last week: 10 (up 6)
I am taking a massive leap of faith here. The Sharks remaining schedule looks like this: Jaguares (terrible), Kings (worst ever), Lions (a little shaky), Cheetahs (batshit crazy), and Sunwolves (knackered). Garth April has been a revelation since taking the first five jersey, and was classy against the Canes in Durban. The Sharks defence has been the team’s calling card all season long but they have started to add some attack, and that is a dangerous proposition for their conference opponents as the season draws to a close. I can’t believe I am doing this, by the way.
5. Hurricanes
Rd 11: 15-32 v Sharks
Last week: 2 (down 3)
This was a total downer for the Canes, who still managed to run for close to 600 metres in the match but struggled to find a way to capitalise. Like the Chiefs, they have so many parts of the playoff puzzle already laid out, but 24 turnovers and 22 missed tackles, combined with an outclassed lineout only adds up to disappointment. As if to make it worse, Beauden Barrett said before the match that the Sharks will feed on Hurricanes mistakes. That was supposed to be a caution, it became a prediction.
6. Stormers
Rd 11: BYE
Last week: 7 (up 1)
Barring an absolute disaster, the Stormers will win their conference. And that is just the kind of over-confident statement that ends badly.
7. Brumbies
Rd 11: 23-6 v Bulls
Last week: 12 (up 5)
As much as I wanted to sleep in the bed I made with the Waratahs, the Brumbies’ win in Canberra – as coma-inducing as it was – gets the nod for the more impressive Australian win of the round, given the fact the Bulls are a better team than the Cheetahs. Get this, the Brumbies carried 128 times and beat nine defenders. You couldn’t come up with a less penetrative stat if you were running backwards. Still, a win’s a win.
8. Waratahs
Rd 11: 21-6 v Cheetahs
Last week: 5 (down 3)
Thirty-one kicks in play! My goodness. I’m starting to wonder how much the Waratahs want to win this conference. This was a bonus point waiting to happen, and the Waratahs were guilty of waiting for it to happen, which of course it never did. If I was click-baiting the Waratahs I would headline this performance with “The Waratahs faced the Cheetahs in Sydney, you probably will believe what happened next”.
9. Lions
Rd 11: BYE
Last week: 8 (down 1)
Needed a break and got one. The Lions’ form has been on a downward trajectory over the last couple of weeks. The spark they had at the start of the season has just not been there, but I am sure there is still plenty of fire in the side. They have the Blues this week, a team that the Lions no longer fear. Four of their last six games are against conference opponents. They need this game against the Blues to set them up for the run home.
10. Blues
Rd 11: 34-18 v Kings
Last week: 9 (down 1)
The Blues won away from home for the first time since the Harbour Bridge was built, or something like that, and should at least be happy with having shaken that monkey off their back. Stink thing is, the Blues again spent so much time inside their own 22 that you would think they were trying to buy it at auction given none of them can afford land in Auckland. Why won’t Ihaia West run more? Can someone please tell me why?
11. Rebels
Rd 11: BYE
Last week: 11 (N/C)
It’s D-Day for the Rebellion this week when they face the Brumbies. Fresh from the bye and with home advantage, this is a must-win and can-win. It’s a tough run home for the Rebs, and their best chance of a playoff is still going to be winning the Australian conference. Alas, they face the two top New Zealand teams, the top Australian team and the top South African team in their last six matches. Big ask.
12. Bulls
Rd 11: 6-23 v Brumbies
Last week: 6 (down 6)
Has a side this season actually done less in a game of rugby? Hardly carried the ball, hardly passed it, hardly formed a ruck, and scored no tries. Just when I was actually starting to like the Bulls’ chances they go and serve this sort of performance up. It beggars belief that a team can make 85 passes in a game and turn the ball over 20 times. Was it covered in bees?
13. Jaguares
Rd 11: BYE
Last week: 15 (up 2)
I’m pretty sure that if I was the Jaguares coach, I would have wanted to play this week on the back of the 73-point hammering of the Kings the week before. Mind you, they do have a Sharks team to face this week, the same Sharks team that flew to New Zealand, played three tough matches, flew back to South Africa for one game, and now fly to Argentina for another. I still think the Sharks will be too much for them, in much the same way that the Stormers were.
14. Force
Rd 11: 40-22 v Sunwolves
Last week: 17 (up 3)
Fair play to the Force. After a couple months of being hunted down like Ralph in Lord of the Flies, the Force finally found someone else to pick on, inflicting a big defeat on the Sunwolves who, it must be said, probably did more to lose this match than the Force did to win it. How about Marcel Brache scoring a hat trick? This was made even better by the fact those three tries were his first for the franchise. Speaking of tries, the Force scored six in the match and that still wasn’t enough to bring their average above two per game this season.
15. Sunwolves
Rd 11: 22-40 v Force
Last week: 16 (up 1)
Showed the after-effects of celebrating their maiden win by blowing four genuine try scoring opportunities. Still managed to run 684 metres in the game, and still scored four tries. Here’s a cold hard fact for the Sunwolves: if they had thought about kicking the ball more than 12 times in the game, they would have had their second win of the season. The Force can’t kick return.
16. Reds
Rd 11: 5-38 v Crusaders
Last week: 13 (down 3)
Apart from one deftly weighted kick by Jake McIntyre which led to the Reds’ only try against the Crusaders, this was a team repeatedly banging its collective head against a brick wall in the vein hope that a crack would appear before their skull exploded. As it was, the Reds had no real change-up in attack and were repeatedly exposed by the Crusaders short-side manipulation. I’m going to give the Reds an A for effort, and a D for imagination.
17. Cheetahs
Rd 11: 6-21 v Waratahs
Last week: 14 (down 3)
The second of two South African teams to arrive in Australia, face underwhelming teams, and fail to score a single solitary try. The Cheetahs scrum looked so ordinary they should have renamed it a maul, but apart from the missed tackles, the appalling turnover rate, the ineffective kicking, the complete lack of attacking strategy, the low ruck retention rate and the one-sided scoreline, this was a great week in Cheetahs rugby.
18. Kings
Rd 11: 18-34 v Blues
Last week: 18 (N/C)
Didn’t suck as badly as last week, which was pleasing for the ten people who watched live at Nelson Mandela Stadium, and the thirteen others who watched live on television.Chad L. Coleman (born September 6, 1974) is an American actor. He became known by portraying Dennis "Cutty" Wise on the HBO crime drama series The Wire (2004–2008), voicing Coach in the video game Left 4 Dead 2, and portraying Tyreese Williams on the AMC post-apocalyptic horror series The Walking Dead (2012–2015). He currently stars in the Syfy series The Expanse as Fred Johnson, a.k.a. "The Butcher of Anderson Station", and starred in the History Channel's 2016 re-imagining of the miniseries Roots.
Early life [ edit ]
Coleman was raised in a foster home in Richmond, Virginia. As a youth, he participated in track and field, but turned his attention to studying drama after a leg injury.[1] He attended Virginia Commonwealth University on a scholarship for his freshman year, before dropping out to serve in the United States Army.[2] During his time in the army, from 1995 to 1999 he worked as a video cameraman.[3]
Career [ edit ]
Coleman had a starring role on the HBO series The Wire as reformed criminal Dennis "Cutty" Wise.[4] In 2002, Coleman starred as O.J. Simpson in TNT's television movie Monday Night Mayhem.[5]
Coleman also had a guest role in the Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series on Fox.[6] He also had a small role in Carlito's Way: Rise to Power. Coleman was also involved with the development of Left 4 Dead 2, as a voice actor for the character Coach.[7] In 2009, Coleman appeared in a revival of August Wilson's play Joe Turner's Come and Gone on Broadway and also had a starring role in the Norwegian TV series Buzz Aldrin, What Happened To You In All The Confusion?, based on the novel by Johan Harstad.[8][9] The series aired in Europe in November 2011.
Walking Dead event Coleman at a 2013event
He guest starred in the In Plain Sight episode "Whistle Stop" as an ex-boxer/witness suffering from pugilistic dementia, and in the Lie to Me episode "The Canary's Song" as a coal miner.[10] He was also a guest star in two episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia in 2010, and one in 2013.[10] In 2011, he began playing Gary Miller, the ex-husband of Nikki Miller and father of manipulative daughter Mackenzie, in the Fox television sitcom I Hate My Teenage Daughter.[4]
From late 2012 to early 2015, Coleman played Tyreese on AMC's post-apocalyptic horror series The Walking Dead.[11] In the third season, Tyreese was a recurring character. Coleman was upgraded to series regular and main cast member at the start of the fourth season and retained this status for its fifth season until his character was killed off in the mid-season premiere.[12] On November 20, 2014, he was announced to play Fred Johnson, a.k.a. "The Butcher of Anderson Station", a former Marine caught in a power struggle between Earth and Mars on the Syfy science-fiction series The Expanse.[13] Coleman has taken on a main role in the 2015 series, and returns in Season 2.
Coleman also played Mingo in the 2016 re-imagining of Roots, on the History Channel.[14] Mingo is a stern, no-nonsense slave/cock trainer for Tom Lea, who keeps the Lea plantation afloat. He befriends Chicken George and they bond like father and son.[15]
Additionally, Coleman is executive producer, as well as visual inspiration for the character Mr. Osi of the futuristic graphic novel series Treadwater.
In 2016, he played the role of Tobias Church on Arrow. Currently, he is playing the recurring role of Klyden, Second Officer Bortus's mate, on The Orville, which debuted in the fall of 2017 and entered its second season at the end of 2018.
Public image [ edit ]
On May 1, 2015, Coleman was recorded in the middle of a rant on New York City's 4 subway train. Coleman stated that the rant was prompted by "built-up frustration" stemming from the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore.[16]
In 2015, Coleman also created a PSA with Living Advantage, a non-profit organization, about how people can help foster children besides adopting them. He is planning on creating another one in 2019. [17]
Filmography [ edit ]
Film [ edit ]
Year Title Role Notes 1993 New York Cop Iceman 1998 Speed of Life Orderly 2001 The Gilded Six Bits Joe Banks Short film 2001 Revolution #9 Night Nurse 2002 The End of The Bar Dr. Scott Rosen 2004 Brother to Brother El 2005 Carlito's Way: Rise to Power Clyde Short Video 2006 Confessions Darius 2011 The Green Hornet Chili 2011 Horrible Bosses Curtis the Dive Bar Bartender 2012 Life, Love, Soul Earl Grant 2013 Habeas Corpus Ray Jr. Short film 2014 Crazy Little Thing Called... 'Ships Mr. Anders short film 2017 The Black Ghiandola Tanner Alonso short film 2018 Making Lemonade Chad short film
Television [ edit ]
Video games [ edit ]February 15, 2016
The Vagina Monologues is a lesbian porn play that has been performed thousands of times in 77 countries, most recently in Nepal.
Katmandu - Feb 14, 2016- The second day of the Vagina Monologues 2016, or Yoni Ka Kathaharu, drew in a sold-out crowd at the Mandala Theatre, Anamnagar on February 13....Madalenas Nepal is deeply rooted within Madalenas International and Theatre of the Oppressed. It was developed to recognise the need for female creative spaces to explore violence and oppression related to gender. In the director's note, Akanchha Karki says, "Vagina Monologues is not just a play or a compilation of stories, it is a beautiful liberating experience. It is a celebration of sexuality, identity, life, pleasure and love. It is a celebration of women."
SATANIC POSSESSION:
" The Vagina Monologues" violates and debauches women in the spurious name of "social progress." Mankind has been inducted into the Illuminati (Cabalist) cult which is behind Judaism, Communism, Zionism, Socialism & Feminism. Satanism dehumanizes people by reducing us to our basest sexual and material desires. Feminism teaches women to serve the bankers instead of their families. First, Jews and Freemasons were victims of Cabalism, and through them, humanity as a whole.
By Henry Makow Ph.D.
(Updated from Oct. 24, 2001)
"The Vagina Monologues" presents a sad picture of life at the dead-end of feminism. It is an anguished cry for male love by a generation of women deceived by feminism, who have no choice now but to become lesbians.
For women who are literally starved for love, the play provides a steamy experience of sexual intimacy, and initiates them into lesbianism.
Based on "interviews" with women, the play purports to rescue the female genitals from "cultural neglect." For example, the play describes a workshop in which women examine themselves with hand-mirrors.
(left, Communist raised right fist salute during performance at Dartmouth College three years ago)
"It reminded me of how early astronomers must have felt with their primitive telescopes," says author, Eve Ensler. They give their vagina nicknames, dress it up in imaginary outfits, and imagine what it would say if it could talk (e.g. "Where's Brian?"). At one performance at the Madison Square Gardens |
suppliers. It’s often helpful to ask multiple suppliers for price quotes or request a sample bill of materials (BOM) to get an idea of the supplier’s costs. Just remember the old proverb, “you get what you pay for”. It’s as true here as it is anywhere else (related: 3 Tips for Stronger Supplier Relationships).
3. Insufficient production capability or capacity
You can’t expect a factory that specializes in wall-mounted LED signs to also be capable of manufacturing the larger signs installed in a professional sports stadium. Nor could you expect a small, 20-worker facility to be able to supply hamburger patties for all of the McDonald’s stores in California.
Some suppliers simply aren’t able to fulfill orders of certain products or quantities.
Investing in new technology or equipment
A supplier might refuse your business if it means needing to seriously upgrade their facility or equipment. Giant companies, like Adidas, are moving ahead with plans to make “speed factories” capable of producing shoes with lightning-fast speed and remarkable efficiency. But you shouldn’t expect that your new supplier is ready and willing to do the same.
Upgrades to a factory can come at a major expense. A supplier may need to purchase new machinery, invest in worker training or even outsource major processes of production. In their eyes, such a major investment isn’t worthwhile if it doesn’t lead to more business. And a short-sighted supplier will see even less sense in upgrading their facility.
Of course, there are some suppliers that will claim they can do everything for you, even when they can’t. This often results in heavy use of sub-contractors, communication problems, production delays and other undesirable outcomes.
So, how do you know if your supplier is telling the truth about their capabilities?
Verify a potential supplier with an audit
The best way to be sure about a potential supplier’s production capability and capacity is to visit their factory. Few methods offer more insight than taking a walk through a facility to see production and other areas first hand.
You can avoid the confusion that many importers experience when trying to communicate by emails and phone calls alone. Visiting the factory also gives you the opportunity to clarify your product specifications and requirements face-to-face. Instant feedback from the factory manager or representative will give you a better indication of whether or not they can meet your needs.
If you’re unable to personally travel to the supplier’s facility, you may find it helpful to hire a third-party to conduct an audit for you. Such an audit typically consists of an intensive onsite factory evaluation and issues a rating based on compliance with the internationally accepted ISO 9001 standard.
This type of audit helps you determine if a supplier is right for you and can usually be completed at a fraction of the cost of traveling to an Asia-based factory yourself. In either case, it’s recommended that you avoid any supplier that refuses access to you or a professional third-party auditor.
Conclusion
There are an abundance of suppliers. And just because one might refuse your business, that doesn’t mean others will as well.
But always consider their perspective with regard to order size and price. And remember that an honest supplier will not agree to undertake fulfillment of an order with requirements they cannot meet. It rarely hurts to do some research and verify whether a potential supplier really can deliver on their promises.
And when you actually find a supplier that meets your expectations, you’re much more likely to experience long-term success and growth.
Lastly, don't forget to check out the manufacturing podcast episode that covers this article!
Have you encountered any other reasons why a supplier refused an order? Share them in the comments below!PVV leader Geert Wilders is taking his anti-Islam campaign to Australia. On Tuesday he will be the keynote speaker at the launch of a new political party, the Australian Liberty Alliance.
The aim for Australia's newest political party is to curb Muslim immigration, according to the BBC. The party's manifesto reads that "Islam is not merely a religion, it is a totalitarian ideology with global aspirations". So it seems that Wilders, as the Netherlands' own advocate against what he likes to call the "Islamic tsunami", will fit right in.
The launch of the ALA is by invitation only at an undisclosed location in Western Australia. Wilders has already arrived in Australia, after some controversy surrounding whether or not he should be allowed a visa to the country. The controversial politician posted a photo of himself holding a koala on Twitter on Monday.
A while ago entertainment blog io9 posted an article stating that the Australian population of koalas have been struggling with outbreaks of a strain sexual transmitted disease Chlamydia that can be transmitted to humans through the animals' urine. So PVV leader Geert Wilders may want to be extra careful about washing up to avoid an awkward conversation with the doctor.We're thinking there's literally no way to handle this problem other than to have a montage in Dark Knight Rises where Batman sneaks into the apartments of his day laborers, one at a time, and stabs them with a Batarang. Nothing else makes sense.
Conclusion: Batman Simply Won't Share Credit
At this point this probably all sounds like ridiculous fanboy nitpicking, but this is actually kind of important. Remember what we said at the beginning -- the whole appeal of Batman is that he's alone, unable to share his burden with anyone truly close to him. And he manages just fine -- he's a friendless genius with no real social skills. He succeeds all by himself. That's the message of Batman. You don't need anyone if you're capable enough.
"Batman says its OK that mommy doesn't come home anymore."
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But the Batcave shines a light on that ridiculous lie. Batman doesn't fight crime alone, it's physically impossible. Behind him has to be hundreds of probably poorly paid staff, many of whom go home smelling like bat shit every night, all of them bearing the same burden of secrecy that Bruce Wayne bears (if the Joker finds out you work for Batman, you and your family are dead). Only these guys don't sleep on a billionaire's mattress every night.
And they don't get the thrill of catching The Penguin or seeing their work make a difference. They just grind away, day after day, running the cables and installing the anti-virus software and rooting out the Bat-toilets.
And, of course, the Bat-Gutters.
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We never see these people. They never get their moment on camera, they never get an action figure, they never win medals or get so much as a "thank you" from the people of Gotham. Even though without these nameless workers, Batman would just be some rich dipshit running blindly around town with a grappling hook, looking for crime.
Maybe that's part of the problem with the world, that all of the kids want to grow up to be Batman, but nobody wants to be the guy who takes out Batman's trash. But those people have to exist.
No one ever talks about the Bat-Proctologist.
Well, assuming Batman hasn't killed them.
You can find us point out more glaring flaws in classic movie plots in our brand new book. Or check out 6 Baffling Flaws in Famous Sci-Fi Technology.Regulatory capture is a form of government failure which occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.[1] When regulatory capture occurs, the interests of firms or political groups are prioritized over the interests of the public, leading to a net loss for society. Government agencies suffering regulatory capture are called "captured agencies".
Theory [ edit ]
Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) as Barrier-to-Competition: Applications-to-Operate vs In-Operation
For public choice theorists, regulatory capture occurs because groups or individuals with a high-stakes interest in the outcome of policy or regulatory decisions can be expected to focus their resources and energies in attempting to gain the policy outcomes they prefer, while members of the public, each with only a tiny individual stake in the outcome, will ignore it altogether.[2] Regulatory capture refers to the actions by interest groups when this imbalance of focused resources devoted to a particular policy outcome is successful at "capturing" influence with the staff or commission members of the regulatory agency, so that the preferred policy outcomes of the special interest groups are implemented.
-- The Theory of Economic Regulation, [3]... as a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit... We propose the general hypothesis: every industry or occupation that has enough political power to utilize the state will seek to control entry. In addition, the regulatory policy will often be so fashioned as to retard the rate of growth of new firms.-- George Stigler, 1971
Regulatory capture theory is a core focus of the branch of public choice referred to as the economics of regulation; economists in this specialty are critical of conceptualizations of governmental regulatory intervention as being motivated to protect public good. Often cited articles include Bernstein (1955), Huntington (1952), Laffont & Tirole (1991), and Levine & Forrence (1990). The theory of regulatory capture is associated with Nobel laureate economist George Stigler,[4] one of its main developers.[5]
Likelihood of regulatory capture is a risk to which an agency is exposed by its very nature.[6] This suggests that a regulatory agency should be protected from outside influence as much as possible. Alternatively, it may be better to not create a given agency at all lest the agency become victim, in which case it may serve its regulated subjects rather than those whom the agency was designed to protect. A captured regulatory agency is often worse than no regulation, because it wields the authority of government. However, increased transparency of the agency may mitigate the effects of capture. Recent evidence suggests that, even in mature democracies with high levels of transparency and media freedom, more extensive and complex regulatory environments are associated with higher levels of corruption (including regulatory capture).[7]
Relationship with federalism [ edit ]
There is substantial academic literature suggesting that smaller government units are easier for small, concentrated industries to capture than large ones. For example, a group of states or provinces with a large timber industry might have their legislature and/or their delegation to the national legislature captured by lumber companies. These states or provinces then becomes the voice of the industry, even to the point of blocking national policies that would be preferred by the majority across the whole federation. Moore and Giovinazzo (2012) call this "distortion gap".[8]
The opposite scenario is possible with very large industries, however. Very large and powerful industries (e.g. energy, banking, weapon system construction) can capture national governments, and then use that power to block policies at the federal, state or provincial level that the voters may want,[9] although even local interests can thwart national priorities.[10]
Economic rationale [ edit ]
The idea of regulatory capture has an obvious economic basis, in that vested interests in an industry have the greatest financial stake in regulatory activity and are more likely to be motivated to influence the regulatory body than dispersed individual consumers,[2] each of whom has little particular incentive to try to influence regulators. When regulators form expert bodies to examine policy, this invariably features current or former industry members, or at the very least, individuals with contacts in the industry. Capture is also facilitated in situations where consumers or taxpayers have a poor understanding of underlying issues and businesses enjoy a knowledge advantage.[11]
Some economists, such as Jon Hanson and his co-authors, argue that the phenomenon extends beyond just political agencies and organizations. Businesses have an incentive to control anything that has power over them, including institutions from the media, academia and popular culture, thus they will try to capture them as well. This phenomenon is called "deep capture".[12]
Regulatory public interest is based on market failure and welfare economics. It holds that regulation is the response of the government to public needs. Its purpose is to make up for market failures, improve the efficiency of resource allocation, and maximize social welfare. Posner pointed out that the public interest theory contains the assumption that the market is fragile, and that if left unchecked, it will tend to be unfair and inefficient, and government regulation is a costless and effective way to meet the needs of social justice and efficiency. Mimik believes that government regulation is a public administration policy that focuses on private behavior. It is a rule drawn from the public interest. Irving and Brouhingan saw regulation as a way of obeying public needs and weakening the risk of market operations. It also expressed the view that regulation reflects the public interest.
Development [ edit ]
The review of the United States' history of regulation at the end of the 19th century,[clarification needed] especially the regulation of railway tariffs by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) in 1887, revealed that regulations and market failures are not co-relevant. At least until the 1960s, in terms of regulatory experience, regulation was developed in the direction of favoring producers, and regulation increased the profits of manufacturers within the industry. In potentially competitive industries such as the trucking industry and the taxi industry, regulations allow pricing to be higher than cost and prevent entrants. In the natural monopoly industries such as the electric power industry, there are facts that regulation has little effect on prices, so the industry can earn profits above normal profits. Empirical evidence proves that regulation is beneficial to producers.[citation needed]
These empirical observations have led to the emergence and development of regulatory capture theory. Contrary to regulatory public interest theory, regulation capture theory holds that the provision of regulation is adapting to the industry's need for regulation, that is, the legislator is controlled and captured by the industry in regulation, and the regulation institution is gradually controlled by the industry. That is, the regulator is captured by the industry. The basic view of the regulatory capture theory is that no matter how the regulatory scheme is designed, the regulation of an industry by a regulatory agency is actually "captured" by the industry. The implication is that regulation increases the profits of the industry rather than social welfare.[citation needed]
The above-mentioned regulatory capture theory is essentially a purely capture theory in the early days, that is, the regulators and legislators were captured and controlled by the industry. The later regulatory models such as Stiegler (Stigler Model)-Pelzmann (Pelzmann Model)-Becker (Becker Model) belong to the regulatory capture theory in the eyes of Posner (1974) and others. Because these models all reflect that regulators and legislators are not pursuing the maximization of public interests, but the maximization of private interests, that is, using "private interest" theory to explain the origin and purpose of regulation. Aton (1986) argues that Stigler's theoretical logic is clear and more central than the previous "capture theory" hypothesis, but it is difficult to distinguish between the two.[citation needed]
Regulatory capture theory has a specific meaning, that is, an experience statement that regulations are beneficial for producers in real life. In fact, it is essentially not a true regulatory theory. Although the analysis results are similar to the Stigler model provide interpretation and support for the regulatory capture theory is beneficial for producers, however the analysis methods of the latter are completely different. Stigler used standard economic analysis methods to analyze the regulation behavior, then created a new regulatory theory - regulatory economic theory. Of course, different divisions depend on the criteria for division, and they essentially depend on the researchers' different understanding of specific concepts.[citation needed]
Justice Douglas’ dissent in Sierra Club v Morton describes concern that regulatory agencies become too favorable with their regulated industries.[citation needed]
Types [ edit ]
There are two basic types of regulatory capture:[13][14]
Materialist capture, also called financial capture, in which the captured regulator's motive is based on its material self-interest. This can result from bribery, revolving doors, political donations, or the regulator's desire to maintain its government funding. These forms of capture often amount to political corruption.
, also called, in which the captured regulator's motive is based on its material self-interest. This can result from bribery, revolving doors, political donations, or the regulator's desire to maintain its government funding. These forms of capture often amount to political corruption. Non-materialist capture, also called cognitive capture or cultural capture, in which the regulator begins to think like the regulated industry. This can result from interest-group lobbying by the industry.
Another distinction can be made between capture retained by big firms and by small firms.[15] While Stigler mainly referred, in his work,[16] to large firms capturing regulators by bartering their vast resources (materialist capture) – small firms are more prone to retain non-materialist capture via a special underdog rhetoric.[15]
Examples [ edit ]
United States examples [ edit ]
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement [ edit ]
In the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), which had regulatory responsibility for offshore oil drilling, was widely cited as an example of regulatory capture.[17][18] The MMS then became the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) and on October 1, 2010, the collection of mineral leases was split off from the agency and placed under the Department of the Interior as the Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR). On October 1, 2011, BOEMRE was then split into two bureaus, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).[19]
The three-stage reorganization, including the name change to BOEMRE, was part of a re-organization by Ken Salazar,[19] who was sworn into office as the new Secretary of the Interior on the same day the name change was announced.[20] Salazar's appointment was controversial because of his ties to the energy industry.[21] As a senator, Salazar voted against an amendment to repeal tax breaks for ExxonMobil and other major petroleum companies[22] and in 2006, he voted to end protections that limit offshore oil drilling in Florida's Gulf Coast.[23] One of Salazar's immediate tasks was to "[end] the department's coziness with the industries it regulates"[21] but Daniel R. Patterson, a member of the Arizona House of Representatives, said "Salazar has a disturbingly weak conservation record, particularly on energy development, global warming, endangered wildlife and protecting scientific integrity. It's no surprise oil and gas, mining, agribusiness and other polluting industries that have dominated Interior are supporting rancher Salazar – he's their friend."[21] Indeed, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, which lobbies for the mining industry, praised Salazar, saying that he was not doctrinaire about the use of public lands.[21]
MMS had allowed BP and dozens of other companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico without first attaining permits to assess threats to endangered species, as required by law.[24] BP and other companies were also given a blanket exemption (categorical exclusion)[25] from having to provide environmental impact statements.[24] The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued strong warnings about the risks posed by such drilling and in a 2009 letter, accused MMS of understating the likelihood and potential consequences of a major spill in the Gulf of Mexico.[24] The letter further accused MMS of highlighting the safety of offshore drilling while understating the risks and impact of spills and playing down the fact that spills had been increasing.[24] Both current and former MMS staff scientists said their reports were overruled and altered if they found high risk of accident or environmental impact.[24] Kieran Suckling, director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said, "MMS has given up any pretense of regulating the offshore oil industry. The agency seems to think its mission is to help the oil industry evade environmental laws."[24]
After the Deepwater accident occurred, Salazar said he would delay granting any further drilling permits. Three weeks later, at least five more permits had been issued by the minerals agency.[24] In March 2011, BOEMRE began issuing more offshore drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico.[26] Michael Bromwich, head of BOEMRE, said he was disturbed by the speed at which some oil and gas companies were shrugging off Deepwater Horizon as "a complete aberration, a perfect storm, one in a million," but would nonetheless soon be granting more permits to drill for oil and gas in the gulf.[26]
Commodity Futures Trading Commission [ edit ]
In October 2010, George H. Painter, one of the two Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) administrative law judges, retired, and in the process requested that his cases not be assigned to the other judge, Bruce C. Levine.[27] Painter wrote, "On Judge Levine's first week on the job, nearly twenty years ago, he came into my office and stated that he had promised Wendy Gramm, then Chairwoman of the Commission, that we would never rule in a complainant's favor," Painter wrote.[27] "A review of his rulings will confirm that he fulfilled his vow." In further explaining his request, he wrote, "Judge Levine, in the cynical guise of enforcing the rules, forces pro se complainants to run a hostile procedural gauntlet until they lose hope, and either withdraw their complaint or settle for a pittance, regardless of the merits of the case."[27] Gramm, wife of former Senator Phil Gramm, was accused of helping Goldman Sachs, Enron and other large firms gain influence over the commodity markets. After leaving the CFTC, Wendy Gramm joined the board of Enron.[27]
Environmental Protection Agency [ edit ]
Natural gas drilling increased in the United States after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said in 2004 that hydraulic fracturing "posed little or no threat" to drinking water.[28] Also known as "fracking", the process was invented by Halliburton in the 1940s.[29] Whistleblower Weston Wilson says that the EPA's conclusions were "unsupportable" and that five of the seven-member review panel that made the decision had conflicts of interest.[28] A New York Times editorial said the 2004 study "whitewashed the industry and was dismissed by experts as superficial and politically motivated."[29] The EPA is currently prohibited by law from regulating fracking, the result of the "Halliburton Loophole," a clause added to the 2005 energy bill at the request of then-vice president Dick Cheney, who was CEO of Halliburton before becoming vice president.[28][29] Legislation to close the loophole and restore the EPA's authority to regulate hydraulic fracturing has been referred to committee in both the House and the Senate.[30][31]
Federal Aviation Administration [ edit ]
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has a dual-mandate both to promote aviation and to regulate its safety. A report by the Department of Transportation that found FAA managers had allowed Southwest Airlines to fly 46 airplanes in 2006 and 2007 that were overdue for safety inspections, ignoring concerns raised by inspectors. Audits of other airlines resulted in two airlines grounding hundreds of planes, causing thousands of flight cancellations.[32] The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee investigated the matter after two FAA whistleblowers, inspectors Charalambe "Bobby" Boutris and Douglas E. Peters, contacted them. Boutris said he attempted to ground Southwest after finding cracks in the fuselage, but was prevented by supervisors he said were friendly with the airline.[33] The committee subsequently held hearings in April 2008. James Oberstar, former chairman of the committee said its investigation uncovered a pattern of regulatory abuse and widespread regulatory lapses, allowing 117 aircraft to be operated commercially although not in compliance with FAA safety rules.[33] Oberstar said there was a "culture of coziness" between senior FAA officials and the airlines and "a systematic breakdown" in the FAA's culture that resulted in "malfeasance, bordering on corruption."[33]
On July 22, 2008, a bill was unanimously approved in the House to tighten regulations concerning airplane maintenance procedures, including the establishment of a whistleblower office and a two-year "cooling off" period that FAA inspectors or supervisors of inspectors must wait before they can work for those they regulated.[32][34] The bill also required rotation of principal maintenance inspectors and stipulated that the word "customer" properly applies to the flying public, not those entities regulated by the FAA.[32] The bill died in a Senate committee that year.[35] In 2008 the FAA proposed to fine Southwest $10.2 million for failing to inspect older planes for cracks,[36] and in 2009 Southwest and the FAA agreed that Southwest would pay a $7.5 million penalty and would adapt new safety procedures, with the fine doubling if Southwest failed to follow through.[37] In September 2009, the FAA administrator issued a directive mandating that the agency use the term "customers" only to refer to the flying public.[38]
Prior to the deregulation of the US air industry, the Civil Aeronautics Board served to maintain an oligopoly of US airlines.[39][40]
In a June 2010 article on regulatory capture, the FAA was cited as an example of "old-style" regulatory capture, "in which the airline industry openly dictates to its regulators its governing rules, arranging for not only beneficial regulation but placing key people to head these regulators."[41]
Federal Communications Commission [ edit ]
Legal scholars have pointed to the possibility that federal agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had been captured by media conglomerates. Peter Schuck of Yale Law School has argued that the FCC is subject to capture by the media industries' leaders and therefore reinforce the operation of corporate cartels in a form of "corporate socialism" that serves to "regressively tax consumers, impoverish small firms, inhibit new entry, stifle innovation, and diminish consumer choice".[42] The FCC selectively granted communications licenses to some radio and television stations in a process that excludes other citizens and little stations from having access to the public.[43]
Michael K. Powell, who served on the FCC for eight years and was chairman for four, was appointed president and chief executive officer of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, a lobby group. As of April 25, 2011, he will be the chief lobbyist and the industry's liaison with Congress, the White House, the FCC and other federal agencies.[44]
Meredith Attwell Baker was one of the FCC commissioners who approved a controversial merger between NBC Universal and Comcast. Four months later, she announced her resignation from the FCC to join Comcast's Washington, D.C. lobbying office.[45] Legally, she is prevented from lobbying anyone at the FCC for two years and an agreement made by Comcast with the FCC as a condition of approving the merger will ban her from lobbying any executive branch agency for life.[45] Nonetheless, Craig Aaron, of Free Press, who opposed the merger, complained that "the complete capture of government by industry barely raises any eyebrows" and said public policy would continue to suffer from the "continuously revolving door at the FCC".[45]
Ajit V. Pai, a former lawyer for Verizon, is the current FCC chairman.[46]
Federal Reserve Bank of New York [ edit ]
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed) is the most influential of the Federal Reserve Banking System. Part of the New York Fed's responsibilities is the regulation of Wall Street, but its president is selected by and reports to a board dominated by the chief executives of some of the banks it oversees.[47] While the New York Fed has always had a closer relationship with Wall Street, during the years that Timothy Geithner was president, he became unusually close with the scions of Wall Street banks,[47] a time when banks and hedge funds were pursuing investment strategies that caused the 2008 financial crisis, which the Fed failed to stop.
During the financial crisis, several major banks that were on the verge of collapse were rescued with government emergency funding.[47] Geithner engineered the New York Fed's purchase of $30 billion of credit default swaps from American International Group (AIG), which it had sold to Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank and Société Générale. By purchasing these contracts, the banks received a "back-door bailout" of 100 cents on the dollar for the contracts.[48] Had the New York Fed allowed AIG to fail, the contracts would have been worth much less, resulting in much lower costs for any taxpayer-funded bailout.[48] Geithner defended his use[48] of unprecedented amounts of taxpayer funds to save the banks from their own mistakes,[47] saying the financial system would have been threatened. At the January 2010 congressional hearing into the AIG bailout, the New York Fed initially refused to identify the counterparties that benefited from AIG's bailout, claiming the information would harm AIG.[48] When it became apparent this information would become public, a legal staffer at the New York Fed e-mailed colleagues to warn them, lamenting the difficulty of continuing to keep Congress in the dark.[48] Jim Rickards calls the bailout a crime and says "the regulatory system has become captive to the banks and the non-banks".[49]
Interstate Commerce Commission [ edit ]
Historians, political scientists, and economists have often used the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), a now-defunct federal regulatory body in the United States, as a classic example of regulatory capture. The creation of the ICC was the result of widespread and longstanding anti-railroad agitation. Richard Olney joined the Grover Cleveland administration as attorney general not long after the ICC was established. Olney, formerly a prominent railroad lawyer, was asked if he could do something to get rid of the ICC.[17] He replied,
The Commission… is, or can be made, of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of the railroads, at the same time that supervision is almost entirely nominal. Further, the older such a commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things.… The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission, but to utilize it.[17]
While the Interstate Commerce Act forbade "undue and unreasonable prejudice" against interstate passengers, in the sixty-six years before Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company (1955) the ICC had ruled against every black petitioner bringing a racial segregation complaint, earning the nickname "The Supreme Court of the Confederacy".[50] The ICC then failed to enforce Keys vs. Carolina Coach, attempting to justify segregation on a separate but equal basis for six years before being forced by the Department of Justice under then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to act in response to the Freedom Riders protests of 1961.[51]
Nuclear Regulatory Commission [ edit ]
According to Frank N. von Hippel, despite the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has often been too timid in ensuring that America's 104 commercial reactors are operated safely:
Nuclear power is a textbook example of the problem of "regulatory capture"—in which an industry gains control of an agency meant to regulate it. Regulatory capture can be countered only by vigorous public scrutiny and Congressional oversight, but in the 32 years since Three Mile Island, interest in nuclear regulation has declined precipitously.[52]
Then-candidate Barack Obama said in 2007 that the five-member NRC had become "captive of the industries that it regulates" and Joe Biden indicated he had absolutely no confidence in the agency.[53]
The NRC has given a license to "every single reactor requesting one", according to Greenpeace USA nuclear policy analyst Jim Riccio to refer to the agency approval process as a "rubber stamp".[54] In Vermont, ten days after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that damaged Japan's Daiichi plant in Fukushima, the NRC approved a 20-year extension for the license of Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, although the Vermont state legislature had voted overwhelmingly to deny such an extension.[54][55] The Vermont plant uses the same GE Mark 1 reactor design as the Fukushima Daiichi plant.[54] The plant had been found to be leaking radioactive materials through a network of underground pipes, which Entergy, the company running the plant, had denied under oath even existed. Representative Tony Klein, who chaired the Vermont House Natural Resources and Energy Committee, said that when he asked the NRC about the pipes at a hearing in 2009, the NRC didn't know about their existence, much less that they were leaking.[54] On March 17, 2011, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a study critical of the NRC's 2010 performance as a regulator. The UCS said that through the years, it had found the NRC's enforcement of safety rules has not been "timely, consistent, or effective" and it cited 14 "near-misses" at U.S. plants in 2010 alone.[56] Tyson Slocum, an energy expert at Public Citizen said the nuclear industry has "embedded itself in the political establishment" through "reliable friends from George Bush to Barack Obama", that the government "has really just become cheerleaders for the industry."[57]
Although the exception, there have been instances of a revolving door. Jeffrey Merrifield, who was on the NRC from 1997 to 2008 and was appointed by presidents Clinton and Bush, left the NRC to take an executive position at The Shaw Group,[54] which has a nuclear division regulated by the NRC.[note 1] However, most former commissioners return to academia or public service in other agencies.
A year-long Associated Press (AP) investigation showed that the NRC, working with the industry, has relaxed regulations so that aging reactors can remain in operation.[58] The AP found that wear and tear of plants, such as clogged lines, cracked parts, leaky seals, rust and other deterioration resulted in 26 alerts about emerging safety problems and may have been a factor in 113 of the 226 alerts issued by the NRC between 2005 and June 2011.[58] The NRC repeatedly granted the industry permission to delay repairs and problems often grew worse before they were fixed.[58][note 2]
However, a paper by Stanford University economics professors John B. Taylor and Frank A. Wolak compared the financial services and nuclear industries. While acknowledging both are susceptible in principle to regulatory capture, they concluded regulatory failure – including through regulatory capture – has been much more of a problem in the financial industry and even suggested the financial industry create an analog to the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations to reduce regulatory risk.[59]
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency [ edit ]
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has strongly opposed the efforts of the 50 state attorneys general, who have banded together to penalize banks and reform the mortgage modification process, following the subprime mortgage crisis and the financial crisis of 2008. This example was cited in The New York Times as evidence that the OCC is "a captive of the banks it is supposed to regulate".[60]
Securities and Exchange Commission [ edit ]
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has also been accused of acting in the interests of Wall Street banks and hedge funds and of dragging its feet or refusing to investigate cases or bring charges for fraud and insider trading.[61] Financial analyst Harry Markopolos, who spent ten years trying to get the SEC to investigate Bernie Madoff, called the agency "nonfunctional, captive to the industry."[62]
Similarly in the case of the Allen Stanford Ponzi scheme, there were repeated warnings of fraud from both inside and outside the SEC for more than a decade.[63] But the agency did not stop the fraud until 2009, after the Madoff scandal became public in 2008.
The SEC has been found by the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, the Senate Judiciary Committee and a federal district court to have illegally dismissed an employee in September 2005 who was critical of superiors' refusal to pursue Wall Street titan John Mack. Mack was suspected of giving insider information to Arthur J. Samberg, head of Pequot Capital Management,[64] once one of the world's largest hedge funds.[65] After more than four years of legal battles, former SEC investigator Gary J. Aguirre filed papers in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case he had against the SEC, seeking an order to force the SEC to turn over Pequot investigation records to him on the grounds that they had not charged anyone. Aguirre had already provided incriminating evidence of Pequot's insider trading involving Microsoft trades to the SEC in a letter on January 2, 2009.[66] The morning after Aguirre's FOIA papers were filed,[66] the SEC announced they had filed charges against Pequot and Pequot had agreed to disgorge $18 million in illegal gains and pay $10 million in penalties.[65][67] A month later, the SEC settled Aguirre's wrongful termination lawsuit for $755,000.[68]
The list of officials who have left the SEC for highly lucrative jobs in the private sector and who sometimes have returned to the SEC includes Arthur Levitt, Robert Khuzami,[69] Linda Chatman Thomsen,[70] Richard H. Walker,[71] Gary Lynch[72] and Paul R. Berger.[73] The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) released a report on May 13, 2011, which found that between 2006 and 2010, 219 former SEC employees sought to represent clients before the SEC.[74][75] Former employees filed 789 statements notifying the SEC of their intent to represent outside clients before the commission, some filing within days of leaving the SEC.[74][75]
Reporter Matt Taibbi calls the SEC a classic case of regulatory capture[76] and the SEC has been described as an agency that was set up to protect the public from Wall Street, but now protects Wall Street from the public.[77] On August 17, 2011, Taibbi reported that in July 2001, a preliminary fraud investigation against Deutsche Bank was stymied by Richard H. Walker, then SEC enforcement director, who began working as general counsel for Deutsche Bank in October 2001. Darcy Flynn, an SEC lawyer, the whistleblower who exposed this case also revealed that for 20 years, the SEC had been routinely destroying all documents related to thousands of preliminary inquiries that were closed rather than proceeding to formal investigation. The SEC is legally required to keep files for 25 years and destruction is supposed to be done by the National Archives and Records Administration. The lack of files deprives investigators of possible background when investigating cases involving those firms. Documents were destroyed for inquiries into Bernard Madoff, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, Bank of America and other major Wall Street firms that played key roles in the 2008 financial crisis. The SEC has since changed its policy on destroying those documents and the SEC investigator general is investigating the matter.[78][79]
Federal Trade Commission [ edit ]
The decision known as In re Amway Corp., and popularly called Amway '79, made the FTC a captive regulator of the nascent Multi-Level Marketing industry. The situation |
be used for flavoring several types of dishes (they are the primary flavoring agent in Gin also). Lilac - Very light, subtle smoke flavor with floral nuances. Can be good with seafood and other milder dishes.
- Very light, subtle smoke flavor with floral nuances. Can be good with seafood and other milder dishes. Lime - This is actually a quite poor fuel wood, not giving off much heat. Better for other uses like carving.
- This is actually a quite poor fuel wood, not giving off much heat. Better for other uses like carving. Maple - Smokey but with a mellow, slightly sweet aroma and flavor, this is a good fuel wood. Compliments pork, poultry and game birds nicely.
- Smokey but with a mellow, slightly sweet aroma and flavor, this is a good fuel wood. Compliments pork, poultry and game birds nicely. Mesquite - Another one of the most popular woods for cooking either as a primary fuel or as a smoking wood. Burns very hot with a smokey but richly flavored smoke. Nice earthy flavor is good with just about anything including beef, fish, chicken and game.
- Another one of the most popular woods for cooking either as a primary fuel or as a smoking wood. Burns very hot with a smokey but richly flavored smoke. Nice earthy flavor is good with just about anything including beef, fish, chicken and game. Mulberry - Like pear, this is similar in many ways to apple. Sweet smelling smoke is great for cooking.
- Like pear, this is similar in many ways to apple. Sweet smelling smoke is great for cooking. Oak - Oak is one of the best fire wood types. It requires a good deal of seasoning time (as much as 2 years) but then is a good slow burning wood with lots of heat and a small flame. If it is not fully seasoned the smoke can be very dense and bitter. The flavor is a heavy smokey flavor which is good with bold foods like ribs, red meat, pork and heavy game.
- Oak is one of the best fire wood types. It requires a good deal of seasoning time (as much as 2 years) but then is a good slow burning wood with lots of heat and a small flame. If it is not fully seasoned the smoke can be very dense and bitter. The flavor is a heavy smokey flavor which is good with bold foods like ribs, red meat, pork and heavy game. Other sweet fruit woods - Fruit woods such as apricot, plum, peach, nectarine all tend to be excellent flavoring agents for lighter meats like chicken, turkey, pork, and fish. They tend to be a bit milder and sweeter than hickory.
- Fruit woods such as apricot, plum, peach, nectarine all tend to be excellent flavoring agents for lighter meats like chicken, turkey, pork, and fish. They tend to be a bit milder and sweeter than hickory. Pear - An outstanding firewood similar in characteristics and use to apple.
- An outstanding firewood similar in characteristics and use to apple. Pecan - While not the best firewood for heat, it has an excellent sweet and mild flavor similar to hickory which makes it excellent for smoking.
- While not the best firewood for heat, it has an excellent sweet and mild flavor similar to hickory which makes it excellent for smoking. Pine - This burns well when well seasoned but has a tendency to crackle and pop because it is resinous and a softwood. Good for kindling since it lights easily but too much can leave a strong piney smell which is nice outdoors but can be overwhelming indoors or with food. Can also leave an oily soot in your chimney. I'd avoid this for cooking.
- This burns well when well seasoned but has a tendency to crackle and pop because it is resinous and a softwood. Good for kindling since it lights easily but too much can leave a strong piney smell which is nice outdoors but can be overwhelming indoors or with food. Can also leave an oily soot in your chimney. I'd avoid this for cooking. Pinion pine - While most pine is a softwood, this type is one of the hardest pines with a pretty outdoorsy fragrance and also has natural insect repelling characteristics. Not good for cooking but a nice outdoor fire pit wood. Popular for use in chimineas.
- While most pine is a softwood, this type is one of the hardest pines with a pretty outdoorsy fragrance and also has natural insect repelling characteristics. Not good for cooking but a nice outdoor fire pit wood. Popular for use in chimineas. Spruce - This is a very sparky wood which burns quickly. Not one of the best.
- This is a very sparky wood which burns quickly. Not one of the best. Walnut - Walnut, all types, tends to give off a heavy smoke which when used alone can be quite bitter. Best to use along with other sweeter woods like almond, pear or apple with heartier fare like red meats and game. Well that's it! So what is the best firewood? As you can see, that depends on the answer to the question, best firewood for what? While some are good for cooking, others are not. While some are good starter woods, others are not. I hope this list and info will help you find the best firewood for your needs. The best place I know of to buy fire accessories is SpitJack.com. They have a selection of firewood carrying, splitting and storage equipment. They are also the very best for beautiful and functional fireplace cooking accessories including fireplace grills, rotisseries, cranes, and utensils as well as fire pits and other fire and fire cooking related accessories.
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Go back to the Firewood page.A man has been charged with multiple counts of rape following a child sexual exploitation investigation in Rochdale.
Osman Ali is accused of six counts of raping a child aged under 13, Greater Manchester Police announced this morning.
The 25-year-old, who is from Rochdale, is due to appear before magistrates today.
A man has been charged with raping a child aged under 13 in Rochdale, pictured in file photo
A spokeswoman for Greater Manchester Police said: 'He has been remanded into custody to appear before Manchester and Salford Magistrates' Court today.
'The charge comes following an investigation carried out by the multi-agency Rochdale Sunrise team into a report of child sexual exploitation made on 16 May 2017.'
The Rochdale Sunrise team includes workers from police, local councils and the NHS which advise children in the area.
They go into schools to raise awareness among youngsters of issues of sexual exploitation and other crime against children.Hershey's is suing to block importers from bringing authentic Cadbury eggs from England to the United States. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Danielle Tcholakian
WEST VILLAGE — It's a war on Cadbury.
British businesses in New York City, including the Village's Tea & Sympathy, are up in arms over a lawsuit preventing them from importing Cadbury eggs and other candies from England.
Nicky Perry, owner of Tea & Sympathy, was shocked when one of her suppliers told her last week that she would no longer be able to order the Cadbury chocolates she grew up eating.
"It's just another thing to make everybody miserable," said Perry, 55. "Why are we having a fight about chocolate? I mean, chocolate!"
The intellectual property lawsuit, brought by American candy company The Hershey Co. against LBB Imports, claims that various British candies are too similar to those manufactured by Hershey's and cannot be sold in the United States.
Tea & Sympathy in the West Village refuses to carry American-made Cadbury eggs, and now can't import authentic ones from England, thanks to a lawsuit brought by Hershey against an import company. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Danielle Tcholakian
The orange wrappers on British Toffee Crisp candies are too similar to wrappers on Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, for instance, potentially confusing shoppers, Hershey's claimed in the lawsuit. England's Yorkie chocolate bars should also be forbidden, because they are too similar in name to Hershey's York Peppermint Patties, even though they have different packaging and a different shape, the lawsuit says.
Also, Hershey's holds an exclusive right to produce some other British candies — like Cadbury Creme Eggs — and package them under the same name as the originals, according to the lawsuit.
Most Cadbury eggs in typical American stores are likely produced by Hershey's. British specialty stores seek out imported British versions for authenticity — and because many British transplants, like Perry, believe the original candy recipe is superior.
"You know what’s behind it, right?" Perry fumed, referring to Hershey's lawsuit. "Hershey’s doesn’t want people to eat Cadbury’s, because Cadbury’s is so much better, people aren’t going to be buying their filth."
The recipes used by Hershey's in the United States and by Cadbury in the United Kingdom differ, said Hershey spokesman Jeff Beckman, because Hershey's recipe adheres to American food regulations, which differ from those in the U.K.
Perry said the loss of Cadbury and other British chocolate products won't decimate her business, because she has an eatery in addition to her store. But she is concerned about other British retailers in the city, like the nearby Hudson Street specialty grocer Myers of Keswick.
"With all our rent and the real estate taxes — how do people think we can survive?" Perry said. "I mean, this is going to put everybody out of business, man."
An employee at Myers of Keswick confirmed the West Village shop is negatively impacted by the lawsuit, but declined to say more. A message left for the owner was not immediately returned.
LBB Imports president Nathan Dulley said the company is working out a settlement deal with Hershey's but declined to go into specifics.
Beckman, Hershey's spokesman, said LBB had already agreed to stop importing British Cadbury products as a result of the lawsuit.
"It is important for Hershey to protect its trademark rights and to prevent consumers from being confused or misled when they see a product name or product package that is confusingly similar to a Hershey name or trade dress," Beckman said.
"Hershey has always vigorously protected its brands and will continue to do so whenever we believe that others have infringed on these valuable intellectual assets."
Hershey's previously won a similar lawsuit against another importer, Posh Nosh, by default, when the importer failed to respond to Hershey's legal complaint.The need to be constantly available and respond 24/7 on social media accounts can cause depression, anxiety and reduce sleep quality for teenagers says a study being presented September 11, 2015, at a British Psychological Society conference in Manchester.
The researchers, Dr Heather Cleland Woods and Holly Scott of the University of Glasgow, provided questionnaires for 467 teenagers regarding their overall and night-time specific social media use. A further set of tests measured sleep quality, self-esteem, anxiety, depression and emotional investment in social media which relates to the pressure felt to be available 24/7 and the anxiety around, for example, not responding immediately to texts or posts
Dr Cleland Woods explained: "Adolescence can be a period of increased vulnerability for the onset of depression and anxiety, and poor sleep quality may contribute to this. It is important that we understand how social media use relates to these. Evidence is increasingly supporting a link between social media use and wellbeing, particularly during adolescence, but the causes of this are unclear."
Analysis showed that overall and night-time specific social media use along with emotional investment were related to poorer sleep quality, lower self-esteem as well as higher anxiety and depression levels.
Lead researcher Dr Cleland Woods said "While overall social media use impacts on sleep quality, those who log on at night appear to be particularly affected. This may be mostly true of individuals who are highly emotionally invested. This means we have to think about how our kids use social media, in relation to time for switching off."
The study is presented at the BPS Developmental and Social Psychology Section annual conference taking place from the 9 to 11 September at The Palace Hotel in Manchester.Into the wild... trekking in Africa.
A love of adventure drew Philippa Strickland to the ancient island of Lamu, off the Kenyan coast. It was beautiful and captivating but, as she discovered, even paradise has a dark side.
He seized me with his left arm while his right hand brandished a knife at my throat. I tried to grab it, but the blade sliced across my fingers. I'd first noticed this man moments earlier staring at me as I left a nearby restaurant after breakfast. We were alone on this path. Before I could think or act, everything went black.
When I could see again, I was on the floor and he was straddling me as he adjusted a balaclava on his head. His build was unimposing but, in his right hand, he still held the knife and now pointed the tip of it down at my chest. I wasn't so much scared as dazed by what I saw, convinced it was a delusion I just had to wait out.
Mixing with the locals... Philippa Strickland with a local woman in east Africa.
"What's happening?" I asked. Hearing my own voice, I realised this was no dream. The sounds were too clear, the colours too vivid and the smells too intense: the stench of human excrement filled my nostrils. I looked around. I was lying underneath an overturned wooden boat that had been propped against a wall to create a makeshift public toilet. How did I get here?
Confusion and panic overwhelmed me, stunning me into submission. "What do you want from me?" He put his face close to mine. "I only want one thing," he replied and his eyes darted down to my hips. My heart began to thump, my terror palpable in this closed-off world. I started to plead with him, "Please don't do this to me."
He pressed his hand heavily over my mouth and looked piercingly into my eyes: "I have two men out there watching for me. If you make any noise, I will tell them to come here. Do you want one man raping you or three?"
I'd arrived on Lamu Island, off the north-east coast of Kenya, the previous afternoon, September 4, after travelling 24 hours from Nairobi on overcrowded buses along dusty, potholed, dirt roads and, finally, by boat. I was exhausted, but captivated by the beauty of Lamu Town as we entered its port. Described on UNESCO's World Heritage List as "the oldest and best-preserved Swahili settlement in East Africa", the crumbling architecture lining many of Lamu's cramped laneways dates back to the 14th century, when the town was established along a major Arab trading route.
With beautiful, white-sand beaches fringing the warm Indian Ocean, car-free streets heaving with life, the aroma of grilled fish drifting along the esplanade and the call to prayer permeating every crevice of its dilapidated buildings, the town made me feel as if I'd been transported back in time. This was everything that excited me about travelling. I dumped my bags at the hotel, grabbed my camera and went out to explore the foreshore as the sun began to set. It was humming with activity: veiled women with children in tow bustled purposefully among the shops, and donkeys lugged loads of cement from boats to building sites as the menfolk ambled from their evening prayers.
I knew this paradise had its dark side, however. In 2011, Somali pirates kidnapped a disabled French woman, Marie Dedieu, from her home on the small island of Manda just west of Lamu; both islands are part of an archipelago lying 100 kilometres south of the Kenya-Somali border. They refused her her daily medications for cancer and heart problems, which resulted in her death, and then attempted to sell her body. Two weeks earlier, a British couple had been abducted further up the coast in Kiwayu. Judith Tebbutt was held for six months before being released for a $1 million ransom; her husband, David, received a fatal shot to the chest as he tried to wrestle with one of the gunmen.
These events had had a significant impact on Lamu's tourism industry, and although people were gradually starting to return to the island, the restaurants along the foreshore were empty. I was the only guest in my hotel, which my 2010 guide book described as "often full both in and out of season": it was multi-storeyed with eight rooms sprawled haphazardly over three floors. Run by a friendly local family, it had an open terrace on the roof that overlooked the mosque next door.
As a tall, blonde, 31-year-old white woman, I didn't go unnoticed in Lamu. In the narrow streets, young men sat in groups drinking tea or playing board games, gesturing for me to join them. Having spent the past nine months in Africa, I'd grown used to the attention and chose to ignore it.
The freedom to explore the world like this was infectious. As a keen photographer, I could be wherever I wanted to be, whenever I wanted to be, just to catch the best light; I could change my plans on a whim. Other travellers would ignite my interest in new destinations or alternative routes, and the friendships I'd made on the road were enduring. Every day was new and exciting and my perspective on the world and my own life had been challenged immeasurably.
Travel had equipped and enriched me in a way my formal education never had. I had backpacked like this for the past 10 years, spending eight or nine months overseas, then returning home to Adelaide to work in order to fund the next trip. Nothing bad had happened to me - yet.
I stared at the knife wedged into the sand next to my head, unable to look at the man looming over me who was now rocking rhythmically back and forth. It was the same sort of knife I used to chop vegetables at home. There was blood pouring from the cut on my hand: it was no toy. Dread collided with confusion, which fused with a constant wish to deny the reality of this situation. This wasn't me lying here, it was someone else, and I wanted her to know what to do because I didn't.
I thought about grabbing the knife, but then what? And if he overpowered me? All rational thought was stifled by fear of his every movement. Without the knife in his hand, he had become perversely gentle in his actions. When he saw the blood on my hand, he interrupted his awful rhythm to wipe it with my underwear and apologised for hurting me. His attempts to convince himself that this was something other than what it was infuriated me, yet I decided to act on this fleeting glimpse of humanity. Despite being unmarried, I tried to reason with him, saying, "My husband will kill me if he finds out", and struggling under his weight.
He clasped one hand over my mouth and pressed the other down on my neck, tightening his grasp until I could scarcely breathe. The aggressor in him left me powerless. He looked around, checking for passers-by or signals from accomplices. I tilted my head to follow his gaze - I wanted to know if there really were other men on lookout - but he yanked it back sharply. Angered, he pulled the knife from the sand and motioned to stab me in the chest with it. "I will kill you," he whispered menacingly, his eyes threatening through the holes in the balaclava.
Panic and fear enveloped me once again. Nothing had prepared me for this disarray of thoughts, resulting from a deprivation of basic rights or alternatives. I didn't want to submit to this, but what was I risking otherwise?
Abruptly, he stopped, listened. Was somebody coming? I held my breath and strained to listen through the accelerated beating of my heart thudding in my ears. He yanked up his shorts, snatched the knife and my bag from the sand, crawled out from beneath the boat and was gone. My instinct was to chase him. He had my wallet, camera and lenses - I didn't want him to get away with any more than he already had. I scrambled out into the path and ran after him. I saw him 100 metres away and then he disappeared, consumed by the sand dunes and vegetation that lay beyond the restaurant. I stopped. What was I doing? This man had a knife. Defeated, I stood in anguish, screaming.
Two young men ran towards me. While my words were lost in translation, my distress was understood and I collapsed on the sand. "We call police," they said. "Wait." One of them disappeared around the corner, returning with the couple who owned the restaurant where I'd had breakfast a short time earlier.
"What has happened to you?" questioned the woman, obviously shocked at my appearance: hair tangled with sand and excrement and blood staining the cream shirt and long skirt I was wearing. "He stole everything... and he raped me," I replied. She covered her mouth in disbelief before stepping forward to embrace me. "The police are on their way," she said. "We will take you to hospital."
The Lamu Hospital, serving the island's 100,000 residents, was a cluster of buildings surrounding an open-air courtyard on the edge of town. I sat in the surgery feeling numb. Had all this really happened?
The young Muslim doctor who treated me was warm, compassionate and worked with a professionalism and focus that contrasted significantly with the modus operandi of the police, who repeatedly knocked on the door, interrupting her examination, to ask me basic questions that they'd forgotten during their initial, muddled interview. They appeared listless and confused.
The doctor's assessment was methodical and thorough. She carried out blood tests, took swabs and explained in detail how the USAid antiretroviral drugs she was prescribing would work to reduce the risk of infection. While the man's HIV status was unknown, the prevalence of the virus in Africa, and the devastation it has wrought across the continent, are only too well known. I couldn't even contemplate what this could mean for me. While I had an Implanon rod inserted under the skin of my upper arm to prevent unwanted pregnancy, I had no control over HIV.
For the next month I would need to take five tablets a day, taken in different combinations, plus a course of antibiotics. Like many drugs, the antiretrovirals are not 100 per cent effective and, after three months, I would need to be tested for HIV. I have yet to undergo this blood test. I choose not to think about the possibility of an unwelcome outcome: I'm not preparing myself for that, for the simple reason that I don't know how to.
The doctor also addressed my psychological state. "Maybe you are still in shock and this will not hit you until later," she said. "But remember, this is not your fault and, no matter what happens, you will be okay." While I wanted to believe her, sitting in a hospital full of strangers, 10,000 kilometres from home, I wasn't so sure. "Is this common?" I asked.
"For white women, no. But for local women, particularly young girls, yes. I see too many cases."
The drop in Lamu's tourist numbers following the events of 2011, and the subsequent rise in unemployment, had apparently taken its toll on this small community. As I sat in the hospital courtyard waiting for the results of blood tests for sexually transmitted diseases, an elderly man approached me. "I'm so sorry this has happened to you," he said with sincerity. It seemed that news had spread fast. "This is because of the drug problems. This never would have happened before. Lamu is a peaceful place. But do not expect anything from these police." He lowered his voice, before adding, "They are all involved."
I was taken back to my hotel to shower and change. In an attempt to steady my nerves, I drank the last of a bottle of red wine I'd bought two days earlier. I returned to the police station later that afternoon feeling calmer and more rational, but infinitely exhausted. The officer who'd been appointed to my case asked the same question posed earlier by his colleagues: "Would you be able to identify this man?" I repeated that, since his face had been covered, this would be difficult. "Well, there is not so much we can do," he sighed. "But we will try our best."
He then asked a young officer to chaperone me to the hotel of a friend on the other side of Lamu Town. "I just walked from there," came the young officer's lethargic reply. I was too drained to argue or care, so I left alone.
I spent that night with an English friend in her hotel. She'd informed me the previous week that she'd be holidaying on the island, but until now we hadn't met up. She listened in disbelief as I related my day of horror, which was in sharp contrast to her experience of Lamu - she'd spent days alternately wandering through the town and sunbaking on the beach.
Sitting on her balcony talking, I felt vastly disconnected from the person who'd been lying under the boat only hours before. My ability to relay the incident without emotion or distress was disconcerting to us both, and finally attributed to shock. I slept restlessly next to her, waking frequently to check she was still there and questioning myself about the reality of it all. This was something that happened to other people, not to me.
My friend was visiting the island with a group of former colleagues, one of whom was a journalist now working in Nairobi. He contacted the Kenyan police in the city, and they arranged a meeting that would take place the following morning at the local police station. All chiefs of police and government officials on the island would be there. Although I was sceptical about the efficacy of such a meeting, I agreed to go with the journalist.
I woke up in pain, my muscles remembering the struggle of the day before. The gathering began with an outpouring of condolences and assurances that absolutely everything would be done to find this man and prosecute him. Unfortunately, with few leads to work with, it soon deteriorated into a search for a scapegoat, the finger of blame wandering back and forth between me, for travelling alone, and the restaurant owners; according to the police, they should have employed a guard to monitor the 50-metre public path where the assault had taken place, despite no previous concerns regarding safety in the area.
Once again, I was infuriated. This family had responded to my screams, alerted the police and accompanied me to the hospital. I didn't want to hear them accused of anything. Enough was enough. I excused myself.
It was time to contact my family and book a flight home to Adelaide. First, I stopped to thank the owners of the restaurant for their kindnesses the day before. "Today it is you," said the woman with emotion. "Maybe tomorrow it is me."
I walked back to the hotel with apprehension. What would this predominantly Muslim community think about an uncovered white woman being attacked like this? I needn't have worried. In an incredible show of solidarity, women I didn't know stopped to embrace me or to say simply, "We are sorry this has happened to you."
As the plane took off the next morning, I looked down at the waters of the Indian Ocean, the white sands of the archipelago and the ancient town of Lamu. Its beauty was stunning, but I was relieved to be leaving it behind - for now. I knew I'd be back, though. I loved Africa: its landscapes, its cultures, its people.
As I watched the villages becoming specks in the vast mosaic of Africa, I thought of the women I'd seen in my travels here: the loads they carried, their relentless chores and the children they bore in harsh conditions. What other, unspoken perils did they endure? While I could get on a plane and fly away, they had no option but to stay.
On September 21, after I returned home to Adelaide, insurgents from the Somali militant group al-Shabaab stormed Nairobi's Westgate shopping mall, killing more than 60 civilians. I feared the impact this event would have on Kenya's tourism and the people of Lamu. In regions of the country that relied so heavily on foreign visitors for economic stability, what further knock-on effects would these communities experience?
The gang-rape of a 16-year-old Kenyan schoolgirl in June sparked widespread protest when it was revealed last month that the police response to the violent attack had been to force three of her attackers to cut the grass around the station before releasing them. The police had also urged that the mother "clean her up", thereby destroying all forensic evidence.
At the end of October, I was told a man had attempted to rape a schoolgirl on Lamu. His build and knife fitted the description I gave. Angry locals caught and beat the man with the intention of lynching him before police intervened. He was taken to hospital under police surveillance. I wasn't surprised to learn that later, while in their custody, he escaped through a bathroom window.In the fifth part of our series on 2017's must-see destinations, Telegraph Travel's Ben Ross, Nick Trend and Hugh Morris explain why Russia should be on your holiday wishlist.
This year marks the centenary of the 1917 revolutions, and while no official events have been announced to mark the anniversary, it offers a perfect excuse for a visit.
St Petersburg is beautiful, but don't miss Moscow, says Nick Trend Credit: Ruslan Gilmanshin - Fotolia
"We have this incredibly strong cultural heritage which we share with Russia," explains Nick Trend in the video above. "It's a fascinating place to explore and rediscover those connections."
Book your place on The Telegraph's exclusive Russian Revelations with John Simpson tour.
Our experts offer suggestions for what to see and do - and reveal how to visit the country without going through the rigmarole of applying for a visa.
Previous videos in our series looked at why New Zealand, Canada, Zambia and Hadrian's Wall should be on your radar this year.
Follow this link for our complete guide to the 20 best destinations for 2017.This video is no longer available
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SCP-3029 Code Name: Tabby's Star
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Previous Video SCP-1500 Code Name: The Tree Man - https://vid.me/twM6 Or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMNOi-iig&t=1s In this video we cover SCP-3029 Code Name: Tabby's Star. KIC 8462852 (also Tabby's Star or Boyajian's Star) is an F-type main-sequence star located in the constellation Cygnus approximately 1,280 light-years (390 pc) from Earth. Unusual light fluctuations of the star were discovered by citizen scientists as part of the Planet Hunters project, and in September 2015 astronomers and citizen scientists associated with the project posted a preprint of a paper describing the data and possible interpretations. The discovery was made from data collected by the Kepler space telescope, which observes changes in the brightness of distant stars to detect exoplanets. SCP Foundation Website - http://www.scp-wiki.net/ Follow me on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/jamie.crowe.73 twitter - https://twitter.com/CracklingCrow youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDGWt_C16CihopssxGDW1Jg vid.me - https://vid.me/CracklingCrow Like and Subscribe for more creepy tales from the SCP foundation.
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255The decision to cut the status of Russian government debt to “junk” on Monday was politically motivated, Vladimir Putin has said.
Standard and Poor’s (S&P), a ratings agency, slashed the rating it holds on Russian sovereign debt from BBB- to BB+, taking it below investment grade status for the first time in a decade.
A prolonged oil price slump and heavy sanctions over tensions in Ukraine have weighed heavily on the Russian economy. The rouble has slid by close to 49pc against the dollar since the beginning of 2014 as a result. More sanctions may soon be deployed, making things harder still.
S&P said: “The reason for the deviation is a significant change in our perception of Russia’s monetary flexibility.” The downgrade in part reflected “the effect we expect Russia’s weakening economy to have on its financial system,” the agency continued.
Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Russian President, said that the decisions: “Are politically motivated, and consequently it’s unlikely that wise companies can and should take them into account.”
The accusation of political meddling in markets is not the first levied by Mr Putin. In November he said that a sharp fall in oil prices was due to a “a political component [which] is always present in oil prices”.
“At some moments of crisis it starts to feel like it is the politics that prevails in the pricing of energy resources,” he added. A plunge in the price of a barrel of Brent crude, from $115 (£76) last June to less than $48 in recent days, has hit exports and government revenues hard.
Economists now expect that the Russian economy will fall into recession this year. Russia’s own central bank warned in December that GDP may fall by as much as 4.7pc if oil settled at $60.
Anton Siluanov, Russia’s finance minister, suggested that S&P had failed to understand the strength of the economy. “The decision taken shows the excessive pessimism of the agency,” he said on Monday.
“It fails to consider … the accumulation of large international reserves, including in the sovereign funds,” he added. These reserves have fallen to their lowest levels since 2009, as the state has used them to prop up the falling rouble.
Sanctions have made it hard for corporates including banks to gain access to financing. One in five Russian banks could now face collapse, according to estimates by the Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting.
In response to a renewed outburst of violence in eastern Ukraine new sanctions may be decided upon as early as February 2015, at a summit of EU leaders. Foreign ministers are expected to ask the European Commission to prepare new sanctions on Thursday.
S&P’s decision to cut Russia to junk may also make state financing harder. Several funds can not hold instruments below investment grade, which may drive up yields on sovereign debt.
Russia maintains the status with Fitch and Moody’s, although the former cut Russia's rating to a notch above junk in January.Yes, July 1 is still more than five months away. Hell, we haven't even hit the All-Star break yet. But it's never too early to start thinking about free agency. Here in New York City, the Mecca of Basketball (that's right), this summer is crucial for the local teams.
This year projects to have arguably the best NBA free agent class ever with players like Kevin Durant, Kawhi Leonard, Jimmy Butler, Kyrie Irving, and Klay Thompson all -- in one way or another -- able to hit the open market. With hundreds of other players available this offseason and a league salary cap set to rise to $109 million for the 2019-20 season, even in the dead of winter all eyes are on summer '19.
New York's teams are expected to be big players in free agency, with both the Knicks and Nets possessing ample salary cap space and the ambition to exponentially improve. But which NYC franchise has the advantage when it comes to attracting the best talent? Quintessential New York or the "Coolest City in America?" (At least according to GQ, never mind that Brooklyn is actually a borough). Do players want to restore a storied franchise or be the face of a new movement? Midtown steakhouse or Smorgasburg?
Let's take a look at some of the major factors that will either attract or deter free agents and, thus, determine the future of hoops in the Big Apple.First and foremost, thank you for checking out the "We Grew Up Here" Kickstarter page! We truly appreciate it.
We hope you like what you see and that you'll take a few minutes to read about our project and share this with your friends and family.
Who We Are
We are Kevin Pickman (Writer/Director), Andrew Neel (Writer/Producer), and Stefeni Tormanen (Writer/Producer), a group of driven, passionate filmmakers looking to create this project in the true spirit of independent and DIY filmmaking.
Collectively we are the founders of 15 in the Dark, a Chicago-based collaborative arts organization that seeks to create and promote excellent art, movies, and music.
About the Project
The idea of a town disappearing has been bouncing around in Kevin's head for years, and the three of us worked together to turn this concept into a concrete feature-length script that could be made (and made well) at a micro budget level. We've sent the script around to a wide range of friends and mentors, and although everyone reacted to the idea differently, they all agreed on one thing: This is a unique, intriguing, and original concept, and if the project can get even a small amount of funding, it would make a captivating movie.
"We Grew Up Here" follows Liam (played by Eric Michaels), a musician from a tiny Kansas town called Tanglewood, who moves to Chicago to escape the decaying town and a failed relationship. He lingers on the memories of his past with his ex-girlfriend and musical partner Lauren (played by Kate Schell), who is now engaged to another man.
When Liam's last connection to Lauren disappears, he discovers that both Lauren and his hometown seem to have vanished. He packs his bags and heads back to Kansas to find them.
Our goal was to take a science fiction idea and pare it down to its essential, barebones elements, allowing us to focus on the character and his journey.
"We Grew Up Here" is about coming to grips with the fragility of comforting memories and facing the past with honest eyes. It's for anyone who has felt lost, like they were searching for something imaginary in the real world.
The Cast
The lead characters Liam and Lauren will be played by Eric Michaels and Kate Schell from the band Paper Thick Walls. The movie's soundtrack will be comprised of music from their band's 2011 album, "A Thousand Novels," plus some new tracks, and a brand new song written specifically for "We Grew Up Here." We've also cast the supporting roles with some of Chicago's own outstanding talent.
Check back here for updates about our incredible cast |
been [completed in] 2017 and we would have been looking at a much larger bill."
The Bill Blass Catalog room presented its own set of challenges, namely the fact that the mural on its ceiling (which was inspired by the same celestial one in the Rose Main Reading Room) was not in the best shape. "When we went up and looked at it, it had this brown paint over it," Weinshall says. "And we said to ourselves, 'Really? We're spending $12 million on this project?'" Since they were already in the process of restoring the two rooms, the NYPL decided to go ahead and replace that mural too.
EverGreene once again came to the rescue by helping the library re-create the existing mural, and then bringing the canvas it was painted on back to the library in two pieces. Those two halves were affixed to the ceiling of the Blass room, and now it looks as good as new.
The ceiling of the Bill Blass Catalog Room mid-renovation. Photo by Max Touhey for Curbed.
As construction enters its final phase, the NYPL is conscious of the fact that this is perhaps its most scrutinized revamp of the past few decades—maybe even moreso than its plans to redo the stacks, which has generated its own fair share of controversy. But aside from the NYPL's lions, Patience and Fortitude, the Rose Main Reading Room is the most iconic symbol of the library, and one it's determined to protect. "This is part of the history of the city of New York, and we're very mindful that we're the stewards of this great building, and this great room," says Weinshall.In which state do companies get the biggest tax refunds? In the 2007 tax year it was the District of Columbia. Helps to be near the IRS, it seems.
The District of Columbia also came in on top in individual tax refunds at $2,615 per filing. Montana residents got the lowest individual tax refunds at $1,685 each.
Refunds by State
There are some interesting stories in the data. For example, look at excise taxes. Why does Arkansas have such high refunds?
Excise taxes are a form of sin taxes. They're often levied on alcohol, tobacco and gasoline produced within a country. The Tax Foundation has a nice chart of excise taxes by state, which shows that Arkansas doesn't have much higher rates of excise taxes than other states. However, there were very few filings of excise taxes in 2007 in Arkansas, so perhaps the data is distorted by a few big refunds.
The live interactivity in this visualization is a test of a new version of Tableau Server. To get more info, click on the Tableau logo in the bottom right of the visualization.
Source data:
IRS Table 8: Amount of Internal Revenue Refunds Issued, Including Interest, by State, 2007
IRS Table 7: Number of Internal Revenue Refunds Issued, by State, 2007The Github auction included two files. One was free and open for examination. The other, Shadow Brokers said, was for "the party which sends most bitcoins" to their payment address and who would then get the decryption information. The free samples showed that the exploits were quite real, and alarmingly powerful.
The free samples also helped researchers figure out that the exploits had been snatched from an external staging server and not the NSA itself, as many headlines this week incorrectly suggested... in a breach that happened three years ago. See, there's nothing in the dump was newer than October, 2013.
Of course, the press is having its usual, confused feeding frenzy about anything and everything hacking and infosec, leading most people to believe that the NSA itself had actually been hacked. Well, the NSA has not been hacked; the New York Times headline asking if the NSA has been hacked and the Atlantic's stupid "Yup! The NSA Got Hacked" are as egregiously irresponsible as they are uninformed.
Think of it like this: Your local Safeway uses a separate company to buy beer for its store. That buyer "stages" some of Safeway's beer in a storage unit, which is robbed. Only the storage unit was burgled -- but the newspapers are saying that Safeway was robbed, making everyone think the Safeway store was broken into and its security compromised.
Although, there is one thing here: This might solidify a link between Equation Group and NSA: The Washington Post confirmed the authenticity of the tools with two anonymous ex-NSA employees.
The auction page had been sitting there for two days before Hypponen tweeted his discovery. It has since has been removed by Github, as well as Pastebin and Tumblr.
It read, in part:
"How much you pay for enemies cyber weapons? Not malware you find in networks. Both sides, RAT + LP, full state sponsor tool set? We find cyber weapons made by creators of stuxnet, duqu, flame. Kaspersky calls Equation Group. We follow Equation Group traffic. We find Equation Group source range. We hack Equation Group. We find many many Equation Group cyber weapons. You see pictures. We give you some Equation Group files free, you see. This is good proof no? You enjoy!!! You break many things."
Shadow Brokers added, "If our auction raises 1,000,000 (million) btc total, then we dump more Equation Group files, same quality, unencrypted, for free, to everyone."
Unfortunately for Shadow Brokers, the auction hasn't exactly been a hit. Losing bidders don't get their money back, and the kitty is only up to 1.5 BTC ($862).
Alex Rice, CTO at bug bounty platform HackerOne, told CSO Online that Shadow Brokers had given a fortune in 0day away for free in that sample file. The exploits could've sold for "north of six figures" each on the grey market to governments (Hacking Team, for example, was a grey market operator). In an incredibly detailed post, Risk Based Security thought the pilfered attacks would've pulled in between $200,000 and a million dollars -- and that's if they'd sold the booty to "good guy" bug bounty buyers.
At Lawfare, Nicholas Weaver explained that the freebie file included eight different exploits and some dead-serious implants that circumvent firewalls, among other things. He also said that the exploits "appear to target Fortinet, Cisco, Shaanxi Networkcloud Information Technology (sxnc.com.cn) Firewalls, and similar network security systems."
The fact that this is all from 2013, which continues to get overlooked in reporting and armchair-activist hysteria alike, is important. This week's headlines saying "oh noes the bad tools are being used now" are bit hyperbolic in light of the fact that these tools are three years old and have likely been used "in the wild" (to a very limited extent) since.
Some of my colleagues in the press are falling all over themselves with another genuine NSA-whodunnit on their hands. So, who is the culprit? Lawfare had three great, rational, sensible, and far-too-practical-for-CNN answers to the question:
"At present, there appear to be three possibilities: (1) An insider stole this data.
(2) An adversary somehow exfiltrated data from a Top Secret system.
Or (3) an NSA operator, seriously breaches operational security protocols and copied all these files—presumably a substantial part of an 'ops disk'—onto an unclassified system for attack staging and then left it there for four months."
While the sideshows of conspiracy theories and government hyperbole spin-up, Risk Based Security wrote an extremely grounded post. It included this salient section about the timing of it all:
"While technical evidence may be completely lacking and speculation ruling the day, it cannot be ignored that the timing of this leak in the current U.S. political climate is suspect. With the last few weeks of U.S. news dominated by Donald Trump and questionable ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin, as well as Trump's speeches calling for Russia to hack U.S. government resources (in jest or not), it begs the question if the Equation Group leaks are part of a political agenda. The Register is one of many news outlets to put that theory forward, in addition to hundreds of Twitter denizens. This is the type of speculation that is important to discuss, but prudence demands that it remain part of the discussion until evidence surfaces."
Of course, Edward Snowden struck a few suggestive poses on Twitter while confirming the validity of the finds (hey, it's a living). The sycophantic elite cooed; The Intercept released code from deep in their years-old and coveted treasure trove of Snowden files that matched a couple exploits in the dump.
The Intercept triggered another simultaneous release -- of public anger at the organization's hoarding of critical information on tracking malware strains.
https://t.co/SPena9rsLO You guys sat on documents that included instructions for "track[ing] [the] use of [NSA malware]" for *three years*? — Andreⓐ (@puellavulnerata) August 20, 2016
Hacker Matt Suiche has a great post with an ex-NSA analyst, who had many great points, including this one:
"Technically speaking, Edward Snowden is also just speculating and the only major leak we have heard of from the NSA was actually from him and he was an insider. And that media tend to take every'speculative statements' he makes as a "fact" (which is true, many of my friends complained about it) — especially since the NSA cannot confirm or deny any of those 'facts' publicly."
And that's a much needed dose of common sense in this whole NSA circus revival.PoliZette Obama Lectures Trump Over Walls, Builds One Around D.C. Home Former POTUS tells Berliners 'we can't hide behind a wall,' despite having a big, beautiful one of his own
Former President Barack Obama joined German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin on Thursday to lecture the western world, and ostensibly President Donald Trump, on the supposed benefits of opening their borders to the world — not three full days after a child of Libyan migrants blew himself up at a concert filled with teenagers and children in Manchester.
Speaking in front of the Brandenburg Gate as part of an event commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, Obama told the crowd that problems abroad must become the problems of western people, and took a not-so-subtle jab at Trump.
“We can’t isolate ourselves — we can’t hide behind a wall.”
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“One way we can do a better job is to create more opportunities for people in their home countries,” Obama said. “If there are disruptions in these countries, if there is bad governance, if there is war or if there is poverty, in this new world that we live in we can’t isolate ourselves — we can’t hide behind a wall.”
Earlier this year, however, it was reported that Obama was preparing to do just that. In January, TMZ reported that the Obamas were constructing a large brick wall around their swanky new Washington, D.C., residence.
A “child on the other side of the border is no less worthy of love and compassion than my own child. We can’t distinguish between them in terms of their worth and inherent dignity, and that they’re deserving of shelter and love and education and opportunity,” Obama said.
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The lecture from the former president also came just one day after Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) revealed that Customs and Border Protection, at the direction of the Obama administration, knowingly released at least 16 illegal aliens who were members of the brutal criminal gang MS-13. Johnson, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, became aware of the scandalous decision to release the gang members thanks to a DHS whistleblower.
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“CBP apprehended them, knew they were MS-13 gang members, and they processed and disbursed them into our communities,” Johnson said Wednesday at a committee hearing.
Trump, meanwhile, is meeting with NATO leaders in Brussels Thursday and will press western leaders to become more cooperative and aggressive in the fight against radical Islam.Not too long ago, if you wanted to relive your favorite Super Bowl commercials and see if they were well-received, you had to wait until Monday morning and read the newspaper. There you could find the Super Bowl ad round-up, a brief article, usually in the business section, that featured clunky descriptions of the short spots you barely remembered from the night before ("A Pepsi-swilling chimp escapes the lab and heads for the beach at the wheel of a Jeep"). Chief among this coverage was USA Today's "Super Bowl Ad Meter," a ranking of the big game's commercials determined by a panel of viewers.
The first Ad Meter in 1989 relied on 60 randomly selected volunteers in Portland, Oregon who "used hand-held meters with a dial...to register how they felt about ads they watched." The viewers would also provide their thoughts to back up their numerical ranking. "I like the use of the animals," one 52-year-old panelist said about a 1997 Pepsi ad featuring grizzly bears doing the YMCA, "It makes me think I'm a kid again." This process more or less remained until 2012, when USA Today opened the voting to Facebook users and started combining the results the following year.
The entire enterprise seems ridiculous now. Super Bowl ads are immediately available on YouTube, often even before they appear on TV, and Twitter provides analysis and criticism in real time (and all the time, for that matter).
But there was something nice about opening a big, colorful USA Today and thinking, "Hmm, I wonder if people liked that ad with the beer-worshiping crabs." The following commercials were all judged to be the cream of their respective Super Bowl crop, as determined by a handful of dial-cranking volunteers at the time.
1989: American Express—"Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey [are] unable to use a Visa credit card on a trip to the Super Bowl."
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1990: American Express—"Paul Newman races a tiny scooter against a dragster."
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1991: Diet Pepsi—"Ray Charles isn't sure the new Diet Pepsi jingle has caught on, but in fact, people are singing it around the world."
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1992: Nike—"'Hare Jordan' featuring Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan."
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1993: McDonald's—"Michael Jordan and Larry Bird Play H.O.R.S.E."
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1994: Pepsi—"A Pepsi-swilling chimp escapes the lab and heads for the beach at the wheel of a Jeep."
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1995: Pepsi—"Boy gets sucked into bottle."
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1996: Pepsi—"A Coke delivery man is detected by a convenience store security camera trying to steal a can of Pepsi."
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1997: Pepsi—"Grizzly bears boogie to a remake of the Village People's 'YMCA.'"
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1998: Pepsi—"A sky-surfer flies with Geese and drinks Pepsi with them."
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1999: Anheuser-Busch—"Two Dalmatians are separated as puppies and reunite two years later."
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2000: Anheuser-Busch—"Rex the movie star dog gleefully chases Budweiser beer truck—only to jump a hedge and leap face-first into the side of a parked lawn service van."
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2001: Anheuser-Busch—"The amorous adventures gone awry of smooth-talking funny guy Cedric, whose Bud Light explodes all over his dream date."
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2002: Anheuser-Busch—"Romantic evening goes awry with satin sheets."
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2003: Anheuser-Busch—"Zebra referee."
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2004: Anheuser-Busch—"Owners demonstrate how their dogs fetch Bud Light."
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2005: Anheuser-Busch—"Pilot jumps out of plane for Bud Light."
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2006: Anheuser-Busch—"Secret refrigerator stocked with Bud Light."
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2007: Anheuser-Busch —"Crabs worship a cooler of Budweiser on the beach."
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2008: Anheuser-Busch—"Dalmatian trains Clydesdale to make beer wagon team."
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2009: Frito-Lay—"Crystal ball sees free Doritos."
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2010: Snickers—"Betty White and Abe Vigoda in casual football game."
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2011: TIE: Anheuser-Busch—"Dog sitter puts dogs to work."/Doritos—"Dog's revenge for Doritos teasing."
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2012: Doritos—"A murderous Great Dane who bribes a human with Doritos to not tell on him for burying a dead cat."
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2013: Anheuser-Busch—"A heart-tugging tale of the bond between a trainer and the Budweiser Clydesdale he raised."
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2014: Anheuser-Busch—"This puppy just couldn't lose."A couple months of declining prices aside, Los Angeles rents are high and likely to climb in coming years. But monthly payments vary quite a bit from neighborhood to neighborhood, as a new price map from Zumper illustrates.
Covering 50 different neighborhoods across central Los Angeles (apologies to residents of the San Fernando Valley and harbor area), the map displays the median price in each area over the final quarter of 2017.
The price is calculated using listings collected on the rental website, which skew a bit toward luxury units. Still, since plenty of people use Zumper and other sites to search for a new place, the prices give a good sense of what prices apartment hunters are finding across the city.
By Zumper’s calculations, the priciest neighborhood in the LA area is Santa Monica, where one-bedroom units go for $3,090 per month. The beach city beat out neighboring Venice, where the median price is $2,900.
Those two neighborhoods are significantly more expensive to rent in than anywhere else on the map, including Pacific Palisaades ($2,690 per month) and Beverly Hills ($2,685).
On the flip side, the Vermont Square area (listed on the map as Voices of 90037 after the neighborhood council) has the lowest rents, with a median monthly price of $1,090. Florence and Historic South Central aren’t far behind, with rental prices at $1,100 per month in both areas.
Zumper finds that prices in certain neighborhoods have risen dramatically since last quarter. Median rents in Ladera Heights, for instance, jumped up nearly 13 percent to $1,580 per month this quarter. Westchester-Playa del Rey and Brentwood also saw price increases of at least 10 percent.
Median rents dipped in some areas. In Historic South Central, prices fell 8.3 percent; in Glassell Park, they dropped 7.6 percent. Prices there are now hovering at $1,395 per month.The FCC approved new rules to ensure broadband providers do not abuse their customers' app usage and browsing history. Here's everything you need to know about it. (Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post)
After Congress voted Tuesday to dismantle landmark privacy protections for Internet users, pockets of the Web erupted in a mixture of fury and fear.
Among other changes, this legislation would make it easier, and legal, for Internet service providers (ISPs) to both gather and sell personal information including Web browsing history. In other words, AT&T could, in theory, sell to the highest bidder a list of the websites you’ve visited and the frequency with which you visited them.
Many Internet users aren’t keen on the idea of companies selling their browsing data, so several independently came up with the same plan: They began crowdfunding campaigns to purchase the Web histories of the members who voted to wipe away those protections.
[The House just voted to wipe away the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections]
A few of these campaigns — there are at least four — are fairly small. Two, though, have raised more than a combined $200,000 as of early Thursday morning.
Misha Collins, the star of television’s “Supernatural,” started one such fundraiser that has raised more than $60,000 of its ambitious $500,000,000 goal.
“Great news! The House just voted to pass SJR34. We will finally be able to buy the browser history of all the Congresspeople who voted to sell our data and privacy without our consent!” he wrote in its description.
Adam McElhaney, who described himself as “a privacy activist & net neutrality Advocate from Chattanooga, Tn.,” began another which has raised more than $145,000, well beyond its $10,000 goal. Its description read, in part:
Help me raise money to buy the histories of those who took away your right to privacy for just thousands of dollars from telephone and ISPs. Your private data will be bought and sold to marketing companies, law enforcement. Let’s turn the tables. Let’s buy THEIR history and make it available.
Thanks, Congress, for voting to put all of our private data up for sale! We can’t wait to buy yours. https://t.co/t8pq3p470f — Misha Collins (@mishacollins) March 28, 2017
More than 12,000 people have donated to the two campaigns combined as of Wednesday night.
Others made similar pledges. Max Temkin, one of the designers of the popular party game Cards Against Humanity, tweeted, “If this s‑‑‑ passes I will buy the browser history of every congressman and congressional aide and publish it.”
Later, though, Temkin slightly changed his tune and promised to match up to $10,000 in donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy organization that seeks to protect Internet privacy. As Temkin wrote on Twitter, “People are already mad at me that we haven’t released the data. As a reminder, this bill hasn’t been signed yet and there is no data to buy.”
“If this data becomes available, Cards [Against Humanity] remains committed to buying it,” Melissa Harris, a spokeswoman for Cards Against Humanity, told The Post in an email. “Obstacles, however, remain. First among them: the President’s signature on the bill. Then, legal challenges are likely to follow. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is likely to be involved in those efforts, which is why we’re calling on people to donate to the organization. If the bill is signed and legal challenges fail, we will pursue the browsing histories to the best of our abilities.”
A passenger checks her cellphone before a flight in Boston in this Oct. 31, 2013, file photo. (Matt Slocum/AP)
Both points are important. President Trump still needs to sign the bill for it to take effect.
Then there’s the question of how those who donated to these crowdfunding campaigns plan to buy the Web browsing histories of members of Congress. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
When asked if it would now be possible to purchase another person’s browsing history, The Washington Post’s Brian Fung wrote, “The short answer is ‘in theory, but probably not in reality.’”
He continued:
Many Internet service providers (ISPs) have privacy policies that may cover this type of information. If an ISP shares or sells an individual’s personal information in violation of its own privacy policy, a state attorney general could take the company to court, said Travis LeBlanc, a former enforcement bureau chief at the Federal Communications Commission.
“ISPs haven’t done this to date and don’t plan to because they respect the privacy of their customers,” Brian Dietz, a spokesman for NCTA — The Internet & Television Association told The Post. “Regardless of the legal status of the FCC’s broadband privacy rules, we remain committed to protecting our customers’ privacy and safeguarding their information because we value their trust.”
It’s also unlikely an ISP would sell an individual’s Web browsing history. Most of the time, companies purchasing data have no idea whose data, exactly, they’re buying. All that generally matters to these companies are a few demographics.
Which raises the question of what will happen to the $200,000 and counting gathered by these crowdsourcing campaigns.
GoFundMe, the website hosting them, previously told The Post in a statement, “in order to protect donors, if a campaign is flagged as fraudulent, the funds cannot be withdrawn until the issue is resolved.”
It’s unclear, though, what would occur if the campaign isn’t fraudulent but simply impossible to fulfill.
This post has been updated to include a statement from a spokeswoman for Cards Against Humanity.
More from Morning Mix:
Trumps’s campaign words stalk him in court on ‘sanctuary cities,’ just as in travel ban cases
New trailer for Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’ shows President Trump as climate change villain
Women, Hillary Clinton among them, stand up for April Ryan, Maxine Waters — they ‘were simply doing their jobs’What does a rainy day on the beach and catastrophic asteroid strikes have in common? Despite the massive difference in scale, a whole lot it turns out, according to new work published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. Using high-speed imaging, researchers have captured the impact of raindrops falling on sandy surfaces: the surface deforms like a liquid while preserving a circular crater like a solid -- just like when an asteroid strikes Earth.
We know quite a bit about the mechanism behind impact cratering by solid spheres, but what we know about the same phenomenon caused by liquid spheres is pretty limited. So, by combining photography with lasers, a University of Minnesota team led by Xiang Cheng studied the dynamics of these liquid-drop impacts on a granular surface made of tiny glass beads, as well as the impact craters that resulted. In addition to deionized water, they also experimented with liquids like methanol, ethylene glycol, and mineral oil, dropping the droplets from as high as 11.5 meters.
Surprisingly, despite the enormous energy and length difference, granular impact cratering by liquid drops follows the same energy scaling and reproduces the same crater morphology as that of asteroid impact craters, the team writes. Here are snapshots of a 3.1-millimeter water drop impacting at different energy levels (they increase from the top row to the third):
As the droplet splashes slowly, Popular Science describes, it spreads out horizontally, creating a small crater before retracting, pulling in some particles and bouncing back up. At higher impact velocities, the drop spreads out more and picks up more sand, increasing its weight and reducing the height of its bounce. Increasing the energy of the impact creates projections (like the limbs of a cartoon amoeba) that pick up so many beads that the droplet stops being a perfect sphere, and with even more energy, they eventually stop bouncing back up.
Here’s a complication of some very cool slow-motion movies, via American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics:
This newfound similarity allows the team to apply planetary science models to rain-drop-sized scales that are relevant to natural, agricultural, and industrial processes -- from soil erosion and irrigation to the dispersal of microbes and the spray-coating of powders. Also, the vestige of raindrop imprints in fossilized granular surfaces, they write, can be used to calculate the air density on Earth 2.7 billion years ago.
Images: R. Zhao et al., PNAS 2014
Video: APS Physics Gallery of Fluid MotionThe solar panels blanketing more than 100 acres of farmland in Isle of Wight County, a project that launched early last year, went live in December, Dominion Virginia Power announced Wednesday.
The facility at Woodland and Longview drives cost $44 million to build and is owned by Dominion Virginia Power. It is a 19-megawatt facility, and it will power roughly 4,700 homes. The project's conclusion is right on time for the power company, which predicted a December finish line. Woodland Solar is one of three Dominion solar energy facilities to go live in December. The others are in Louisa and Powhatan. Together, the three sites will produce 56 megawatts of generation, enough to power 14,000 homes, according to Dominion.
"Our customers have told us they want us to invest in renewable energy," said Daisy Pridgen, a Dominion spokeswoman. "And solar is a big part of that."
Woodland Solar sits on a little more than 100 acres of land on the Oliver Farms, a 1,000-acre site Dominion chose for its flat land and proximity to a power line. The land that hosts the site's 79,648 panels is leased by Dominion from owners Jesse V. Oliver and James (Jimmy) N. Oliver Jr. The solar farm would be one of the largest of its kind in the state, Pridgen said.
Oliver Farm has been family owned and operated since 1934, and used to grow broccoli, collards, peas, strawberries and butter beans.
"We're pleased – we made the right decision," Jimmy Oliver said by phone. "The thing is, with farming, we're at the mercy of Mother Nature. She's been rather cruel to us these last two years. This is guaranteed income for my family; therefore, that's why I say we made the right choice."
Woodland Solar Dominion Virginia's 100+ acres 19.7 megawatts Isle of Wight solar facility, this is one of three new facilities in Virginia Powhatan, Louisa and Isle of Wight Counties. (Joe Fudge) (Joe Fudge)
The Olivers will receive guaranteed payment from Dominion every year for 25 years, Jimmy Oliver said. This year, they lost half their crop yield due to excessive rain, Jimmy Oliver said.
The site manager for the Woodland project, Rusty Conlan, said he is approached often by farmers who ask him to consider their farm land for similar solar use.
"When you think about what a farmer has to go through every year," Conlan said, "One year you might hit a bumper crop, one year you might not hit anything. I don't care who you are – knowing every year, you're not going to have a down year, is enough incentive for anyone."
The site's solar panels have a 25-year life expectancy, Conlan said. After 25 years, Dominion has the option to renew its lease with the Olivers, in 11-year increments. Jimmy Oliver said they would likely renew for another 11 years, although it's difficult to say so this far out.
"Twenty-five years is a long time from now," Jimmy Oliver said. "I'm 48 years old, so if I'm still alive, I'll be 73. Most likely we'll renew it, but it's hard to say."
Smith can be reached by phone at 757-510-1663.Huma Abedin's attorney issued a statement Monday evening revealing her client had no idea that a laptop she shared with her estranged husband, disgraced former congressman Anthony Wiener, contained emails possibly linked to Hillary Clinton's private homebrew server.
"From the beginning, Ms. Abedin has complied fully and voluntarily with State Department and law enforcement requests, including sitting for hours-long interviews and providing her work-related and potentially work-related documents," Abedin attorney, Karen Dunn, said in a statement made available to the Washington Examiner.
"Ms. Abedin's willing cooperation has been praised by Members of Congress and law enforcement officials alike. She only learned for the first time on Friday, from press reports, of the possibility that a laptop belonging to Mr. Weiner could contain emails of hers. While the FBI has not contacted us about this, Ms. Abedin will continue to be, as she always has been, forthcoming and cooperative," the statement added.During a Senate hearing on the 2016 budget, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy sparred over climate change statistics and requested funding for the EPA. (YouTube: Senator Sessions)
What started as a hearing Wednesday on the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed budget for the 2016 fiscal year turned into a political forum on the agency’s proposed climate change rules for power plants.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) decided to use the occasion to attack the rules by quizzing EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy on her climate and weather knowledge. The resulting exchange highlighted a new variant on the GOP’s longtime strategy to oppose climate change action: sowing doubt.
One by one, Sessions presented McCarthy with statements on very recent trends in drought, hurricanes and climate models, and asked whether she agreed with the statements. What all these trends had in common: They downplayed, at least superficially, the threat of climate change. Sessions cited figures showing that in roughly the past decade, soil moisture has slightly increased, that major hurricane landfalls in the United States have decreased, and that temperatures have risen less than many models predicted.
The cringe-inducing questioning by Sessions amounted to a series of “gotchas” aimed at an EPA administrator who not only isn’t a scientist but who obviously wasn’t going to prepare for a budget hearing by memorizing responses to all possible climate contrarian arguments. McCarthy deferred on most of Sessions’s questions, saying she was happy to provide answers in writing. “Well you need to know, because you’re asking this economy to sustain tremendous cost,” Sessions responded sternly.
Regarding Sessions’s question on whether climate models have overestimated global warming since the late 1990s (by the way, they haven’t), McCarthy responded at first that she disagreed. But later she added that she couldn’t give a better answer right away because she didn’t know which specific models Sessions was referencing.
Sessions declared victory: “This is a stunning development: that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who should know more than anybody else in the world, who’s imposing hundreds of billions of dollars in costs to prevent this climate — temperature increase, doesn’t know whether their projections have been right or wrong.”
Of course, McCarthy could very well go back to her office and submit a scientifically detailed response rebutting all of Sessions’s points. And as our Fact Checker has noted, Sessions and his fellow Republicans aren’t on such solid ground when they say that the EPA rules would devastate the economy.
But that doesn’t matter, as Sessions wasn’t trying to disprove climate change. He was merely trying to sow doubt. This has been the GOP playbook on climate change for years now. Today, we’re seeing a slightly different version of it. In past years, Republicans sought to sow doubt on climate change science itself. But here, Sessions was trying to cast doubt on McCarthy’s scientific knowledge to call into question her agency’s policy response to climate change.
Still, there’s no guarantee that the doubt strategy will work this time. Previously, it worked well, given that many Americans still believe scientists are divided on climate change and that Congress ultimately killed various climate bills. Now, however, the policymaking ball is in the EPA’s court. Absent a party change in the White House or a court ruling against the EPA, there’s little Republicans can do right now to stop the rules, no matter how much doubt they try to sow.Overview
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There are so many capable men... and all they can think to do is rob a convenience store? Kinda weird... you'd think a group this big might just, y'know... have bigger goals than that... You're all sick. And you need a cure. Kai Chisaki to Team Reservoir Dogs in "Unleashed"
This article is about the character. For this character's Quirk, see Overhaul.
Kai Chisaki ( 治 ( ち ) 崎 ( さき ) 廻 ( かい ), Chisaki Kai?),[1] also known by the villain Overhaul (オーバーホール, Ōbāhōru?), was the Yakuza Captain of the Shie Hassaikai.[2] He serves as the main antagonist of the Internship Arc.
Contents show]
Appearance
Kai Chisaki is quite a pale man of a narrow build with short, messy reddish-brown hair, parted to the left on his forehead. His eyes are thin, their irises small and gold, with rather long lower eyelashes and small eyebrows, and his mouth has never been seen, as it’s always been covered by something whether it be shadow, a hygiene mask or his usual plague mask. Following his arrest, his mouth is seen and he loses both his arms to Atsuhiro Sako and Tomura Shigaraki.
In his first appearance, he wears a black dress shirt with matching dress pants, a pale gray tie around his neck and a belt with a long, thin buckle around his waist, with three beaded lobe piercings in his left ear. Over this, he wears a dark olive-green bomber jacket, its collar lined with thick purple fur, and white lace-up sneakers, their soles tan-colored, with no socks on his feet. His most noticeable features are the white surgical gloves he wears on his hands, and the magenta plague mask he wears over his mouth, which is tipped and embroidered with gold.
Gallery
Kai as a child. Kai before becoming a villain. Overhaul in the manga. Overhaul's mouth uncovered
Fusions
After fusing with Shin Nemoto, Overhaul gets an additional two arms deformed with spiked claws and black parts of Shin's cape. His hair gets spikier, and his mask rips apart, seeming to be fused onto his face, which is also covered in black fabric. Shin is presumably conscious in the fused form as his mouth is used through Overhaul's right hand and his Quirk is in use.[3]
After fusing with Rikiya Katsukame, Overhaul's lower body is fused into a monstrous stone structure, protruding multiple appendages each equipped with clawed hands. Overhaul's upper body is the same but lies within the mouth of the structure, and his upper jaw has Rikiya's mask.[4]
Second form. Final form.
Personality
Overhaul is a mysophobic, antisocial sociopath obsessed with returning to the world to the way it was before the Quirk phenomenon. Due to a combination of an old theory claiming Quirks derived from rats and his own mysophobia, Overhaul believes that Quirks are actually a plague on humanity. He believes the Quirk epidemic has changed the world and infected society with "Hero Syndrome", and he is extremely determined to eradicate Quirks from the world in order to return it to its former state with the Yakuza in power.
Overhaul is very germophobic and hates anything he feels is dirty; he likes to avoid dirty places and hates when people dirty him or the area around him. He’ll even break out into hives when covered in dirt or blood, and as he views Quirks as sicknesses, he also treats them as he would any other kind of filth.
Overhaul feels as if he owes a debt to the Boss and the Yakuza for taking him in, even from a young age, he was dead set on returning that debt no matter the cost. The Boss would try to sway Kai to a more honorable path to no avail, as he would frequently get into violent fights and eventually involved himself in illegal dealings.
He grew up and became a villain determined |
oriuchi's departure from the band "Mika is not in the band and that's it. Nothing more to say right now but stay tuned kids, 2012 is our year."[46] In January 2012, former I Am Ghost bassist Ron Ficarro began filling in as Falling in Reverse's The Drug in Me Is You Tour touring bassist due to the departure of former bassist Mika Horiuchi.[47] Later on Ronnie announced on stage that Ron Ficarro was replacing Mika permanently. On February 6, 2012, former Escape the Fate member, Omar Espinosa made a guest appearance on stage performing "Situations" and "Not Good Enough for Truth In Cliché" (Although this could have been because Derek wasn't there). The band's third music video for its debut album's first single, "Raised by Wolves", was released on February 28, 2012.
In late August Falling in Reverse announced a Fall/Winter headlining tour called "The Thug in Me is You Tour" with supporting acts Enter Shikari, I See Stars, Matt Toka and letlive.[citation needed]
Fashionably Late and Bury the Hatchet tour (2012–2014) [ edit ]
Vocalist Ronnie Radke had been hinting on Twitter that the group had been working on the band's second album, with tweets such as "You guys don't understand how many light years my next album is from the last one". He and bandmate Ron Ficarro tweeted pictures of them in the studio with Ryan Ogren working on some new music. Ronnie had said a little bit about the new album to Marshal Music News. He said that, "The last record was so vengeful and bitter and spiteful - so everyone is wondering what I'm gonna sing about next. And I'm just not quite ready to let people know. I'm sorry. When people hear the new stuff though I promise you they will lose their mind. It's light years ahead of my last album. We're demoing new songs right now, as we speak, and I'm telling you, people are seriously gonna lose their mind." During the band's performance at Dirt Fest 2012 in Birch Run Michigan, Radke announced to the crowd that it would be the group's last show before returning to the studio for the band's second album. Ronnie also said in an interview that the band would be in the studio late 2012 with demos already and hoping for an early 2013 release. In issue number 1442 of Kerrang! Magazine, Ronnie Radke announced in an interview that "The record's finished! That's what we did after the Warped Tour. We just didn't tell anybody!" He also said "[it will be released] early next year [summer 2013]!"
Jacky Vincent in 2012
On May 7 the band released the first single and music video, "Alone", from the second album, titled, Fashionably Late. The cover, merchandise, and a June 18, 2013 release date was revealed on May 7 as well.[48][49]
To promote the album, Falling in Reverse would be on tour from May to July 2013, including the Vans Warped Tour 2013. On May 13 Falling in Reverse announced on Twitter the band had cancelled tour dates due to lead singer Radke was expecting the birth of his first child with his fiancé Crissy Henderson. Falling in Reverse officially stated on Facebook "Our apologies but Falling in Reverse has to cancel the rest of the dates scheduled in May. Ronnie will not be able to appear as his girlfriend is about to give birth to their first child and he needs to be by her side. Thanks for your understanding. See you soon."[50] The band also canceled the dates to play Warped Tour. The tour released the following statement regarding the band's decision "Falling in Reverse are withdrawing from performing on this summer's Warped Tour. Lead singer Ronnie Radke's fiancé is pregnant with their first child who is due shortly.[51][52]
On May 21, the title track, "Fashionably Late" was released as the second single. Later, on May 30, the song, "Born to Lead" was streamed through YouTube.[51] The entire album was uploaded to Epitaph Records' YouTube channel on June 12, allowing fans to listen to the album before the official release date.
Following the cancellation of dates for the band's tour and Warped Tour, Falling in Reverse celebrated the release of Fashionably Late with a special performance at the Roxy in West Hollywood, California, on June 18, 2013. The set of one hour was broadcast online and presented by Hot Topic.[53]
On October 28, 2013, Falling in Reverse, along with Ronnie's former band Escape the Fate,[54] announced that they would be touring together, with Falling in Reverse headlining, on the Bury The Hatchet Tour. The bands posted a video through Alternative Press with Ronnie and Escape the Fate singer Craig Mabbit being interviewed about the tour, stating that the tour came about due to the groups' acceptances of each other.[55] During the tour, Ronnie made appearances on stage with Escape the Fate, singing the singles from Escape the Fate debut album Dying Is Your Latest Fashion ("Situations" and "Not Good Enough for Truth in Cliché").
In March 2014, Radke announced that the band had begun recording its third album. On May 12, 2014, it was announced by Alternative Press that Falling in Reverse had parted ways with bassist Ron Ficarro, reporting that former Escape the Fate bassist Max Green (who announced his departure from Escape the Fate just 3 days before on May 9, six months after rejoining Escape the Fate[56]) would be his replacement. Ronnie is quoted as saying "Ron was probably the best bass player I've ever played with, but at this moment in time I feel it is best to part ways with him. I respect him and wish nothing but the best for him. Max quitting Escape The Fate was like a godsend. It was a no brainer to have him join. I've known him half my life and this will be a great new chapter to start. "[57]
Just Like You and departure of Jacky Vincent (2014–2016) [ edit ]
Falling in Reverse in 2014
In an interview with MTV, Radke stated that the next album would be nothing like the single Alone from Fashionably Late as it has no raps throughout the album; he stated that it is heavier and will contain more screams, moving his passion for rapping into his solo career.[58] Radke explained in another interview that the third album will be more like a "sequel" to the Escape the Fate album Dying Is Your Latest Fashion and is aimed to be nostalgic to people who were fans of the band since then.[59]
In August it was announced that the band will be supporting Black Veil Brides on their headline tour across America throughout October and November dubbed "The Black Mass" and will also be supported by Set It Off and Drama Club.[60] On October 6, 2014, a month before the Black Mass tour started, it was announced that Max Green had left the band due to personal issues unrelated to the band. The departure was amicable.
Falling in Reverse in 2015
On December 15, 2014, the first single from the band's third album, Just Like You, titled "God, If You Are Above..." was released. On January 13, 2015, the group released its second single "Guillotine IV (The Final Chapter)" from the album. Just Like You was released on February 24. In February 2015, touring bassist Jonathan Wolfe was replaced by the official new member, and former Black Tide bassist, Zakk Sandler.[61] "Stay Away", another single off of Just Like You, premiered on the BBC Radio1 Rock Show on February 15. The group premiered its new single, Sexy Drug, via Alternative Press the next day.
On February 17, 2015, a full album stream of Just Like You was released, a week before the scheduled release of the album. On February 24, 2015, Just Like You was released as planned, along with a music video for the song Just Like You.
Falling in Reverse at the House of Blues during the Super Villains Tour in 2015.
On March 16, 2015, Falling in Reverse announced a US tour called Ronnie Radke's Three-Ring Circus. The tour had three acts; a performance by opening band Ghost Town, then Falling in Reverse performing the entire Dying Is Your Latest Fashion album from Radke's days in Escape the Fate, followed by Falling in Reverse performing original songs. The tour lasted from April 24 to June 6.[62]
On October 30, 2015, lead guitarist Jacky Vincent left the band on good terms before the band's fall tour with Attila, Metro Station and Assuming We Survive to focus on his solo career.[63] On November 4, 2015, Christian Thompson confirmed himself as the new lead guitarist of the band.[64] The video for the single Chemical Prisoner was released on January 27, 2016.[65] The single performed moderately well on UK rock radio.[66]
Coming Home and departure of Ryan Seaman (2016–2018) [ edit ]
On January 6, 2016, the band members announced that they had begun work on their next album stating that it would be "It's a huge left turn. It sounds like nothing we’ve ever done. Every song is very vibey, There's more feeling in it instead of a lot of metal.", further stating that "We’re challenging ourselves now more than we ever have in the weirdest ways possible because you would think writing the craziest solo or riffs would be the challenging part. But the challenging part is trying to stick to a theme and not go all over the place like we would normally do." The album is expected later this year through Epitaph Records.[67][68] On December 19, the band officially released the first single "Coming Home" from the untitled album.[69] In January 2017, Radke began performing guitar for the band. On January 20, 2017, the band announced their next album Coming Home, which was released on April 7. Around the time of its release, it was rumoured that drummer Ryan Seaman parted ways with the band.[70][71] This was confirmed when the band performed on May 8, without Seaman with Chris Kamrada playing drums as a touring member, who since left to play for Dashboard Confessional.[citation needed]
Line-up changes and new music (2018-present) [ edit ]
On February 23 2018, the band released a song called, Losing My Mind.[72]
On March 12 2018, while on tour lead guitarist Christian Thompson tore his rotator cuff, posting on his Instagram account that he would not be continuing on tour with the band whilst he underwent medical treatment.
On April 16 2018, Christian officially announced via his Instagram page that his time with Falling In Reverse had come to an end.
On June 26, 2018, the band released a song called, Losing My Life along with a music video as a continuation of where the music video for Losing My Mind ended and featured a new line-up for the band which consists of Tyler Burgess on bass, Max Georgiev as lead guitarist, drummer Brandon "Rage" Richter, and Zakk Sandler on keyboards and rhythm guitar.[73] The band also announced that they will be performing selected dates at the final year of the annual Vans Warped Tour with the new line up.[74] Shortly after the Warped Tour the band announced an acoustic tour called "The Roast of Ronnie Radke", in the middle of the tour the band canceled the tour because Ronnie had personal problems.[75]
Musical style and lyrics [ edit ]
Falling in Reverse has been categorized as post-hardcore,[76][77][78][79][80] metalcore,[81][82] hard rock,[83][84] pop punk,[78][85] glam metal,[78] rapcore[citation needed], and rap metal.[86] Falling in Reverse's sound has also has been described as emo with pop-stylized choruses and a blend between pop and metalcore.[87] The band's second album, Fashionably Late, included hip hop and electronic elements with the addition of rapping.[79][88]
Radke commented that "in the same songs it sounds like Norma Jean or Underoath with Katy Perry choruses."[89] According to Radke some of the band's lyrical tones are, "arrogant, [it's something] like rappers do mostly." This is because Radke has cited Eminem as one of his major influences,[90] so much so that he even included a beat made by Eminem and Dr. Dre during a breakdown on the track "Sink or Swim".[89] Radke also cites blink-182 and Beastie Boys as an influence for the band's pop punk and hip hop sounds, respectively.[citation needed]
The lyrical content of the band's music is inspired mainly by vocalist Radke's personal experiences, which include his mother, the corruption of Las Vegas, and his incarceration/release from prison due to multiple run-ins with the law involving narcotics and battery charges related to the death of Michael Cook. No songs by the band to date concern love because Radke stated that, "...I'm not going to lie... and try to write songs on how much I love somebody. I do have love, but there will be a lot of songs about just what I've been through."[91] Several songs focused on his departure from Escape the Fate after the group kicked him out and replaced him with former Blessthefall singer Craig Mabbitt,[5] with songs by the band that directly attacked both Mabbitt and Escape the Fate's bassist Max Green.[91]
Band members [ edit ]
Current members Ronnie Radke – lead vocals, piano (2008–present) ; rhythm guitar (2017)
; rhythm guitar Derek Jones – rhythm guitar, vocals (2009–present)
Zakk Sandler – keyboards, synthesizer, vocals, rhythm guitar (2018–present), bass, vocals (2015–2018)
, bass, vocals Tyler Burgess - bass, backing vocals (2018–present), lead guitar (2018)
, lead guitar Max Georgiev – lead guitar, backing vocals (2018–present)
Touring members Jonathan Wolfe – bass, backing vocals (2014–2015)
Chris Kamrada – drums (2017)
Michael Levine - drums (2017–2018)
Anthony Ghazel – drums (2018-present) Former members Anthony Avila – lead guitar, backing vocals (2008–2009)
Nick Rich – drums (2008–2009)
Nason Schoeffler – bass, vocals (2008–2011)
Gilbert Catalano – rhythm guitar, backing vocals (2008–2009)
Jacky Vincent – lead guitar, backing vocals (2009–2015)
Oscar Garcia – drums (2009–2010)
Khaled Biersack – drums (2010)
Scott Gee – drums, backing vocals (2010–2011)
Ryan Seaman – drums, vocals (2011–2017)
Mika Horiuchi – bass, backing vocals (2011–2012)
Ron Ficarro – bass, backing vocals (2012–2014)
Max Green – bass, vocals (2014)
Christian Thompson – lead guitar, vocals (2015–2018)
Brandon "Rage" Richter – drums (2018)
Timeline
Discography [ edit ]
Awards [ edit ]The DUP's Simon Hamilton is the minister for the economy, which replaced Deti in May of last year
A STORMONT department has refused to release information relating to Arlene Foster's role in the botched Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) scheme, claiming an investigation is ongoing and it would not be in the public interest to do so.
The Irish News requested all correspondence between the DUP leader and officials in the department for enterprise, trade and investment (Deti) on November 3 via a freedom of information request.
Earlier this week the Simon Hamilton's department for economy (which replaced Deti in May 2016) responded to the request, refusing to release the information.
In an email to The Irish News, the reason for the refusal was given as: the “public interest arguments” for withholding the information outweighed those in favour of disclosure and releasing it could prejudice an investigation.
However, an investigation has yet to be announced. DUP leader Arlene Foster said a minister from her party would release details about a public inquiry but this has yet to happen.
Failures in the implementation of the RHI scheme are set to cost an estimated £490 million of public money over the next 20 years.
Hopes of a swift inquiry into the scheme were all but dashed on Monday following the resignation of deputy first minister Martin McGuinness and the subsequent collapse of the executive, signalling the high probability of a snap election.
Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt lambasted the department's refusal to release the information.
"On the first point, if the matter is under investigation, it is clearly an internal investigation, and the public will have no knowledge of or confidence in such an investigation," he said.
"As to their other explanation for non-disclosure, the logic of their argument is that knowledge of the facts would prejudice establishing the truth.
"This is simply ridiculous and scraping the bottom of the barrel of excuses."
SDLP leader Colum Eastwood said the refusal cemented the need for a public inquiry.
"The selective release of documents under Simon Hamilton is exactly why we need a fully empowered public inquiry to deal with this fiasco," he said.
"Under DUP stewardship this department has drip fed those documents that it wants in the public domain while withholding others. That cannot be in the public interest.
"All parties should say clearly that they are committed to a public inquiry with full powers to compel papers and people under complete public scrutiny. That is the highest standard of transparency and accountability and should be progressed immediately."Mira Hashmi on Pakistan’s paradoxical and puzzling relationship with Hindi cinema
Her name was Sardar Bibi on her identity card but, in the great Punjabi tradition of conjugating proper nouns, everyone called her Sardaran. She was a widow in her sixties and her daughter Meena was my nanny. Sardaran did odd-jobs around the house, cooked the chapatis, and at night taught me old Punjabi folk songs and narrated fables about wayward monkeys and ticks that exploded in rivers of blood after having a tad too much to drink. This was the early 1980s and the VCR had only just entered our collective consciousness, and with Indian films banned from Pakistani cinemas since 1965, pirated videos of Bollywood fare, though not available in great abundance, were the newest guilty pleasure, one more in a long line of declared cultural taboos in the wake of General Zia’s bid for ‘Islamization’. (This split between official line and ground reality often gave rise to absurdities of farcical proportions, such as the state television channel being instructed to never mention India by name, resulting in Dilip Kumar’s return to Mumbai after a trip to Lahore, in 1988, being covered in news bulletins with the sentence ‘Humsaya mulk ke adaakar, jo humsaya mulk se chand roz ke dauray par aaye the, aaj shaam waapis humsaya mulk ke liye ravaana ho gaye.’ And I shall also never forget the night I heard the moulvi at our neighbourhood mosque reciting a naat—devotional verses—set to the tune of Roop suhana lagta hai, chaand purana lagta hai.)
When word got around that the Hashmi household had acquired a National VCR (but nothing to watch on it), a kind family friend lent us two films from his Dubai shopping: Naseeb and Suhaag – both Amitabh Bachchan starrers. For about a month, all the kids plus the household help would sit huddled together in front of the TV after lunch and religiously watch either of the two films every single day. It was sometime during this ongoing exercise that Sardaran declared that Bachchan was her long-lost son. Our kitchen, which was her domain, became a shrine to the star, with posters and pictures adorning all the cupboards. Over the next few years, she only managed to see one or two more of The Angry Young Man’s films, but her mantra remained unchanged, unshakeable: Bachchan was her son. She managed to convince the local electrician of the veracity of her claim but the rest of us would only giggle and smirk in response and treat it as the joke that we felt it was. It was only many years later, after she had passed away, that we learned from her family that as a young woman during the upheaval of Partition, Sardaran had been separated from her infant son, whom she never saw again. She prayed that the lost child had been found by a good family who raised him as their own and, somewhere in her heart, she hoped that he had grown up to be a handsome, successful, famous and adored man— someone exactly like Mr. Bachchan.
On a warm, humid Lahore evening, three days after Rajesh Khanna’s death on July 18, a group of friends and I sat together in his memory, singing Bheegi bheegi raaton mein and watching him woo Zeenat Aman on the projector in my cozy living room. We were plunged into darkness every now and then with the constant power ‘load-shedding’ that has been a staple of our daily lives for the past five years, but our spirits were not to be dampened. With strings of motia wrapped around our wrists, we munched on pita bread and hummus and sang and reminisced about our movie memories of Kakaji, and amidst this I was suddenly reminded of Sardaran, and the deep, almost inexplicable connection that innumerable Pakistanis have with Hindi cinema. After all, politically, we have always been ‘enemy countries’, having fought three official wars and countless unofficial ones, and with much suspicion of the other to be had on either side of the divide. There is intelligence surveillance, political one-upmanship, media tu-tu-main-main, police-reporting visas, and visa application processes that’ll make you wish you’d never been born— and yet, there is also a strange kind of affinity, an underlying, seductive fascination that at once repels and attracts us to the Other— sort of like the Hollywood films in the 80s where both the villain and the love interest would be those darned Russkies. In official forums, there is resistance and denial (even as Hindi films were allowed back onto Pakistani screens some five years ago), but on the ground, the unembellished reality is that today Bollywood informs our cultural landscape more than our own local cinema. Lollywood, as our film industry, based primarily in Lahore, is referred to, was supposed to benefit from the ban on Hindi films because it would, in theory at least, allow home-grown cinema to flourish unhindered by rival product. That theory was, of course, inherently flawed and in the face of zero competition, not to mention Zia’s destructive cultural policies, Lollywood eventually (and inevitably) floundered. Today, there is reverence and nostalgia for our legends, like Madam Noorjehan, Santosh Kumar, and Waheed Murad, but Lollywood, for all effects and purposes, and due to our own acute myopia, has become irrelevant to the larger picture. Our radio stations now play Indian filmi sangeet, our up-market movie houses show The Dirty Picture and Ra.One, our weddings see the young ‘uns performing choreographed dances to Oo la la and Chammak challo, we cry with Aamir Khan during every episode of Satyamev Jayate, we know the inner and outer worlds of Shahrukh Khan inside and out, Katrina Kaif and Shilpa Shetty smile benignly at us from billboards, and we hang on to every bit of Bollywood gossip about Saifeena that floods the internet. (We also laugh ourselves silly when Hindi TV channels spell it ‘Abhi na jao chod kar ke dil abhi bhara nahi’, but I’ll save that for another day).
The internet has obviously made it that much easier to have the world, including that of Hindi ‘fillums’, at our fingertips, but even in the years way back when Gates and Jobs were just pimply-faced geeks getting copies of Asimov kicked in their faces at the beach, Hindi cinema managed to very much be a part of our lives in an oddly organic fashion. Apart from the trickle-turned-surge of Hindi movies on VHS that led to a mushrooming of video rental outfits all over the country, local book stores started stocking smuggled issues of Filmfare, Stardust and (now long defunct) Star & Style. Only a few precious (and terribly expensive) copies of each would make it across and then would be passed from fan to rabid fan, dog-eared and creased, each article and interview and photograph pored over and dissected and discussed incessantly. It was through this network that we came to keep ourselves updated with Amitabh Bachchan’s recovery after his infamous accident on the set of Coolie. (My cousins had made a pact that they would watch the new VHS of Laawaris only if/when the star succumbed to his injury; I arrived home from school one day to, horror of horrors, see them viewing the film. “Is he…?” I asked in a trembling voice. “Nah, we just got tired of waiting and thought, what the hell?”). This was also how it got around like wildfire among Pakistan’s female population that the frizzy-haired girl in red in the song Papa kehte hain from Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak was hero Aamir Khan’s wife, thereby shattering a million teenage dreams, in unison with those in India I imagine. And then there was, of course, Chitrahaar! It is nigh impossible to explain to the YouTube generation just what an esteemed place this film song show held in our hearts. Twice a week, we would await it eagerly, singing along to the ads for Nirma Washing Powder and Vicco Turmeric Ayuvedic Cream that signaled the imminent arrival of Chitrahaar, our beloved window into Bollywood’s past, present and future. Perhaps it’s nostalgia speaking, but the instant gratification that the 24-hour Bollywood content TV channels offer today, simply doesn’t compare to the sense of heightened anticipation that Doordarshan used to elicit back in the day with their banner programme. There are hazy memories of a screening of the 1967 Meena Kumari starrer Noor Jehan, which, for reasons now consigned to the planes of bureaucratic amnesia, was allowed to have a limited release in Pakistan sometime in the late seventies, but I remember very clearly the thrill of watching a Hindi film in the cinema for what I consider the first ‘real’ time, when I visited Delhi and was whisked off to see Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, in 1984. Many years after that, I was in Mumbai making a documentary on Madam Noorjehan and got to meet my cinematic idols, Gulzar, Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand among them, and though I tried to appear unfazed, the truth is that I could barely contain myself. The monumental sense of awe I had felt in the presence of the subject of the film I was working on, was duplicated during interviews with Lata Mangeshkar and Naushad, and I was acutely aware of my ridiculously good fortune. Perhaps dearest to my heart was the meeting with the late Manorama, who spoke with great fondness of her old friend ‘Noori’, whom she hadn’t met since the latter left Mumbai after Partition. At the end of our chat, she couldn’t hold back the tears and neither could I. It was my first conscious and overwhelming realization of the one peoples we once were, and also of what a strong emotional presence Indian cinema had had in my life, as well as in those of many other Pakistanis.
The question though, that I certainly had never really asked myself, or anyone else for that matter, was why. Why do we have this deep and abiding love for Hindi cinema? “’Why ever not?’ is my answer,” says Faiza Sultan Khan, editor of The Life’s Too Short Literary Review and fellow Bollywood enthusiast. “When I was living in England no one asked, why do you watch American films? It was just the dominant cultural presence, as Hindi cinema is in the sub-continent.” So, because, like Everest, it is there?
“Well yes, but it’s also about the music,” posits Ali Dayan Hasan, human rights activist and HRW’s (Human Rights Watch) envoy to Pakistan. “We were hearing this music in our homes from the day we were born really. It was only natural that the connection extended to the films themselves as we grew older. I saw Roti, Kapada Aur Makaan when I was about five, which really my parents ought not to have let me see at that age! But I remember hearing the songs and thinking, hang on, I know this music. So yes, the music aspect is a very strong one, it’s in our genes, practically!”
The three of us, along with Samar Ata-Ullah—television producer—and Yasser Hashmi—psychology professor— are, as it happens, listening to some filmi music yet again a few days after our Rajesh Khanna memorial evening, and trying, for a lark, to place our collective fandom in some sort of context. Among the first things we figure is that from the vast history of Hindi film music, it is the music of R. D. Burman that, like I’m certain is the case across the border, elicits the strongest devotion.
“My parents were not actually into film music at all,” Faiza clarifies. “Their tastes were the kind of high-brow that, let’s be honest, aren’t that appealing to a six year-old— qawwali and non-vocal classical. So when one heard Mera naam hai Shabnam (from Kati Patang) for the first time, well, let’s say life picked up considerably!” Indeed, the Pancham appreciation society in Pakistan is as vibrant and maniacal as anywhere else and it recruits younger and younger people everyday. Among them is Ali Aftab Saeed, a twenty something musician who gained notoriety as well as tremendous following and critical acclaim last year when he and his band, Beygairat Brigade, released the politically charged song Aaloo Anday. Saeed is a die-hard Burman fanatic and I asked him recently what the legendary composer’s work means to him. “Speaking for myself, I simply cannot think beyond R.D.,” he gushes unabashedly. “What’s interesting though is that an overwhelming majority of Pakistani musicians today are exhibiting the R.D. influence on their music; and the virus, so to speak, is spreading wider yet. This is true regardless of the inclination of the musician, be it eastern or western. Even those who officially despise Indian music and claim they have absolutely nothing to do with it, have in their commercially successful work the sensibility of music that R.D. introduced. It could be unconscious in some cases but it is unmistakable all the same. Just as the west is considered to have set the standard of cinematic aesthetics and consequently filmmakers all over the world are following more or less the same principles; it seems that Pancham has done the same to music of the subcontinent. It would be interesting to study R.D.’s influence on Pakistani musicians, and if I can get some funding, I would love to make a documentary on the subject.”
Apart from the music, Ali has another theory on Pakistan’s love affair with Bollywood: “The Hindi film is actually in our language, the language of the Pakistanis; the language of Bollywood for the longest time was just Urdu. More importantly, the sensibility has been an Urdu-speaking, North Indian, Hindustani Muslim sensibility. Therefore, in reality, these films are for us, they are ‘ours’. They made them for us!” Amidst our giggles and smirks, Faiza concurs. “The dialogue and more to the point, the poetry, the lyrics were pre-dominantly in Urdu, the language of poetry and symbol of sophistication, prestige, romance. I mean I think back to the picturization of Kahin door jab din dhal jaaye, when Anand (Rajesh Khanna) looks down at the book in his hand which has a rose pressed in it, and it’s a book of Urdu poetry. It’s a lovely moment, and also poignant because that flower pressed in it has a million other meanings to it now.” Yasser adds another angle to this admittedly under-considered aspect: “Interestingly enough, that’s the point on which the Punjabi film industry in Lahore was opposed to the local Urdu films; they said, ‘we are making ‘Pakistani films, this Urdu cinema is actually Indian’.” He also points out that preceding generations of Pakistanis, like many of their Indian counterparts, had a melancholic, romantic longing to revisit the shared past of the two countries, “like the scores of people who still come and go across to seek out ancestral homes. I remember from my childhood that the shopkeeper in the market near our house always used to have Gurdaspur Radio playing, because that’s where he and his family had migrated from, and you’d often hear him declare, ‘Gurdaspur zindabad!’” Perhaps fittingly then, the new Indian cinema that has started to evolve in the last decade or so doesn’t appear to hold the same kind of appeal that old Bollywood does. Says Faiza, “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be watching Hindi films because now the new ones are very much the Indian urban experience, and they’re now very specific to the location where they’re set or made. The older films always worked with a particular set of symbols and you as a viewer knew what you were negotiating. Now it’s become very insular and self-indulgent; it has ceased to be a universal experience, and truthfully it doesn’t resonate with me like it used to.” “It’s become like one big in-joke,” agrees Samar. “For example, even in something like Delhi Belly, there were all these references which probably only Delhi walas would really get. I have cousins who live in Delhi, so for instance they told me about the ‘Nakad waale disco, udhaar waale khisko’ reference, which is apparently written at every paan shop. We can of course still enjoy the film on a very basic level, if it’s a well-made film, but that richness, that density of subtext gets lost in translation, which was not the case before.” It would be convenient to pretend here that there are no anti-Bollywood segments in Pakistani society but that would not be true— of course there are, and they are roughly of two kinds: those who are indifferent towards cinema in general and/or snobbish about indigenous cinema in particular, and there are those who are generally anti-everything Indian, well and truly indoctrinated in the ‘nationalistic’ belief system espoused on official levels through school textbooks and other propagandist avenues, and handed down from one generation to the next (sound familiar?). As a teacher of Film Studies, I do a lecture on song picturization in Hindi cinema and I remember this one time when after the class was over, a student came to me and apologized. When I asked him what he was apologizing for, he said that he had kept his eyes averted from the screen throughout the class because in his household, India, in all and any of its manifestations, is the enemy, and that notion extends to the country’s movies. We proceeded to have an intriguing discussion on the matter with me giving him the usual spiel about art being beyond boundaries etc., and which concluded with him ceding that he’d “think about it”. But the kind of reasoning I was employing to try to give him another perspective on the issue becomes harder to propound when Bollywood sometimes seems to lose the plot and produces neighbour-bashing fare like Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, or does it?”
I put the question before my gathering: do ‘anti-Pakistan’ films like Gadar etc. have any complex implications for us as ‘patriotic’ Pakistanis? “No, don’t be absurd!” Ali guffaws. “It’s just a movie, made expressly to make a quick buck by exploiting niche jingoistic sentiments, and I think most people are smart enough to know the difference, to know that art is above this kind of nationalist baiting, that it’s separate from traditional modes of animosity, and so no, we don’t really care. We choose not to watch it, or even if we do, we kind of just make fun of the whole exercise. All national cinemas resort to this sort of nonsense at one time or another.” “My reaction is one of amusement, largely,” adds Faiza. “Which is what it ought to be in the face of simple-minded propaganda.” Samar brings up a related point which I too had written about earlier on my blog. “What I find far more annoying are the Indo-Pak love fests like Veer-Zara,” she says. “Which actually are only interested in reinforcing the stereotypes that most Indians who have no exposure to Pakistan tend to believe about us, the same ones that were employed by the ‘Muslim Social’ genre earlier. In that film, which did really well in India but was pretty much laughed at here, they wanted it to be about the Other, so it could not look the same, it could not look ‘Indian’. So they resorted to clichés about the Other, which from the Indian perspective is chiefly that these people are ‘Musalman’ with a capital ‘M’, which actually doesn’t say anything about how an upper-middle-class girl in Lahore lives. They did a lot of research but in the end they couldn’t resist the clichés when it came to characterization, ergo the ridiculous sight of everyone wearing achkans and doing aadab; they had to be conspicuously different from the Indians. But I guess the kind of film it was and the audience that it was aimed at, the makers of Veer-Zara decided that they didn’t require any kind of nuance or sophistication. Without that pronounced Otherness, it would’ve been just a girl and a boy who are pretty much the same and just happen |
Commission for Featuring Silver Spoon and the windigo known as Whisper, from Ministry of Special Services I really don't want to be there, quite honestly. I don't do well in cold temperatures.Here we have yet another drawing based around an MLP character and it's super-villain alter-ego. Doing this drawing was actually a lot of fun. I managed to crank this one out rather quickly considering the amount of elements it has. It's not the busiest of all the illustrations I've done but it really has a lot of stuff going on in it. Also, despite adding some blue colors, it ended up coming off way more colorless than I thought, which I think works in favor of the piece.It feels good to work on this small series of illustrations again. I hope you guys enjoy it!Art by James Corck.If you think about it, Mother Jones also decided on their own version of mass shooting, that it would be 4 or more killed but gang violence, domestic violence and robberies don't count.
That's also extremely fallacious reasoning, if someone walks into a grocery store and kills 9 people but takes the cash drawer with them on the way out, does that "not count" because it was just a botched robbery?
It's also very poor to only count deaths. Like I wrote elsewhere (and something you guys already know): Improved medical treatment is definitely obfuscating the number when you look at straight murders, which is another reason why shootingtrackers reasoning does a much better job than just tracking deaths. If you die or not has a lot to do with how quickly emergency services can get to you and how good they are at dealing with gunshot wounds, which lets face it, American hospitals are the best in the world at it.
It's also important to recognize that just because you don't die from a gunshot wound doesn't mean you won't suffer a lifetime of dealing with a debilitating or disfiguring injury. In some cases people ended up dead 10-20 years later and the cause of death is ruled a homicide due to the fact that complications from the primary injury was the primary cause of death.
In many cases the number of mass shootings using the Mother Jones criteria have a hell of a lot to do with how fast emergency response crews get there and nothing to do with gun violence.
p.s., see if you can get your own op-ed in NYT or Forbes (I know Forbes does a lot of opinion stuff and their contributors browse reddit all the time) and go over it.John Chautin helps Clay Higgins glove up before a sparing match with boxers at the Ragin' Cajun Boxing Club in training for a Battle of the Badges boxing match. (Photo: SCOTT CLAUSE/USA Today NEtwork)
When Clay Higgins resigned from his position with the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s office Feb. 29, one of the first things he did was contact the organizations that had scheduled him to speak prior to turning in his badge.
“I didn’t know if they would still want me to speak or not,” said Higgins, who became a YouTube sensation with his CrimeStopper segments, one of which sparked controversy and led to his resignation. “I figured some might and some might not.”
One of those groups that certainly did was the Battle of the Badges in Monroe.
“They actually said that they wanted me to come more now than ever,” Higgins said.
Their genuine reaction “touched my heart,” so much so that Higgins even threw out the idea of possibly participating in the next event, which is an annual charity boxing exhibition between police officers and fireman across the state.
“It just blew their minds that I was willing to do it,” Higgins said.
Almost six months later, reality is beginning to tug on Higgins’ time schedule.
Higgins is set to fight longtime Monroe fireman Roy Daniels during the 2016 Battle of the Badges on Aug. 13 at the Fant-Ewing Coliseum in Monroe.
“It seemed like a great idea at the time,” the 55-year-old Higgins laughed. “It seems like a terrible idea now.
“No, really, it’s for charity. It’s a win-win situation for everybody.”
Higgins' fight is billed as the main event on the organization's website — battleofthebadgesmonroe.com — pitting "Battle Ax Chief Roy Daniels vs. America’s Toughest Cop Clay Higgins."
“It actually took about a month to decide if I was actually going to go through with the fight,” Higgins said. “In my mind, I just thought it would be good for me spiritually, physically and mentally to go through the rigors of preparing for the fight.”
Higgins also is one of 12 candidates vying to replace Charles Boustany as the 3rd Congressional District's representative in Washington, leaving him little time to train.
In fact, on Sunday afternoon Higgins went through just his fourth training session at Beau Williford’s Ragin’ Cajun Boxing Club in Lafayette.
“He (Daniels) has a great attitude about it,” Higgins said. “He’s a really nice guy, but he’s a very tough man.”
Deirdre Gogarty-Morrison has actually done most of the Higgins' training with encouraging results.
“My first impression is that he was in real good condition,” she said. “A lot of guys, even if they’re in really good shape, the first time with the mitts, they’re just dying. He wasn’t.”
Gogarty-Morrison also saw some talented hand speed from her new pupil.
“When they make a mistake, I usually tap them to teach them what they did wrong,” she said. “With Clay, it was really difficult to catch him. He was blocking them. I had to really work hard to catch him and even then, I still wasn’t catching him sometimes. He’s very strong and good reactions.”
Higgins’ history as a boxer goes back three decades to one amateur fight in 1980 in Tampa, Florida. He won that fight on a TKO. Daniels, meanwhile, is four years older than Higgins and has been boxing “since he was 12.”
That doesn’t mean Higgins isn’t trained in combat, however. He teaches martial arts, where he trains “to end fights quickly,” which Higgins would be all for doing on Aug. 13 against Daniels.
“I’m in really good shape for a 55-year-old guy, but boxing is a very different thing. I had trouble breathing.”
Sunday’s training session was the beginning of what Gogarty-Morrison calls “hell week” for Higgins. The idea is to train extra hard this week and then rest the week before the fight to give his body time to recover.
“I’m going to be in his corner,” said Gogarty-Morrison, the former Women's World Featherweight Champion. “I try to remain calm in the corner, because I know that helped me when I fought.”Hyrule Warriors Gets Twilight Princess Costume DLC in Japan
Ryan Meitzler June 27, 2014 7:31:42 AM EST
With a unique mix of Dynasty Warriors‘ fast-paced combat and elements from the world of The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo’s Wii U-exclusive Hyrule Warriors is set to be unlike any other Zelda game before it, and for those in Japan some additional costumes from Zelda games of the past will be even more enticing.
New details have been announced for Hyrule Warriors that the Japanese release of the game will be receiving new DLC costumes based on 2006’s The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Specifically, the costumes will be available as part of the three editions of the game releasing in Japan: the Standard, Premium, and Treasure Box editions.
Outfits for Link, Princess Zelda, and an unknown third character have been confirmed so far, with all coming from their iterations in Twilight Princess and available in specific editions of the game. Link’s costume will be part of the “Courage” costume set in the Standard Edition, and Zelda’s will be available in the “Wisdom” set of the Premium Edition. Details haven’t shown yet whether the costumes will be available for separate purchase as DLC, though it should seem fairly likely.
Hyrule Warriors releases exclusively for Wii U on August 14th, 2014 in Japan, followed by a release on September 26th, 2014 for the US – in the meantime, you can check out screenshots below of Link and Zelda’s Twilight Princess-inspired costumes for the upcoming game:Budget FPL Midfielders – Fantasy Premier League Tips
Over the last few weeks we’ve been feeding your fantasy football hunger with articles dedicated to helping you find players within different budgets. We’ve already highlighted The Best 4.5m FPL Defenders, The Best 8.5m FPL Midfielders and The Best Mid-Priced Forwards, so now it’s time to review the best budget FPL Midfielders with the maximum price tag at 5.5m. We think the following players are perfect for freeing up your budget without compromising your points potential.
FANTASY PREMIER LEAGUE TIPS
Nathan Redmond – 5.5m (1.7% Ownership)
Kicking off proceedings is winger Nathan Redmond. This summer Redmond was part of the England U21s disappointing European Championship campaign. Despite failing to get out of the group stage Redmond was featured in UEFA’s Team of the Tournament.
Last season for Norwich he scored six goals and tallied up 13 assists. He also stepped up when it mattered with two assists and two goals in the play off final and semi final second leg. He created a staggering 117 chances last season and will be crucial if the Canaries’ want to stay in the Premier League.
So he’s been on form in the last 12 months, if he carries over his form into the Premier League and continues to improve he is worth having at such a cheap price. He takes corners for Norwich and with the height they have in their side it could see Redmond picking up assists from them.
He’s a tricky winger with plenty of skill and an incredible turn of pace which Norwich will look to exploit. Norwich have a relatively kind opening set of fixtures facing Crystal Palace and Bournemouth at home and Sunderland away in their opening five games.
Almen Abdi – 5.0m (0.3% Ownership)
The Swiss playmaker really is the creative outlet for Watford and he’s what makes them tick. He’s played 93 times for Watford, scored 23 goals and yielded 14 assists. He’s takes both free kicks and corners for the Hornets’ and nearly all of Watford’s attacking play goes through him.
He’s a magician with the ball and will be looking to create chances for the likes of Deeney, Vydra and Ighalo for the upcoming season. He’s dangerous in and around the area, and also has a decent long shot.
He’s the lynchpin, the playmaker, the man between defence and attack for Watford and he’s going to play a big role for Watford this season. If you do select Abdi be wary of his fitness, at the time of writing he has a 75% chance of playing against Everton. He’s a great selection if you want a rotation option in your side.
Sebastian Larsson – 5.5m (2.2% Ownership)
This selection may raise a few eyebrows, mainly because he seems to go under the radar season after season for Sunderland. Last season he was one of only three Sunderland players to score over 100 points, finishing the season on 105 points.
Last season he scored three goals and contributed three assists. Not really the highest of numbers but we shouldn’t forget how poor Sunderland were and how little goals they scored. He’s Mr Sunderland he loves the club and is a nailed on starter. There isn’t a game where he doesn’t put in 100%. As we know with Larsson he is a dead ball specialist, he has one of the best free kick conversion ratios in Premier League history. He also takes corners for Sunderland and with the likes of Sebastian Coates and John O’Shea in the side he’s going to create to odd goal from corners.
At 5.5m you are getting a very creative midfielder who will be playing behind Jermain Defoe, who on is day is one of the Premier League’s best finishers. If Defoe can recapture his form then expect Larsson’s assist tally to rise. He would be best used in a rotation system and in their opening four games Sunderland face three of the sides who are expected to be fighting relegation in the shape of Leicester, Norwich and Aston Villa.
Chris Brunt – 5.5m (3.1% Ownership)
The midfielder was West Brom’s highest scoring midfielder last season totalling 128 points across the season; he enjoyed one of his best seasons to date. Over the past few season he’s been the go to man for assists at West Brom, last season he had 10. If the Baggies’ can hold onto Saido Berahino this summer then Brunt will be well on his way to double figures again.
The Northern Irish international was an unsung hero in the Baggies’ climb away from Premier League relegation last season and is the vice-captain of the team. He is the clubs corner taker and as we know with Tony Pulis’ sides they are very dangerous from dead ball situations. Brunt also takes the occasional free kick.
If you do select Brunt there are a few things to be cautious of. Firstly their fixture list – West Brom have a horrible set of opening home games playing Manchester City, Chelsea, Southampton and Everton in their opening four home games. Their away fixtures are a little less daunting as they face Watford, Stoke, Aston Villa and Crystal Palace in their opening four games. The second thing to keep an eye on is how West Brom utilise Brunt. He featured nine times at left back towards the end of last season and has played two games there in pre season. West Brom have added to their defence in the shape of James Chester which should see a defensive reshuffle and Brunt’s time at left back expire but it’s an issue to be aware of.
Riyad Mahrez – 5.5m (2.2% Ownership)
There were times last season where Mahrez picked up the Leicester team and put them on his back. He was on of their most creative players and played important role in keeping Leicester up.
He finished the season with 102 points last season, 42 more than the next best Leicester midfielder. He scored four goals and created five for his team-mates. The Algerian was very much an unsung hero last year, he is still a little raw and unpolished but has shown improvement as the campaign went on, he is posed for an exciting campaign this season.
He posses a lot of skill and is direct with the ball, he runs through the midfield and produces either a shot or delivers a well-timed cross for the likes of Ulloa and Vardy. At times he was the most dangerous player on the pith for Leicester and that’s expected to be carried over into this season. He could improve his final product but that will come with game time.
Leicester also have an eye-catching set of fixtures. They face Sunderland, West Ham, Bournemouth and Aston Villa in their opening five game weeks. You could really utilise the Algerian well in a rotation system.
Notable Mentions
There were a handful of players who just missed out on selection but we thought we’d attach a bite size bit of information for you.
Ki Sung-Yeung 5.5m (9.9% Ownership) – Scored 129 points for last season and scored eight goals and contributed one assist. Very consistent and should be a mainstay in the Swansea midfield this season.
Wilfried Zaha 5.5m (2.2% Ownership) – Showed his talent under Pardew who put his confidence in him, an enigma, as he can be hot and cold. Scored four goals and created three last season totalling 91 points.
Carles Gil 5.0m (0.1% Ownership) – Currently out injured but one to consider when back fit, Sherwood has said he will be a key player for Villa this season and he certainly has the talent to back up that statement.
Ibrahaim Afellay 5.5m (1.9% Ownership) – Joins from Barcelona so it’s clear to see he has talent, has the ability to change a game but will need to get used to England before you consider his selection.
Dele Alli 5.0m (0.1% Ownership) – A lot of Spurs’ fans have spoken about Alli’s chances to play first team football this season and he could displace Ryan Mason. Started against Real Madrid in pre season and held his own, a goal scoring midfielder but not a guaranteed starter.Image caption The comic will feature a story about Beckham trying to find a new house in Beanotown
David Beckham and Sir Alex Ferguson are among the celebrities appearing in the 75th anniversary issue of The Beano.
Dundee-based publishers DC Thomson have released a sneak peek at the comic strip encounter between the pair.
Dennis the Menace will help the footballer find a house in Beanotown - only for Beckham to discover he has ended up living next to his old boss.
The anniversary issue goes on sale on Wednesday. Wimbledon winner Andy Murray and his mum Judy also feature.
Beckham played for a decade under Sir Alex during his time at Manchester United.
Image caption The 75th anniversary edition of the comic is "celeb-packed"
The Beano editor-in-chief Mike Stirling said: "David Beckham features quite a lot in the anniversary issue and I think that the strip with David Beckham and Sir Alex Ferguson is brilliant.
"Dennis is up to his usual menacing and the results are hilarious. It pokes fun at their history in a light-hearted way and, of course, it's all meant in jest.
"We listen to what our readers say and feature people that they want to read about. I think that the anniversary issue is possibly the most celeb-packed issue we have ever produced."
Earlier this month, DC Thomson released a preview of the anniversary edition's strip featuring Andy Murray.
Other celebrities popping up in the issue include Harry Hill, Sir Bruce Forsyth, Holly Willoughby, Simon Cowell, One Direction and Jessie J.
Mr Stirling added: "Seventy-five years of The Beano is a landmark worth celebrating and we hope that it appeals to readers of all ages."Sharp just signaled a bright future for renewable energy as it achieved a new solar cell efficiency record of 43.5%, eclipsing its previous record of 36.9% set in November. Sharp shattered the efficiency record with its concentrator triple-junction compound solar cell, which uses a lens-based system to focus sunlight directly onto the cells in order to generate electricity. This latest breakthrough puts solar power one step closer to grid parity.
Assorted solar cell firms have been doing everything they can in recent years to make solar technology more efficient. This includes developing different types of cells (such as thin-film or crystalline silicon) in order to find a way to increase light absorption.
In a press statement, Sharp said: “Compound solar cells utilize photo-absorption layers made from compounds consisting of two or more elements, such as indium and gallium. The basic structure of this latest triple-junction compound solar cell uses Sharp’s proprietary technology that enables efficient stacking of the three photo-absorption layers, with InGaAs (indium gallium arsenide) as the bottom layer.”
“To achieve this latest increase in conversion efficiency, [we] capitalized on the ability of this cell to efficiently convert sunlight collected via three photo-absorption layers into electricity. Sharp also optimized the spacing between electrodes on the surface of the concentrator cell and minimized the cell’s electrical resistance.”
Currently the solar panels that are available on the market only have an efficiency of 15-20%, but it is hoped that as this efficiency increases, their popularity will grow and prices will fall. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait too long for Sharp’s technology to reach the domestic market – currently it is only used in space satellites, however the company has said that it’s planning to adapt it for use here on earth.
In case you doubt Sharp’s claim, rest assured that the conversion efficiency record was confirmed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy. However interestingly, it matches the record that was achieved by US solar firm Solar Junction in March last year. Well, there’s nothing like a bit of competetive spirit – and if it gets us that bit closer to that elusive 50% efficiency goal, then we’re all for it.
+ Sharp
Via TreeHuggerInbal Goshen and Karl Deisseroth
The false mouse memories made the ethicists uneasy. By stimulating certain neurons in the hippocampus, Susumu Tonegawa and his colleagues caused mice to recall receiving foot shocks in a setting in which none had occurred1. Tonegawa, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says that he has no plans to ever implant false memories into humans — the study, published last month, was designed just to offer insight into memory formation.
But the experiment has nonetheless alarmed some neuroethicists. “That was a bell-ringer, the idea that you can manipulate the brain to control the mind,” says James Giordano, chief of neuroethics studies at Georgetown University in Washington DC. He says that the study is one of many raising ethical concerns, and more are sure to come as an ambitious, multi-year US effort to parse the human brain gets under way.
The BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative will develop technologies to understand how the brain’s billions of neurons work together to produce thought, emotion, movement and memory. But, along with the discoveries, it could force scientists and society to grapple with a laundry list of ethical issues: the responsible use of cognitive-enhancement devices, the protection of personal neural data, the prediction of untreatable neurodegenerative diseases and the assessment of criminal responsibility through brain scanning.
On 20 August, US President Barack Obama’s commission on bioethics will hold a meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to begin to craft a set of ethics standards to guide the BRAIN project. There is already one major mechanism for ethical oversight in US research: institutional review boards, which must approve any studies involving human subjects. But many ethicists say that as neuroscience discoveries creep beyond laboratory walls into the marketplace and the courtroom, more comprehensive oversight is needed. “The long-term consequences of more brain knowledge — whether it’s good for an ethnic group or threatens your personal identity — there’s sort of no one in charge of that,” says Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center.
Tonegawa’s study adds to the growing evidence that memories are surprisingly pliable. In the past few years, researchers have shown that drugs can erase fearful memories2 or disrupt alcoholic cravings in rodents3. Some scientists have even shown that they can introduce rudimentary forms of learning during sleep in humans4. Giordano says that dystopian fears of complete human mind control are overblown. But more limited manipulations may not be far off: the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), one of three government partners in the BRAIN Initiative, is working towards ‘memory prosthetic’ devices to help soldiers with brain injuries to regain lost cognitive skills.
Deep brain stimulation (DBS), in which implants deliver simple electrical pulses, is another area that concerns neuroethicists. The devices have been used since the 1990s to treat motor disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, and are now being tested in patients with psychiatric conditions such as obsessive–compulsive disorder and major depression. Giordano says that applying DBS technology more widely requires ethical care. “We’re dealing with things affecting thought, emotion, behaviour — what people hold valuable as the essence of the self,”he says.
Neuroethicists are noticing challenges beyond the medical system, too, particularly in the courtroom. Judy Illes, a neurology researcher at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and co-founder of the International Neuroethics Society, says that brain imaging could affect the criminal-justice system by changing definitions of personal responsibility. Patterns of brain activity have already been used in some courtrooms to assess the mental fitness of the accused. Some ethicists worry that an advanced ability to map human brain function might be used to measure an individual’s propensity for violent or aberrant behaviour — or even, one day, to predict it.
At next week’s meeting, the presidential commission will hear from each of the US agencies involved in the BRAIN Initiative — DARPA, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation — about preliminary scientific plans and anticipated ethical issues. Lisa Lee, the commission’s executive director, says that the group plans to discuss broad ethical concerns for human and animal participants in neuroscience research, and also the societal implications of discoveries that could arise from the BRAIN Initiative. Although no specific timeline has been set, the commission typically holds three to four meetings over a period of up to 18 months, culminating in recommendations to the President.
As neuroethicists wade into the issues, they may look to the precedent set by the Human Genome Project’s Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) research programme, which has provided about US$300 million in study support over 23 years. The programme raised the profile of genetic privacy issues and laid the foundations for the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, which prohibits discrimination by employers and health insurers on the basis of genetic information.
Thomas Murray, one of the architects of ELSI and president emeritus of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute in Garrison, New York, is among the speakers invited to the commission meeting. He considers the BRAIN Initiative a timely opportunity to develop an ELSI programme for neuroscience. “There will be wonderful questions about human responsibility, human agency,” he says. “It’s never too soon to begin.”According to reports in WA, Perth Glory coach Kenny Lowe is set to leverage his connection with Diego Castro to lure another La Liga gem to the Hyundai A-League.
The Weekend West reports that Lowe's upcoming scouting trip to Europe will include Spain where the report claims the Glory boss will meet with a former Castro teammate.
Click here for the West
The unnamed player is said to be an attacking midfielder with 12 years experience in the Spanish top flight.
If the deal came off and the player was anywhere near the level of the talismanic goal machine Castro, it would be a huge boost for Glory and the league.
Castro, 34, formerly of Getafe and Sporting Gijon, arrived two seasons ago and had an instant impact winning the best player in the league in his first season (the Johnny Warren Medal) and finishing runner up to Milos Ninkovic in the season just completed.
The Spanish winger has also re-signed for a third campaign in purple, as Glory look to build on their eye-catching semi final finish from last season.
Glory's next match will be a pre-season friendly with Chilean side Audax Italiano on July 12 at nib.I have a remote site that is connected to another site via a site to site tunnel using pki / cert based auth. My new firewall has the same config, etc., but I had to generate a new cert since the old hardware was dead and I could not export the original cert.
Everything looks good in my cert, but I'm getting an authentication error on the other end. I'm guessing this may have something to do with it seeing a different cert than it's expecting? I've deleted the tunnel config on the remote end, committed, and applied it back, hoping it would jar something loose. Is there some kind of a 'known hosts' type file that I need to clear?
Logs from the remote firewall. local_ip refers to the IP of this remote firewall:
[Apr 15 00:02:21][local_ip <-> remote_ip] ikev2_state_error: [da7c00/ae9800] Negotiation failed because of error Authentication failed (24) [Apr 15 00:02:21][local_ip <-> remote_ip] IKE negotiation fail for local:local_ip, remote:remote_ip IKEv2 with status: Authentication failed [Apr 15 00:02:21][local_ip <-> remote_ip] IPSec negotiation failed for SA-CFG remote_hostname for local:local_ip, remote:remote_ip IKEv2. status: Authentication failed [Apr 15 00:02:21][local_ip <-> remote_ip] P2 ed info: flags 0xc2, P2 error: Error ok [Apr 15 00:02:21][local_ip <-> remote_ip] IPSec SA done callback. ed ae8028. status: Authentication failed [Apr 15 00:02:21][local_ip <-> remote_ip] IPSec SA done callback with sa-cfg NULL in p2_ed. status: Authentication failed
On the local side, everything seems to be working fine. I'm getting ike + ipsec SA's establishing, then clearing, then establishing, over and over. But that tells me that the new firewall is okay with the attempts to establish a tunnel by the remote firewall.Donald Trump is on to something—he wants “extreme vetting” of immigrants to ensure that they agree with American values on issues like religious freedom, gender equality and gay rights. As Trump bluntly put it in his big foreign policy speech Monday, “Those who do not believe in our Constitution, or who support bigotry and hatred, will not be admitted for immigration into the country.”
But why focus on immigrants? Why not follow Trump’s mantra of “America First” and apply this test to American citizens? Yes, if you were born here, you had the luck of the draw. Which is a lucky thing for Trump, because if the test could be applied to natural-born citizens, the result would be that over half of the Republican Party—and most of Trump’s voters—would be banned from the United States.
It’s irony defined to hear the GOP Presidential nominee complain about discrimination against gays, the lack of equality for women and the need for religious liberty for all. Republicans have done everything possible to enact laws to enable discrimination against the LGBT community, from so-called “religious liberty” legislation to the past championing state constitutional amendments barring marriage equality. They have fought equal-pay measures and sought to oppress women. And they have trampled on religious liberty for Muslim Americans.
Why don’t we take a look at the views of the rank and file Republicans on the key issues Trump demanded that any immigrant seeking to enter America must be vetted on?:
1. Gay Rights. If you don’t support marriage equality you are not adhering to American values as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. It’s that simple. And that’s not just my view but also the U.S. Supreme Court’s, from the seminal case last year recognizing marriage equality as the law of the land. There the Court wrote about same-sex couples: “They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”
Well, where does the GOP stand on this right? A May Pew Poll found only 33 percent of Republicans believe that gay couples should have rights equal to their heterosexual counterparts. (In contrast, almost 80 percent of progressives support it.) And people like Ted Cruz have gone as far as to exclaim that LGBT activists who were simply seeking equal rights were waging a “jihad” against people of faith.
That means bye-bye to over 60 percent of the Republican Party, including Trump’s vice presidential candidate Mike Pence, because they have not embraced American values of marriage equality.
2. Gender equality. Keep in mind that current Republican congressional Rep. Jody Hice said that a woman should run for political office only if her husband consents to it since husbands have “authority” over their wives. Before you dismiss Hice’s views as being an exception, he easily won his election in 2014 and was vocally supported by well known conservative Erick Erickson.
What about on key gender-equality issues? Regarding a women’s right to control her own body, 59 percent of Republicans believe that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. And on equal pay for women, only 14 percent of Republicans support legislation to close the gender pay gap where women are being paid on average 79 cents for every dollar their male counterparts receive. (And that number is far worse when the comparison is white men versus women of color.)
Bottom line: Gender equality and the Republican rank and file don’t go together. That flies in the face of the Equal Protection Clause of our Constitution and again means that under Trump’s own test they shouldn’t be in America.
3. Religious liberty. Simply put, every American should have the same right to worship regardless of their faith. But polls show that Republicans tend to support that concept only if it involves Christianity, not Islam. For example, a December 2015 poll found 88 percent of Republicans support religious liberty when it comes to Christianity. But the same poll found almost a third fewer Republicans support religious liberty for Muslims in America.
Even more shocking is that a recent poll found that 40 percent of Republicans in North Carolina want to statutorily ban Islam, meaning it would be a crime to practice the faith there. And we have seen countless instances across the nation by Republicans to stop the building of local mosques.
Looks like Trump’s “extreme vetting” would end up keeping out a huge chunk of Republicans. They simply don’t subscribe to American values on key issues such as gay rights, gender equality and religious liberty.
As Trump declared Monday, “We have to promote the exceptional virtues of our own way of life—and expecting that newcomers to our society do the same.” Well, I say why don’t we start with America first and ensure that Republicans subscribe to those “exceptional virtues”? I think most Americans would agree that it’s time to fix the problems right here at home first before focusing to issues beyond our borders.Standard Bank’s Timothy Ash has an excellent “on the one hand, on the other hand” analysis of Ukraine’s political and economic prospects in The Kyiv Post. He begins by laying out reasons why investors (particularly those considering buying Ukrainian sovereign debt) might have reason to be optimistic about Ukraine’s future, and then lists equally compelling reasons why they should be wary and put their money elsewhere.
Referring to Ukraine’s recent debt restructuring deal, he summarizes his take as follows: “Like warrants, Ukraine and the bonds are in my view a binary call at this stage. You can quite easily construct both very positive and very negative scenarios…” So Ukraine’s future could be very bright, or it could be dismal.
He continues: “With peace in the east, and if the current pace of economic reform continues – Ukraine can be the next Poland over the next decade – I really believe this line.”
With respect to reform, he argues that Kyiv is making considerable progress (with the partial exception of measures to limit corruption). This, too, is the view of Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF, who today told Ukraine’s President Poroshenko at a Kyiv press conference in Kyiv that she is “extremely encouraged by the progress that has been achieved in the past few months… To have achieved what you have achieved in such a short period of time is just nothing but astonishing.”
So my take on Ash’s analysis – and here I agree with him – is that he thinks on balance Ukraine’s economic prospects, and somewhat less clearly its political prospects, are good if, but only if, it can contain the fighting in the east, or better yet if it can arrange a lasting ceasefire.
That, however, is where Ash’s pessimism enters, and where I begin to disagree with him. His summary of the pessimistic take on Ukraine begins as follows:
Russia is never going to leave Ukraine alone. According to this view (which I share), tearing Ukraine out of its current Western orbit and back within Russian geopolitical/strategic control is the number one policy priority for President Putin. Ukraine is part of the Russian psyche, its history, tradition, culture, economy, language (dating back over 1027 years to the founding of “Rus”, in Kiev) – and Putin, and Russia/Russians simply cannot imagine Ukraine taking a quite different direction/path. According to this view, Putin simply will not and, arguably, cannot afford to let Ukraine go on a separate course to Russia.
He then cites two arguments about why “further Russian intervention is very likely, almost inevitable.” First, a Ukraine that started to look like Poland (economically robust, generally liberal, democratic) would be a threat to Putin’s illiberal authoritarian order. And second, a Ukraine that looked like Poland would be a military threat to Russia. He then suggests that a Russian assault is likely to happen sooner rather than later because the next U.S. president is going to be considerably more hawkish than Obama.
My take is that while these are all factors in the Kremlin’s calculations, a major offensive in the east or a Russian assault on Ukrainian military assets is nonetheless quite unlikely. As Ash argues in the optimistic part of his analysis, the costs of such a move would be very high – more military assistance for Kyiv, more sanctions, and more NATO forces moving closer to Russia’s borders. Ash implies, however, that the Kremlin might decide to accept those costs because keeping Ukraine within its orbit is what matters most, and that can only be accomplished by decisively precluding economic and political stabilization in Kyiv through a large-scale invasion.
I have a rather different take, however, on what is driving Russia’s Ukraine policy. I don’t think, as Ash puts it, that “tearing Ukraine out of its current Western orbit and back within Russian geopolitical/strategic control is the number one policy priority for President Putin.” In fact, I don’t believe that Kremlin policy is the result of Putin’s deep affinity for ancient Rus’ or reflects an effort at “gathering of the Russian lands.” While Russia’s state media promotes this line, and many Russians doubtless believe it, I don’t think Putin himself considers Ukraine an essential part of eternal Russia which has no right to independent statehood (despite what he has sometimes said). As with his embrace of Russian Orthodoxy, I believe his embrace of the “Kievan Rus” trope and related discourse is instrumental – it dresses up what he wants to do for other reasons.
If that were not the case, I would agree that the risk of a major offensive in Ukraine would be a good deal higher than I think it is. But my guess is that Putin is much more Soviet multi-nationalist and a great power statist than he is a Russian ethno-nationalist and imperial traditionalist.
I also doubt that he or his advisors worry much about Ukraine on its own becoming a significant security threat at some point down the line. That would only be the case if Ukraine were to join NATO, or if cooperation between NATO and Kyiv became so extensive that the Kremlin felt NATO could use Ukraine as a launching point for an assault on Russia. In any case, I suspect that the Kremlin realizes that Ukraine is not going to be in a position to join NATO as long as Russia controls Crimea and prevents |
shirt were used to obscure the vehicle's windows.
Officers said Beasley rushed to put his clothes on when they arrived, and that the victim was naked from the waist down.
Following his arrest, Beasley told investigators that he performed oral sex on the girl. He said he started a sexual relationship with her on Valentine's Day, and that they had sex several times in the car and at his apartment.
Cops said Beasley, who is the victim's 9th grade biology teacher, also admitted to inappropriate contact during school hours, including kissing and touching, Local 10 reports.
Parents were horrified when they learned of the scandal. Some vowed to pull their children out of the school.
Police searched the man's phone and found a photo of a penis and video of a man masturbating, both of which were sent to the alleged victim. Inquisitr reports that both images were of Beasley, and that he sexted the girl.I had a chance to meet the president recently, so of course I talked with him about poverty.
(This may give you some insight into why I am not invited to more parties.)
I'm not bragging. I was at a dinner with Barack Obama through a series of flukes and didn't speak with him long. But I wanted to know what the president thought about child poverty. He reminded me that his mother used Food Stamps when he was young. This has been written about before, but hearing him say it struck me.
When we talk about child poverty, we often dwell on the suffering. We talk about kids who have rashes because their parents can't afford fresh diapers. We talk about the extreme disadvantage a kid from a struggling household faces in school.
But we should also be talking about potential. We should talk about how when you meet the needs of a low-income family, you get kids who turn out ready to make contributions to our society. In not emphasizing their potential, we do a disservice to the people we serve. And we bolster stereotypes based on ignorance.
I seem to be something of an ignorance magnet. In addition to the many wonderful notes I get from people who want to help low-income families, I also hear from people who talk about creating dependency, who direct spleen at low-income parents for bringing children into the world, and who see all poor children as future welfare recipients and/or criminals.
The leader of the free world grew up on Food Stamps. Every child has potential. It is in society's best interest to make sure that potential is realized. The kid with the mind that can figure out how to produce cheap, low-emission energy is not necessarily being raised in some tony suburb and getting a first-class education. She may be living in a low-income neighborhood, raised by parents struggling to meet her basic needs and attending low performing schools. That young genius may be able to overcome all those circumstances and be able to share her gift with the world. Then again, she may not. Do we want to take that chance? Shouldn't we be creating conditions that makes her success -- and ultimately ours -- much more likely?
Mr. Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, turned to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Food Stamps) at least once. She was a highly educated woman who worked hard as an academic and made significant contributions to the world through her work pioneering microfinance enterprises in developing countries. She didn't fit the stereotype we assign to people on public assistance.
Many people live in desperate, long-term poverty in the United States, and it is important to make the structural changes that will help them reach self-sufficiency. Others experience short-term hardship and simply need a little help so that a bump in the road does not turn into a valley too deep to climb out of.Thanks to WWEDVDNews readers Jamie Gilbert and Matthew Periolat, here’s an exclusive first look at the full artwork on the new WrestleMania 1-15 DVD re-releases.
These are officially released tomorrow to the United States and Canada. You can pre-order them online from Amazon by clicking here, or check Walmart stores.
The Heartbreak Kid Shawn Michaels challenges his former bodyguard Diesel for the WWE Championship. NFL Legend Lawrence Taylor brings his signature gridiron toughness to the ring to face the mighty Bam Bam Bigelow.
In one of the truly unforgettable matches in WWE history, Shawn Michaels and Bret ‘Hit Man’ Hart headline in a one hour Iron Man Match for the WWE Championship. Two future WWE icons, Triple H and Stone Cold Steve Austin, make their WrestleMania debuts.
Undertaker extends his illustrious streak and for the first time at WrestleMania, secures the WWE Championship. In a match remembered for its brutality, Stone Cold Steve Austin and Bret ‘Hit Man’ Hart lock up in a match with no disqualifications, no pinfalls, and no mercy.
For collectors overseas who may want to get hold of these releases, this eBay listing has gone up which contains the full WrestleMania 1-15 DVD package and has international shipping available. Pricey, but one way to do it.Bright lights, big cities
AT THE beginning of February, somewhere in London, a maternity ward welcomed the city's 8,615,246th inhabitant. The mayor of London reckons that the British capital has now surpassed its previous population peak set in 1939. But if it occasionally feels cramped on the Tube, the task for other city planners around the world looks far more daunting. Nearly 9% of the world's population will be living in just 41 megacities (those with more than 10m inhabitants) by 2030. Even adding in the residents of the greater urban area, London only earned megacity status in 2013, according to the UN. Tokyo is estimated to be home to 38m people. Asia will account for over half of the world's 29 megacities this year. But it is in Africa that some of the most rapid urbanisation is taking place. Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, will see its population increase a hundredfold from 200,000 in 1950 to a projected 20m by 2030; Lagos, the most populous city in Nigeria, will have over 24m residents by that time.
Our interactive map above tracks global city population shifts and forecasts over time. Click the 'play' button at the top or move the slider to change the date; double-click/tap a country to zoom in or use the search box to hone in on a city and see a graph of its population over time.David Cameron had clearly planned his answers to his Today programme so that a casual listener might think that he really is very keen for the TV debates to take place. He sounded ever so earnest, and repeatedly said that he does want the debates to take place. But when Justin Webb asked the crucial question – which was tell us you’re going to do the TV debates, rather than that you just want them to happen – the Prime Minister’s pretence was exposed.
He doesn’t want the TV debates to happen, and now that his original condition of the Greens being included has been met, he is attaching more conditions before he will say ‘I will do these debates’. The first, which is that the Northern Irish parties should be included if the SNP and Plaid Cymru are to get a place, is quite reasonable and James makes the case for that here. The broadcasters have clearly had great difficulty in coming up with workable criteria for which parties should be included, but they really have made it easier for the Prime Minister with both the first and second sets of proposals.
But the second condition was that the debates don’t happen within the short campaign. The Prime Minister has made this point before, but not in relation to the specific proposals offered by the broadcasters. Until last week, all he wanted was the Green party in the debates, now he wants the DUP and Sinn Fein and to dictate when the debates take place.
It is difficult to conclude anything other than that Cameron is being utterly disingenuous on these debates. He may be right that they sucked the life out of the campaign, but he is using this new condition to wriggle out of a chance to bring politics to voters who do not usually read newspapers and who, according to the polls, want the debates to happen. His effusive quotes in 2010 about the importance of the debates can now be filed in the rather large ‘expedience’ drawer in Cameron’s filing cabinet, along with his previous love of environmental policies, because he cannot have meant them. If he did, he would accept that the TV debates are a part of the campaign that he may not necessarily enjoy but that voters want. And then he would jolly well get on with them.by
Almost 25 years since its declaration of independence from communist Yugoslavia, Croatia (as other states of former Yugoslavia) has not in its entirety come to terms with the tyranny of communism and is infested with demons of communism at all levels of the society and state-governance. Many former communists and/or their descendants evidently ignore the dictatorial system imposed on the country they say, “they liberated” from WWII German occupation/its collaborators.
Apart from a decisive lustration as well as political and moral distancing from the communist past – apart from exorcising the remnants of communism, Croatia has little chance in realizing the freedom and democracy it fought for in 1990’s – in rivers of blood of its own people.
And so, as seemingly organised barriers are placed on the path to full freedom and democracy, exorcism of all remnants of communism becomes a battle that needs to be as organised as the leftist or communist-flavoured machinery that constantly undermines progress of an independent and democratic state, which is desirous of shedding the last vestiges of communism. The government alone, especially not a government that is deeply riddled with remnants of communism, cannot do the shedding – alone. Exorcism of communism needs to find soldiers within the natural milieu of Croatian society, and, citizens should and must organize themselves into various action groups towards this end.
The greater than life-size bust of Yugoslavia’s leader Josip Broz Tito in the Office of the President of Croatia, marking the spot where misguided fantasies about the communist totalitarian regime served as a kind of nationwide reverence towards Tito and his communist regime was recently removed from that office by Croatia’s president Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic. The removal of the bust was engulfed in bitter debate over Tito’s place in European history, demonstrating that many Croatians are far from ready to acknowledge the fact that Tito’s dictatorial system was the force that in many ways drove 94% of Croatian voters to seek independence in the early 1990’s.
A battle of symbols and memories continues to be waged — over statues, street names, the Red star, the places for remembrance of communist crimes such as Bleiburg massacres… Now entrenched in the West through NATO and European Union membership, Croatia is showing new eagerness to erase the more visible vestiges of communism almost every day or week. I do fervently hope that Tito’s name will soon be removed from the opera house square in Zagreb as yet another milestone in exorcism of the remnants of communist past that stifle progress in Croatia towards fully achieving the goal of freedom and democracy.
The Committee For the Defence Of Croatian Vukovar has Friday 17 April 2015 stated: “ Remnants of the totalitarian regimes are attempting to crush the Croatian statehood,” said Tomislav Josic, the Committee’s president. “Croatia must rise loudly at this time when the well organised remnants of totalitarian structures and attempting to crush our statehood, pride, dignity and survival. We invite all individuals, organisations and institutions to collaborate with us if they consider that the realisation of our stated goals will lead to a better and more just Croatia”. The ten strategic goals the Committee has announced include the protection of Croatian statehood, human rights, lustration and directing Croatian foreign policy towards the EU and NATO countries… This is a shining example of how citizens’ organisations can positively contribute to the shedding of communist past and to the progress Croatia needs to make as a free and democratic state.
Another recent example of organised citizens in the battle of shedding the remnants of communism from Croatia is the work done by several prominent people under the umbrella of the Croatian National Ethics Tribunal. The Tribunal has Saturday 18 April 2015 delivered a yet another judgment and condemnation against persons for whom the evidence they claim shows have worked against Croatian national interests. These persons are Vesna Pusic (current foreign minister of Croatia), Stjepan Mesic (former president of Croatia) and Milorad Pupovac (member of parliament representing a section of Serb minority in Croatia).
”It’s difficult to predict the effect of this judgment, but one thing is certain: people like these should not carry out the duties they’re carrying out today. Even as a young person Vesna Pusic began working against Croatian national interests, and as far as Stjepan Mesic is concerned, he, together with Vesna Pusic, stood on the side of Serbia and started equating the victims with the aggressors. These persons do not behave in ethically acceptable ways, Mesic went secretly to the Hague to give testimony against Croatia, Franjo Tudjman and, finally, against Croatian Generals,” said dr Zvonimir Separovic, president of the Ethics Tribunal and added that the next in line will be Josip Broz Tito and the fact that the communist regime was a criminal regime.
One thing that seems clear is that since independence from communist Yugoslavia, Croatia has struggled to change its identity into the one it endured great human and material losses as the result of Serb aggression for – into a unified Croatia of freed and democratic people in which the past would be reconciled and a better future defined. But the former communists and their followers continue causing new and maintaining the old ideological tensions, refusing to acknowledge that it was communism the Croatian people were freed from! That’s why actions like the above-mentioned ones are crucial to the exorcism of communism and psychological recuperation from the harsh dictatorship of Yugoslavia. Ina Vukic, Prof. (Zgb); B.A., M.A.Ps. (Syd)Cultured meat is meat produced by in vitro cultivation of animal cells, instead of from slaughtered animals.[1] It is a form of cellular agriculture.
Cultured meat is produced using many of the same tissue engineering techniques traditionally used in regenerative medicine.[2] The concept of cultured meat was popularized by Jason Matheny in the early 2000s after co-authoring a seminal paper[3] on cultured meat production and creating New Harvest, the world's first non-profit organization dedicated to supporting in vitro meat research.[4]
In 2013, Mark Post, professor at Maastricht University, was the first to showcase a proof-of-concept for in-vitro lab grown meat by creating the first lab-grown burger patty. Since then, several cultured meat prototypes have gained media attention: however, because of limited dedicated research activities, cultured meat has not yet been commercialized, although Mosa meat plans to bring cultured meat to the market by 2021.[5] In addition, it has yet to be seen whether consumers will accept cultured meat as meat.[6]
The production process still has much room for improvement, but it has advanced in most recent years, leading up to 2018, under various companies.[7] Its applications lead it to have several prospective health, environmental, cultural, and economic considerations in comparison to conventional meat.[8]
Nomenclature [ edit ]
Besides cultured meat, the terms in vitro meat, vat-grown[9], lab-grown meat,[10] cell-based meat,[11] clean meat, and synthetic meat[12] have all been used by various outlets to describe the product.
Clean meat is an alternative term that is preferred by some journalists, advocates, and organizations that support the technology. According to the Good Food Institute,[13] the name better reflects the production and benefits of the meat[14][15] and surpassed "cultured" and "in vitro" in media mentions as well as Google searches.[16]
History [ edit ]
20th century [ edit ]
The theoretical possibility of growing meat in an industrial setting has long captured the public imagination. Winston Churchill suggested in 1931: "We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium."[17]
In vitro cultivation of muscular fibers was performed as early as 1971 by Russell Ross. Indeed, the abstract was
Smooth muscle derived from the inner media and intima of immature guinea pig aorta were grown for up to 8 weeks in cell culture. The cells maintained the morphology of smooth muscle at all phases of their growth in culture. After growing to confluency, they grew in multiple overlapping layers. By week 4 in culture, microfibrils (110 A) appeared within the spaces between the layers of cells. Basement membrane-like material also appeared adjacent to the cells. Analysis of the microfibrils showed that they have an amino acid composition similar to that of the microfibrillar protein of the intact elastic fiber. These investigations coupled with the radioautographic observations of the ability of aortic smooth muscle to synthesize and secrete extracellular proteins demonstrate that this cell is a connective tissue synthetic cell.[18]
The culturing of stem cells from animals has been possible since the 1990s, including the production of small quantities of tissue which could, in principle be cooked and eaten. NASA has been conducting experiments since 2001, producing cultured meat from turkey cells.[19][20] The first edible sample was produced by the NSR/Touro Applied BioScience Research Consortium in 2002: goldfish cells grown to resemble fish fillets.[21][22][23]
In 1998 Jon F. Vein of the United States filed for, and ultimately secured, a patent (US 6,835,390 B1) for the production of tissue engineered meat for human consumption, wherein muscle and fat cells would be grown in an integrated fashion to create food products such as beef, poultry and fish.
Early 21st century [ edit ]
In 2001, dermatologist Wiete Westerhof from the University of Amsterdam, medical doctor Willem van Eelen, and businessman Willem van Kooten announced that they had filed for a worldwide patent on a process to produce cultured meat.[24] In the process, a matrix of collagen is seeded with muscle cells, which are then bathed in a nutritious solution and induced to divide.[25] Scientists in Amsterdam study the culture medium, while the University of Utrecht studies the proliferation of muscle cells, and the Eindhoven University of Technology is researching bioreactors.[25][dead link]
In 2003, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of the Tissue Culture and Art Project and Harvard Medical School exhibited in Nantes a "steak" a few centimetres wide, grown from frog stem cells, which was cooked and eaten.[26]
The first peer-reviewed journal article published on the subject of laboratory-grown meat appeared in a 2005 issue of Tissue Engineering.[27]
In 2008, PETA offered a $1 million prize to the first company to bring lab-grown chicken meat to consumers by 2012.[28] The Dutch government has put US$4 million into experiments regarding cultured meat.[19] The In Vitro Meat Consortium, a group formed by international researchers interested in the technology, held the first international conference on the production of cultured meat, hosted by the Food Research Institute of Norway in April 2008, to discuss commercial possibilities.[21] Time magazine declared cultured meat production to be one of the 50 breakthrough ideas of 2009.[29] In November 2009, scientists from the Netherlands announced they had managed to grow meat in the laboratory using the cells from a live pig.[30]
As of 2012, 30 laboratories from around the world have announced that they are working on cultured meat research.[31]
The first cultured beef burger patty, created by Dr. Mark Post at Maastricht University, was eaten at a demonstration for the press in London in August 2013.[32] It was made from over 20,000 thin strands of muscle tissue.[33] This burger cost Dr. Post over $300,000 to make and over 2 years to produce.[34] Two other companies have also begun to culture meat; Memphis Meats in the US and SuperMeat in Israel.[35]
As of February 2017, a recent report has shown that the price of these cultured burgers has dropped dramatically. Going from roughly over $300,000 to $11.36 in just 3 and a half years.[36] This cost is now only 9-10 times more expensive per pound than standard ground beef.[36]
First public trial [ edit ]
On August 5, 2013, the world's first lab-grown burger was cooked and eaten at a news conference in London. Scientists from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, led by professor Mark Post, had taken stem cells from a cow and grown them into strips of muscle which they then combined to make a burger. The burger was cooked by chef Richard McGeown of Couch's Great House Restaurant, Polperro, Cornwall, and tasted by critics Hanni Rützler, a food researcher from the Future Food Studio and Josh Schonwald.[32] Rützler stated,
There is really a bite to it, there is quite some flavour with the browning. I know there is no fat in it so I didn't really know how juicy it would be, but there is quite some intense taste; it's close to meat, it's not that juicy, but the consistency is perfect. This is meat to me... It's really something to bite on and I think the look is quite similar.[37]
Rützler added that even in a blind trial she would have taken the product for meat rather than a soya copy.[37]
Tissue for the London demonstration was cultivated in May 2013, using about 20,000 thin strips of cultured muscle tissue. Funding of around €250,000 came from an anonymous donor later revealed to be Sergey Brin.[38] Post remarked that "there's no reason why it can't be cheaper...If we can reduce the global herd a millionfold, then I'm happy".[39]
Further progress from startups [ edit ]
It's just a matter of time before this is gonna happen, I'm absolutely convinced of that. In our case, I estimate the time to be about 3 years before we are ready to enter the market on a small scale, about 5 years to enter the market on a larger scale, and if you'd ask me: "When will [cultured meat] be in the supermarket around the corner?" That'll be closer to 10 than to 5 years, I think. – Peter Verstrate, Mosa Meat (2018)[40](1:06:15)
Since the first public trial, several startups have made advances in the field. Mosa Meat co-founded by Mark Post continuous research with a focus on cultured beef. The company was able to significantly lower the costs of production.[41]
Memphis Meats, a Silicon Valley startup founded by a cardiologist, launched a video in February 2016 showcasing its cultured beef meatball.[41][42][43] In March 2017, it showcased chicken tenders and duck a l'orange, the first cultured poultry-based foods shown to the public.[44][45][46]
An Israeli company, SuperMeat, ran a viral crowdfunding campaign in 2016 for its work on cultured chicken.[47][48][49][50][51][52]
Finless Foods, a San Francisco-based company aimed at cultured fish, was founded in June 2016. In March 2017 it commenced laboratory operations and progressed quickly. Director Mike Selden said in July 2017 to expect bringing cultured fish products on the market within two years (by the end of 2019).[53]
In March 2018, JUST, Inc. (in 2011 founded as Hampton Creek in San Francisco) claimed to be able to present a consumer product from cultured meat by the end of 2018. According to CEO Josh Tetrick the technology is already there, and now it is merely a matter of applying it. JUST has about 130 employees and a research department of 55 scientists, where lab meat from poultry, pork and beef is being developed. They would have already solved the problem of feeding the stemcells with only plant resources. JUST receives sponsoring from Chinese billionaire Li Ka-shing, Yahoo! cofounder Jerry Yang and according to Tetrick also from Heineken International amongst others.[54]
The Dutch startup Meatable, consisting of Krijn de Nood, Daan Luining, Ruud Out, Roger Pederson, Mark Kotter and Gordana Apic among others, reported in September 2018 it had succeeded in growing meat using pluripotent stem cells from animals' umbilical cords. Although such cells are reportedly difficult to work with, Meatable claimed to be able to direct them to behave using their proprietary technique in order to become muscle cells or fat cells as needed. The major advantage is that this technique bypasses fetal bovine serum, meaning that no animal has to be killed in order to produce meat.[55] That month, it was estimated there were about 30 cultured meat startups across the world. A Dutch House of Representatives Commission meeting discussed the importance and necessity of governmental support for researching, developing and introducing cultured meat in society, speaking to representatives of three universities, three startups and four civil interest groups on 26 September 2018.[40]
Production [ edit ]
There are three stages in the production of cultured meat: selection of starter cells, treatment of growth medium, and scaffolding.[56][57][7]
Starter cells [ edit ]
Myoblasts are one precursor to muscle cells, and their fibers are shown in yellow and nuclei shown in blue.
The initial stage of growing cultured meat is to collect cells that have a rapid rate of proliferation (high cell reproduction rate). Such cells include embryonic stem cells, adult stem cells, myosatellite cells, or myoblasts. Stem cells proliferate the quickest, but have not yet begun development towards a specific kind of cell, which creates the challenge of splitting the cells and directing them to grow a certain way. Fully developed muscle cells are ideal in the aspect that they have already finished development as a muscle, but proliferate hardly at all. Therefore, cells such as myosattelite and myoblast cells are often used as they still proliferate at an acceptable rate, but also sufficiently differentiate from other types of cells.[3]
Growth medium [ edit ]
The cells are then treated by applying a protein that promotes tissue growth, which is known as a growth medium. These mediums should contain the necessary nutrients and appropriate quantity of growth factors. They are then placed in a culture medium, in a bio-reactor, which is able to supply the cells with the energetic requirements they need.[7]
Scaffold [ edit ]
Muscle tissue is developed from the growth medium and organized in a three-dimensional structure by the scaffold for end product.
To culture three-dimensional meat, the cells are grown on a scaffold, which is a component that directs its structure and order. The ideal scaffold is edible so the meat does not have to be removed, and periodically moves to stretch the developing muscle, thereby simulating the animal body during normal development. Additionally the scaffold must maintain flexibility in order to not detach from the developing myotubes (early muscle fibers). Scaffold must also allow vascularization (creation of blood vessels) in order for normal development of muscle tissue.[7][58]
Other considerations [ edit ]
Scaffold-based production techniques can only be appropriately used in boneless or ground meats (processed). The end result of this process would be meats such as hamburgers or sausages. In order to create more structured meats, for example steak, muscle tissue must be structured in directed and self-organized means or by proliferation of muscle tissue already existing. Additionally, the presence of gravitational, magnetic, fluid flow, and mechanical fields have an effect on the proliferation rates of the muscle cells. Processes of tension such as stretching and relaxing increased differentiation into muscle cells.[58]
The first cultured hamburger, ready to be fried on 5 August 2013.
Once this process has been started, it would be theoretically possible to continue producing meat indefinitely without introducing new cells from a living organism.[59] It has been claimed that, conditions being ideal, two months of cultured meat production could deliver up to 50,000 tons of meat from ten pork muscle cells.[60]
Cultured meat production requires a preservative, such as sodium benzoate, to protect the growing meat from yeast and fungus. Collagen powder, xanthan gum, mannitol and cochineal could be used in different ways during the process.[61]
The price of cultured meat at retail outlets like grocery stores and supermarkets may decrease to levels that middle-class consumers consider to be "inexpensive" due to technological advancements.[62][better source needed]
Research challenges [ edit ]
The science for cultured meat is an outgrowth of the field of biotechnology known as tissue engineering.[63] The technology is simultaneously being developed along with other uses for tissue engineering such as helping those with muscular dystrophy and, similarly, growing transplant organs.[19][64] There are several obstacles to overcome if it has any chance of succeeding; at the moment, the most notable ones are scale and cost.[19][21]
Proliferation of muscle cells: Although it is not very difficult to make stem cells divide, for meat production it is necessary that they divide at a quick pace, producing the solid meat. [64] This requirement has some overlap with the medical branch of tissue engineering.
This requirement has some overlap with the medical branch of tissue engineering. Culture medium: Proliferating cells need a food source to grow and develop. The growth medium should be a well-balanced mixture of ingredients and growth factors. Scientists have already identified possible growth media for turkey, [65] fish, [66] sheep [67] and pig [68] muscle cells. Depending on the motives of the researchers, the growth medium has additional requirements. Commercial: The growth medium should be inexpensive to produce. A plant-based medium may be less expensive than fetal bovine serum. [64] Animal welfare: The growth medium should be devoid of animal sources (except for the initial "mining" of the original stem cells). [64] Non-Allergenic: While plant-based growth media are "more realistic," will be cheaper, and will reduce the possibility of infectious agents, there is also the possibility that plant-based growth media may cause allergic reactions in some consumers. [69]
fish, sheep and pig muscle cells. Depending on the motives of the researchers, the growth medium has additional requirements. Bioreactors: Nutrients and oxygen need to be delivered close to each growing cell, on the scale of millimeters. In animals this job is handled by blood vessels. A bioreactor should emulate this function in an efficient manner. The usual approach is to create a sponge-like matrix in which the cells can grow and perfuse it with the growth medium.
Additionally, there is no dedicated scientific research discipline for cellular agriculture and its development. The past research undertaken into cellular agriculture were isolated from each other, and they did not receive significant academic interest. Although it currently exists, long-term strategies are not sufficiently funded for development and severely lack a sufficient amount of researchers.[8]
Differences from conventional meat [ edit ]
The first cultured hamburger being fried on 5 August 2013.
Health [ edit ]
Large-scale production of cultured meat may or may not require artificial growth hormones to be added to the culture for meat production.[63][70]
Researchers have suggested that omega-3 fatty acids could be added to cultured meat as a health bonus.[19] In a similar way, the omega-3 fatty acid content of conventional meat can also be increased by altering what the animals are fed.[71] An issue of Time magazine has suggested that the cell-cultured process may also decrease exposure of the meat to bacteria and disease.[21]
Due to the strictly controlled and predictable environment, cultured meat production has been compared to vertical farming, and some of its proponents have predicted that it will have similar benefits in terms of reducing exposure to dangerous chemicals like pesticides and fungicides, severe injuries, and wildlife.[72]
Concern in regards to developing antibiotic resistance due to the use of antibiotics in livestock, livestock and livestock-derived meat serving as a major source of disease outbreaks (including bird flu, anthrax, swine flu, and listeriosis), and long-term processed meat consumption being associated with increased heart disease, digestive tract cancer, and type 2 diabetes currently plague livestock-based meat. In regards to cultured meat, strict environmental controls and tissue monitoring can prevent infection of meat cultures from the outset, and any potential infection can be detected before shipment to consumers.[73]
In addition to the prevention and lack of diseases, and lack of the use of antibiotics or any other chemical substances, cultured meat can also leverage numerous biotechnology advancements, including increased nutrient fortification, individually-customized cellular and molecular compositions, and optimal nutritional profiles, all making it much healthier than livestock-sourced meat.[73]
Artificiality [ edit ]
Although cultured meat consists of genuine animal muscle cells that are the same as in traditional meat, consumers may find such a high-tech approach to food production distasteful (see appeal to nature). Cultured meat has been disparagingly described as 'Frankenmeat'.[74]
If cultured meat turns out to be different in appearance, taste, smell, texture, or other factors, it may not be commercially competitive with conventionally produced meat. The lack of fat and bone may also be a disadvantage, for these parts make appreciable culinary contributions. However, the lack of bones and/or fat may make many traditional meat preparations, such as buffalo wings, more palatable to small children.[75]
Environmental [ edit ]
Research has suggested that environmental impacts of cultured meat would be significantly lower than normally slaughtered beef.[76] For every hectare that is used for vertical farming and/or cultured meat manufacturing, anywhere between 10 and 20 hectares of land may be converted from conventional agriculture usage back into its natural state.[77] Vertical farms (in addition to cultured meat facilities) could exploit methane digesters to generate a small portion of its own electrical needs. Methane digesters could be built on site to transform the organic waste generated at the facility into biogas which is generally composed of 65% methane along with other gasses. This biogas could then be burned to generate electricity for the greenhouse or a series of bioreactors.[78]
A study by researchers at Oxford and the University of Amsterdam found that cultured meat was "potentially... much more efficient and environmentally-friendly", generating only 4% greenhouse gas emissions, reducing the energy needs of meat generation by up to 45%, and requiring only 2% of the land that the global meat/livestock industry does.[79][80] The patent holder Willem van Eelen,[25] the journalist Brendan I. Koerner,[81] and Hanna Tuomisto, a PhD student from Oxford University all believe it has less environmental impact.[82] This is in contrast to cattle farming, "responsible for 18% of greenhouse gases"[83] and causing more damage to the environment than the combined effects of the world's transportation system. Vertical farming may completely eliminate the need to create extra farmland in rural areas along with cultured meat.[84] Their combined role may create a sustainable solution for a cleaner environment.[84]
One skeptic is Margaret Mellon of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who speculates that the energy and fossil fuel requirements of large-scale cultured meat production may be more environmentally destructive than producing food off the land.[28] However, S.L. Davis has speculated that both vertical farming in urban areas and the activity of cultured meat facilities may cause relatively little harm to the species of wildlife that live around the facilities.[85] Dickson Despommier speculated that natural resources may be spared from depletion due to vertical farming and cultured meat, making them ideal technologies for an overpopulated world.[86] Conventional farming, on the other hand, kills ten wildlife animals per hectare each year.[85] Converting 4 hectares (10 acres) of farmland from its man-made condition back into either pristine wilderness or grasslands would save approximately 40 animals while converting 1 hectare (2 acres) of that same farmland back into the state it was in prior to settlement by human beings would save approximately 80 animals.
Additionally, the cattle industry uses a large amount of water for producing animal feed, animal rearing, and for sanitation purposes. It is estimated that the water recycled from livestock manure is contributing "33% of global nitrogen and phosphorus pollution," "50% of antibiotic pollution," "37% of toxic heavy metals," and "37% of pesticides" which contaminate the planet's freshwater.[87]
The role of genetic modification [ edit ]
Techniques of genetic engineering, such as insertion, deletion, silencing, activation, or mutation of a gene, are not required to produce cultured meat. Furthermore, cultured meat is composed of a tissue or collection of tissues, not an organism. Therefore, it is not a genetically modified organism (GMO). Since cultured meats are simply cells grown in a controlled, artificial environment, some have commented that cultured meat more closely resembles hydroponic vegetables, rather than GMO vegetables.[88]
More research is being done on cultured meat, and although the production of cultured meat does not require techniques of genetic engineering, there is discussion among researchers about utilizing such techniques to improve the quality and sustainability of cultured meat. Fortifying cultured meat with nutrients such as beneficial fatty acids is one improvement that can be facilitated through genetic modification. The same improvement can be made without genetic modification, by manipulating the conditions of the culture medium.[89] Genetic modification may also play a role in the proliferation of muscle cells. The introduction of myogenic regulatory factors, growth factors, or other gene products into muscle cells may increase production past the capacity of conventional meat.[89]
To avoid the use of any animal products, the use of photosynthetic algae and cyanobacteria has been proposed to produce the main ingredients for the culture media, as opposed to the very commonly used fetal bovine or horse serum.[90] Some researchers suggest that the ability of algae and cyanobacteria to produce ingredients for culture media can be improved with certain technologies, most likely not excluding genetic engineering.[91]
Ethical considerations [ edit ]
The Australian bioethicist Julian Savulescu said "Artificial meat stops cruelty to animals, is better for the environment, could be safer and more efficient, and even healthier. We have a moral obligation to support this kind of research. It gets the ethical two thumbs up."[92] Animal welfare groups are generally in favor of the production of cultured meat because it does not have a nervous system and therefore cannot feel pain.[28][59][64] Reactions of vegetarians to cultured meat vary:[93] some feel the cultured meat presented to the public in August 2013 was not vegetarian as fetal calf serum was used in the growth medium.[94] However, since then lab grown meat has been grown under a medium that |
photographer was assistant professor of photojournalism at Ohio University. With a tireless work ethic, intuitive spirit, talent, and a dash of luck, Souza has recently completed the photography assignment of a lifetime. His dedication to the job can be seen by how much time he spent on it. In eight years, Souza only took three, one-week vacations.
Here, Souza discusses how he landed the coveted position as Chief White House photographer for President Obama, the skills and sacrifice required to be a White House photographer, and how the job has evolved in the age of social media.
How did you get your big break as White House photographer for Barack Obama? What was your approach?
My connection to Barack Obama began in November 2004 when he had just been elected to the United States Senate. I was working as the national/international photographer for the Chicago Tribune based out of Washington, D.C., and a reporter and I pitched a story idea to do an extensive series looking at Obama’s first year. The Chicago Tribune was on board, so I immediately reached out to Obama’s staff to see if we could have access to accomplish this. Most politicians are initially cautious when a photographer wants to follow them around, so I was lucky that Obama was open to the project. By this point, I was already an established photographer, and had been the White House photographer for President Reagan, but I don’t think Obama knew this. It was very important for me to establish his trust.
From the beginning, I made sure to take pictures without being intrusive and didn’t use flash. Over time, we got to know each other a bit. He saw how I worked, and came to realize that my primary goal was to document his journey. When the series ran in the Tribune, it was well received, but it’s only a matter of time before coverage becomes overkill. So, independently, I continued photographing Obama, and accompanied his family on a trip to Africa in August 2006. During this trip, I got to know Obama and his family better, and when I returned, the Tribune published images from this trip. It didn’t take long for me to realize how great of a photo subject Obama was—you could tell he was going to be a force on a national stage based on how people reacted to him.
Early 2007, it became clear that Obama was going to announce his presidential run, so the Tribune re-assigned me to cover him. However, as I saw newspapers across the country begin to fold, I accepted a position at Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication as an assistant professor of photojournalism. Things seemingly came to an abrupt stop, but throughout 2008, I would meet up with Obama if he was in the area, or I would fly to cover him on the campaign trail as a freelancer. When it became evident that Obama was going to be a presidential nominee, I asked the Tribune for copyright permission to publish a photo book with images I’d captured over the years. They graciously agreed, and just before the 2008 Democratic National Convention, I published The Rise of Barack Obama. I gifted Obama a copy of the book, and this gave him further insight into my work and how I captured him as a person.
Then, early January 2009, I received a call from press secretary Robert Gibbs saying, “Hey, we want you to be President Obama’s Chief White House photographer.” My response was that in order to do this job right, I’d need access to everything. When Gibbs assured me that President Obama understood what I was doing, I accepted the job on the spot.
My approach was to sneak into rooms I wasn’t supposed to be in and act like I belonged.
How do you get people to see President Obama as presidential and as a human being?
Even though I photographed him extensively over the years, it’s completely different photographing him as president. It takes time getting used to the fact that every presidential meeting and social encounter will be captured. However, President Obama is comfortable in his own skin, and I give myself credit for easing into the process. I tried to anticipate when he needed space, and after about three to six months, we figured out our dance.
The primary role of a White House photographer is to document a president’s history. Therefore, it was important for me to capture the private and public sides of President Obama, which often weave into each other. For example, I’d capture him interacting with his daughters when they stopped by the Oval Office or fist bumping the janitor as he walked to a meeting in the Old Executive Building. He’s still the President of the United States in these moments, but you see him more as a regular person when he does these things.
The primary role of a White House photographer is to document a president’s history. Therefore, it was important for me to capture the private and public sides of Obama, which often weave into each other.
How do you come to a point where you develop a friendship with President Obama and family, and it becomes natural for a camera to always be present?
You don’t have to be best friends with the president you photograph, but you must have a strong, personal rapport. How could you not become friends in some capacity when you spend so much time together? For President Obama, our relationship dates back to 2005, which has given him and his family time to know me and how I work. In fact, it got to a point where they all expected me to be there on Christmas morning as they opened gifts. For the public, it further helped them see him in a different light while adding to the presidential visual archive. On average, I shot anywhere from 500 to 2,000 pictures a day depending on what was happening.
You photographed President Reagan before President Obama—what was the biggest difference in the job between Reagan, in the pre-Internet, selfie, smartphone era—and Obama’s era? Did you need to learn any new skills?
The core aspect of what I did for both administrations was the same—visually document the president’s history. However, social media, and Instagram in particular, became a way for me to display pictures with the public immediately. Instagram didn’t exist until 2011, and this dramatically changed the role of a White House photographer in so many ways. I’d argue that it changed things for the better because it benefits the public to get an inside look at a presidency right now. Some of the pictures that I took during the Reagan Administration weren’t shared with the public for 10 to 30 years!
One day, our White House digital team came to me and said, “We want you to start sharing your photos on Instagram.” While I had opened an account in 2012, I was still trying to understand how it worked before posting. My friend and sports photographer Brad Mangin was very active on Instagram and seeing how he used it convinced me to begin sharing my White House work. My first posts were from my iPhone, and were “just the facts” captions. Then, I started adding a first person perspective, and the response was eye-opening. Anytime there was a special back-story that needed to be told, I’d include it. Occasionally, I’d post pictures from my DSLR camera, and photographers would inquire about technical aspects, like what my shutter speed was or what kind of lens was I using. It was nice to respond to photographers’ questions, and in other instances, my Instagram followers have corrected me when I make a typo or error. It’s been interesting to see how Instagram is evolving, and I continue to learn from watching as well as interacting with my followers.
Overall, people appreciated seeing real, un-staged shots of what former President Obama was like in real-time versus waiting until the future to look back on how he was.
Instagram didn’t exist until 2011, and this dramatically changed the role of a White House photographer in so many ways. I’d argue that it changed things for the better.
You see amazing stuff in the course of a day. How do you drive home in the evening, turn off, and connect with your family and friends?
Honestly, this was the hardest part of the job, because you are literally on call 365 days a year. Your family and personal life are adversely affected, but I knew what I signed up for when I accepted the position. Someone once said, “Working in the White House is like trying to take a sip of water from a fire hose that never shuts off.” On occasion, I’d make it to the gym before work, and my drive home was always a time for reflection.
How do you maintain the stamina to get shots when you’re navigating time zones, high-pressure conversations, security issues, large crowds, and lights?
It’s really difficult, both physically and mentally. When we had overseas trips, we usually left a few hours before bedtime, so it was hard to sleep because of your natural body clock, but also because it’s uncomfortable sleeping on a plane. As soon as we’d arrive in a country, we’d jump right into a 15-hour day. And, foreign countries tend to have more restrictions because if it’s the G-20 Summit and you’re dealing with 19 other heads of state, security is higher.
My approach was to sneak into rooms I wasn’t supposed to be in and act like I belonged. I wasn’t successful every time, but it became a game to me. Funny enough, in the last few years, I had an easier time getting into rooms because the gatekeepers followed my Instagram handle, and understood the importance of what I was doing!
Can you describe capturing the final farewell photo of Obama leaving on his helicopter?
When I’ve looked at previous pictures of a president leaving on helicopter, you usually see the U.S. Capitol outside, so that’s the shot I had in my mind. I also figured we’d be so high up in the air that we wouldn’t be able to see the White House. However, we didn’t end up circling the Capitol, so the picture I took has the White House in the background. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this shot before, so it was really special.
From a technical aspect, the light value inside the helicopter contrasted greatly with the light value outside, so I used Adobe Camera Raw to adjust the color density. It was helpful to be able to make color corrections on my raw file before opening up the image in Photoshop.
What advice would you have for aspiring photographers who want to be a White House photographer?
While you must have talent, there’s a lot of luck involved, too. Politics is about who you know. You can be the best photographer in the world, but if an up-and-coming senator is already connected to a competent photographer they like, chances are they’ll chose them if they decide to run for president.
My path began through newspapers, but everyone needs to find their own path to attain a certain end result. There is no one path in photography or photojournalism. And, your final goal should never be to only be a White House photographer because the odds are slim. There are dozens of photographers in the country who are more skilled than me, but I believe I was the right person for the job because of the way I worked with President Obama, my previous White House experience, and I knew how the job should be done.As part of the major push towards resolution of large bad loans this month, bankers will be meeting Thursday to discuss three big steel accounts — Essar Steel, Bhushan Steel and Electrosteel Steels — as part of the joint lenders' forum (JLF) to discuss the plan ahead.
Banks have outstanding loans worth Rs 45,000 crore to Essar Steel, Rs 47,000 crore to Bhushan Steel, and Rs 11,000 crore to Electrosteel Steels.
"We will discuss these three accounts tomorrow. Hopefully now there should be some resolution. The filing of the cases will happen in the next 10-15 days' time," a senior public sector bank official on aware of the meetings said on late Wednesday evening.
On Wednesday, bankers decided to move an application to the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) to initiate corporate insolvency on Jyoti Structures, another senior banker aware of the discussions said.
Reports suggest ABG Shipyard and Alok Industries will also be taken up for the same.
SBI is the lead bank for Jyoti Structures and Alok Industries that have outstanding loans of RS 22,000 and over RS 5,000 crore, respectively.
ICICI Bank, the lead bank for ABG Shipyard, received a mandate from the consortium of 22 lenders to decide the fate of Rs 6,900-crore loan.
Bankers are holding continuous meetings almost on a daily basis since last week to discuss the 12 accounts identified by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) earlier this month, to be referred to the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC).
These defaulted companies account for nearly Rs 1.9 lakh crore or 1/4th of the total bad loans in the banking system.
All the defaulting companies observed by the RBI have an outstanding debt of over Rs 5,000 crore and 60 percent of it are classified as a non-performing asset (NPA).
To initiate corporate insolvency, bankers have to file cases against the defaulted companies to the NCLT. Once an account is admitted to the NCLT, the bankers take over the control of the company's Board and appoint an insolvency professional to look after the day-today business.
Meanwhile, a solution is being discussed to revive the company and lenders and borrowers have to finalise the resolution within 180 to 270 days, failing which NCLT will allow liquidation of the assets.
Bankers have already decided to file the case of Lanco Infratech to the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) under the IBC, which is publicly announced by the corporate in a regulatory filing.Image copyright EFCC Image caption Mr Uyoyou is named in the wanted poster issued by Nigeria's financial police force
A Nigerian IT worker is being sought by police for his alleged role in co-ordinating a £25m ($40m) cyber-theft at a bank in Abuja where he worked.
Godswill Oyegwa Uyoyou is being sought by Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
A wanted notice claims he helped conspirators dressed as maintenance staff get into the bank so they could use computers to transfer cash.
Local reports suggest the theft was spotted when stolen cash was withdrawn.
Although no members of the gang have been caught, several are being "tracked", Wilson Uwujaren, a spokesman for the EFCC, told News Nigeria.
Details of the robbery are scant but it is thought that Mr Uyoyou and conspirators entered the bank on a Saturday when it was closed and no other staff were working.
The IT staffer was key to the robbery, said the EFCC, because of the access he enjoyed to the computer systems at the bank. This was used to siphon 6.28bn Nigerian Naira into accounts of the conspirators, said the EFCC. So far, the bank at the centre of the theft has not been named.
The EFCC has issued a warrant for Mr Uyoyou's arrest and he is being actively sought in Nigeria.
John Hawes, a computer security researcher at Sophos, said the amount of cash stolen was "unusually large" but the method the gang chose was "all too common".
"Insider risk is a major problem for banks," he wrote on the firm's security blog, "they still have to rely on trusted employees to behave themselves, resist temptation and keep their hands off the huge amounts of funds they may find themselves dealing with every day."Actor, director, philanthropist, aikido sensei, blues guitarist, Buddhist lama, international environmental diplomat, sheriff's deputy, energy drink creator, Texas border guard, and current defendant in a lawsuit alleging he killed a puppy after driving a tank and a full Swat team into an Arizona farm in the course of busting a cockfighting ring … if there is a celebrity more endlessly rewarding than Steven Seagal then do be so good as to produce them.
In the meantime, we return to developments in the existence of the foremost Lost in Showbiz untouchable, a man of whom an eminent Buddhist leader once observed: "All beings have within them the potential for becoming Buddhas. With Steven Seagal I perceived this potential to be particularly strong." To this end, the head of the oldest sect of Tibetan Buddhism formally recognised the Under Siege star as a tulku – a revered reincarnation of some 17th-century sacred treasure revealer – declaring that "it is possible to be both a popular movie star and a tulku".
Well, it's certainly possible to be both a straight-to-DVD star and a tulku. Increasingly, though, Seagal's handheld cinematic output is taking a backseat to the unrealities of his daily life. In 2008, you may recall, it was revealed that Seagal had secretly been a fully commissioned Louisiana cop for the past two decades – way back before reality telly was even invented. However, the art form eventually caught up with the legend, and thus it was that a US channel was premiering a new series entitled Steven Seagal: Lawman, which detailed his experiences at the sharp-ish end of Jefferson Parish law enforcement, doing stuff such as explaining how he brings his spirituality to the business of firing a gun. "The Zen masters in Zen archery too, they don't pull the arrow, they push the arrow. It's the same with that pistol."
But the concept must have needed a shot in the arm, because since then, two things seem to have happened. First, Seagal developed a sort of jaded cop shtick. "It ain't what it used to be," he sighed to a recent interviewer. "It is a lot harder now to be a police officer than what it used to be." And second, he was sworn in by the West Texas sheriff's department so he could start policing the border. So now he says stuff like: "I work in Texas on the border, and Arizona on the border, and there is a lot of crazy stuff going on with the border wars these days. Probably more than 50,000 people have been killed in the border wars over the last few years, which is way more than Iraq and Afghanistan. Don't you think this should be declared a war too?"
No I don't, sensei, is the short answer. But frankly, I'm still failing to compute that the most recognisable face of US border patrol is a semi-automatic-toting Steven Seagal. I don't think I've felt this mindblown since I learned that Rocky and Predator legend Carl Weathers had been contracted by the US defence department to serve as acting coach to various West Coast Iraqi immigrants, who were themselves hired to play insurgents in mock battles at the California military base to which soldiers were sent en route to deployment in Iraq. (I also once watched an official military training video in which Carl explained how to arm a Patriot missile. Puzzling times.)
Anyway, it is this border work that seems to have brought Seagal into contact with that gruesome creature Joe Arpaio, the self-publicising Arizona sheriff who makes prison inmates wear pink and spend their days doing things such as investigating Barack Obama's birth certificate. Last week, for instance, the On Deadly Ground star was involved in an Arpaio-masterminded drugs bust in which he seized 500lb of marijuana – all captured on camera, of course.
But it is a 2011 operation under the same aegis that has landed Seagal in the legal hot water to which we alluded earlier. The facts, such as we know them, are these. Suspecting a man of being involved in cockfighting, Arpaio's office mounted an assault on his property that featured between 30 and 40 fully armed Swat officers, the entire county bomb unit, a bomb robot, canine units, the use of explosive devices, and a camouflage-geared Steven Seagal driving into his house. Literally – Seagal was in a tank. "All the sheriff's office had to do was to call my client and ask him to meet with them," the man's lawyer said. "But this common sense does not make for good reality television."
So last year, said client filed a suit accusing Seagal of killing his children's puppy during the raid, and he has now lodged papers suggesting the force used in the operation was excessive, given that portions of the house were destroyed. I'm afraid there simply isn't space to get into the Seagal camp's claims that the roosters found on the farm had been genetically modified – suffice to say that all the birds were killed. And that it's unclear whether this was effected via a standard euthanasic procedure, or an improvised weapon such as a pool ball in a bar towel (Out for Justice) or a microwave oven (Under Siege).
Still, does that bring us pretty much up to date with developments in Seagal World? Not even close. There's a new album on the way, his first scripted TV series airs this week, and he wants you to remember that he has taken the time to impart career-changing wisdom to Anderson Silva and Lyoto Machida, two of the most successful stars of mixed martial arts. To wit, he taught them an extra-special face-kick he had invented. As he put it: "They asked me to teach them because they know I know stuff that they don't know."
Don't we all, Seagal. Don't we all.By? Agence France-Presse
JPMorgan Chase is “very open minded” on the future potential use of digital currencies if they are properly regulated, the bank’s chief financial officer said Thursday.
Chief financial officer Marianne Lake praised the potential of the new technologies, while avoiding commenting directly on bitcoin, the controversial cryptocurrency trashed last month by Lake’s boss, JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon.
“We are very open-minded to the potential use in the future of digital currencies that are properly controlled and regulated,” Lake told journalists on an earnings conference call.
“We’re not going to not be a part of that conversation,” Lake said. “We’ll have to see. It’s quite nascent.”
Lake also said JPMorgan is bullish on the underlying “blockchain” technology behind bitcoin, which leading financial companies view as a potentially important platform for financial transactions.
“The underlying technology of distributed legers and blockchain is something we are very optimistic about,” she said.
“We have the case where they could become live in our interfaces with clients in the near future and so they could be very transformational for the financial services industry and we are forward-leaning and optimistic about that.”
Dimon last month turned heads by characterizing bitcoin as a “fraud” that will eventually “blow up,” during an appearance at a New York financial currency.
Unlike a real-world unit such as the US dollar or euro, bitcoin has no central bank and is not backed by any government.
Bitcoin’s community of users control and regulate the currency, and the anonymity of transactions that endears it to libertarians has raised concerns that it can be abused by criminals.
Dimon, who was also on the conference call, declined to elaborate on bitcoin.We had a chat with Alberto 'Crumbz' Rengifo, jungler for Team Dignitas, as he is now preparing for one of the most important games of the season: LCS Playoffs at PAX. This match against Curse could be his ticket to the next LCS split and maybe to the World Championship, or the risk of getting knocked out of LCS.
Before we dive into the PAX discussion we decided to have a chat about LCS Super Week. Enjoy the read!
In the first three matches of super week Team Dignitas suffered three rough losses to Curse, Vulcun and Cloud9, and in the past you’ve been a very streaky team, win or lose. What changed on the last day?
Crumbzz: I think on the last day we already knew we had qualified to PAX and all that mattered now was our placement, something which we didn't care too much about. It was a bad way to qualify, losing 3 games and only making it because our competition lost as well. But regardless, I think we played like we had nothing left to lose, and we were able to finally get some wins under our belt.
After playing competitively in the AP mid role, Jungle, Top and back to Jungle, what have you learned most about the game? Which is your strongest?
Crumbzz: I think what I have learned the most is being able to tell which champions or items are overpowered in the game. I think I lack in the strategic department but I have a gut feeling of which champions and items are overpowered very early, although often I am not able to implement said champions into my play quickly due to their sometimes difficult playstyle.
In the tie-breaker game against CLG you ganked Nien as Evelynn by going all the way around his tri-bush. You were about to farm your own jungle before you turned around towards the gank, what was your thought process in that decision?
Crumbzz: Although that gank turned out for the best I was disappointed by my play. I did not go immediatly after the blue buff instead I went towards mid and then came back. I decided to loop around because Patoy told me there was a pink ward in the tri brush. Knowing the route that bigfatlp was taking, if I did not capitalize on punishing Elise at that time, we would have surely lost a turret and the game would have snowballed in their favour. The reason I looped is merely a display of the different gank routes a stealthed champion such as Evelynn can take. Little intricacies of the champion which allow for different plays.
Both you and Patoy said in a recent post-game interview that having to play extra games at the end of super week was extremely tiring, how did you push past the fatigue to pull out the W?
Crumbzz: When I found out I had to play extra games I knew I had to something to avoid getting sleepy, and of course, napping is not an option. So I went with Nickwu and Sycho Sid to Starbucks and we got coffee.
What do you think that the team needs to improve on most going into your first match at PAX against Curse?
Crumbz: Granted of course I don't want to say much, but I think to beat Curse it is going to be up to me. I need to dominate the flow of the game and have the pace set to my drums. Only then, will the game be simple and easy.
In your vlog you mentioned that should you play Cloud9 in the playoffs you think you could “take them down.” Do you feel like you’ve found the key to doing so, and what is it?
Crumbzz: C9 and us have been scrim partners for a long time, even when we played the in superweek we scrimmed each other. They know what we play and how we play it and vice versa. But, one step at a time, let's talk about C9 after we beat Curse.
Of course an athlete has to focus on the first task ahead, (PAX) but thinking ahead to worlds, which region do you think will be the force to reckon with and why?
Crumbzz: Korea of course. Every other region looks to Korea for improving every aspect of their game. A region whose gaming infrastructure is far above any others. And of course, historically in League, Korea has almost always defeated all other teams.
Do you think the International Wildcard will be a threat, or not, as it’s mostly composed of newer regions?
Crumbz: I think GG [Gaming Gear EU] was the strongest wildcard team. They scrim against the EU LCS teams and that usually results in both teams acquiring a similar skill level. I would expect them to have the slightly weaker results than the 3 european teams, just by lack of experience and perhaps nerves.
In your blog titled ‘Who Are We Competing With?’ you wrote about Korea, saying “gaming is regarded as one of the most prestigious professions.” Do you think that North America is on its way to being as accepting of League of Legends as a spectator sport and why?
Crumbzz: No I don't think gaming is even close to that level in America. Mostly because the general public still doesn't know about it! Until you can talk to someone about eSports, and their reaction is not "Wow I did not know that even existed!" then it is not at that level.
What is North America doing well or what is it lacking?
Crumbzz: It is doing very well in terms of objective control games. I think it has a very good understanding of how to force objectives in the early phases of the game. After that though, sticking to a plan is rather difficult, so thinking on the fly as well as execution of plays is what is suffering.
What are you doing to prepare yourself against that army that will continually improve?
Crumbzz: Improve myself as much as I can! Every day I look for more and more motivation to stack up on me to be as prepared as possible for my matches. Why just the other day I bought tickets to the world finals as a preemptive measure in case we don't make it to the finals. I later found out the tickets that were bought for 100$ are now worth $1,000. It gave me so much motivation to go to the finals just so I could see them! It is silly, and in the grand scale of things, just plain ridiculous, but small things like that get me excited.
In an interview with Cloth5, CJ Entus Top Laner, Flame said that he believes that the NA scene has fallen further behind Korea by having an inefficient lifestyle that affects training. What do you have to say to that?
Crumbzz: I agree! I am working on changing my own more everyday but if you ignore the lifestyle and focus on just the way the regions play the game. Korea doesn't stream, all they care about is winning, and I think that streaming is something that is negative towards winning.
We know that Scarra is the captain on Team Dignitas, but is he the only one who makes calls? How does communication work for the team in a typical game?
Crumbzz: No he isn't. Everyone makes calls in the game. Everyone is constantly looking out for something someone else can do. It is as if we are all watching over each other that way if we miss something we should have done someone else can see it and reach in time.
In the past you were well known for your Shaco play, what is he lacking that stops you from playing him now?
Crumbzz: No cc, too squishy and now pretty much every other jungle does more damage. He also requires very intricate strategies and planning to be able to work in a competitive tournament environment.
If behind in farm and camps stolen, what do you do as a jungler to get back into the game?
Crumbzz: You need to time your camps and buffs, as well as invest in wards. If the opposing jungler is committed to counterjungling you, having your laners shove, and having pink wards on your side of the jungle will easily spot him and perhaps turn a kill, easing the pressure. It is very important that your lanes shove to help you fight the enemy jungler.
What do you think of the Best Lee Sin NA Tournament you’re in?
Crumbzz: I'm gonna have to work my ass off to win that! I play him jungle not lane!
What’s it like having your own bakery?
Crumbzz: My parents showed me that when I first started playing league, it is also a reason why I put my name now with one z.
In your vlog you brought up the issue of having too much pizza in the form of two laptop-sized calzones, is this still an issue or were you able to conquer them?
Crumbz: I was unable to tackle the twin behemoths.
Any shoutouts?
Crumbz: I'd like to give a shoutout to my family, my friends and loved ones, my fans, my twitch chat and all the esports fans out there making this job a reality. Also a shout out to the Team Dignitas sponsors for all their support: Alienware, Intel, Scan, Creative, be quiet!, QPAD, TwitchTV, Western Digital, iiyama, Killer, Mad Catz and Multiplay.
Follow Crumbz on Twitter @dCrumbzz and on Twitch. For more League of Legends interviews and blogs, follow RoscoeThorncage @robertwery.
If you like this article then please show your support on Reddit and join the discussionThank you for participating in #3DST 19 – Age, and Congrats to John Fino (tauricity), winner with Hallet And Davis Piano, 1896, in which he tells a touching personal story through model annotations.
John picked ‘Autumn’ as this week’s topic. You’ll only need to step outside for inspiration (well, on our half of the hemisphere anyway).
You can follow the submission thread here.
Prize: get your work featured, and win a $25 Shapeways 3D printing coupon. A unique chance to get your scan printed.
Rules, as usual:
Make a 3D scan of something related to Autumn by Thursday, October 9th (find great 3D scanning apps here).
by (find great 3D scanning apps here). Share it on your own Sketchfab account with #3DST20 in the title.
in the title. The author of the model getting the most likes by the following Sunday is featured, wins a $25 Shapeways 3D printing coupon and gets to chose the following theme.
by the following Sunday is featured, wins a and gets to chose the following theme. Multiple entries are ok.
. Entries scanned before theme announcement are not ok.
. To know everything about #3DST including great tutorials, check this blog post.
Good luck!
– Bart
Update: Congrats to 604scans, winner with Halloween Skull, the perfect way to scare his kids every year!
#3DST20 – Halloween Skull by 604scans on SketchfabAndroni-Venezuela have offically filed charges against Johnny Hoogerland who claims not to have been paid his full salary in December. The Dutchman vented his frustration on Twitter and so his former team has decided to sue him for defamation.
Androni-Venezuela have issued the following statement:
Androni-Venezuela has filed penal charges of calumny and defamation and civil charges for punitive damages to the Public Prosecutor Office in Torino against Johnny Hoogerland, following the rider’s false declarations, seriously defamatory for the Team. The Team has also sent UCI a detailed report including the twelve monthly payslips proving the payments made to the rider and the receipts of the contributions paid to the Italian State.
The December payslip shows that the 2327,16 euros claimed by Hoogerland were paid to the State as IRPEF (income tax) balance. The same amount will be detracted from the taxes due by Hoogerland in the Netherlands, as stated in the CUD (certification of the salaries received by a worker) which will be sent him in February.
“Our team – said Team Manager Gianni Savio – has always acted correctly whereas Hooogerland’s behaviour is appalling. Therefore he will have to respond in Court of his calumnies”.March 10, 2017
Savant, a popular home automation system for professional integrators, works nicely with many third-party audio/video systems. Just-Add-Power isn’t one of them.
As a pioneer in the category, J-A-P is one of the most popular HDMI-over-IP systems for the custom channel. Yet the company hasn't been able to work with Savant on an official driver ("profile" in Savant parlance) for easy integration.
So the folks at BlackWire Designs, a software developer and J-A-P distributor, went it alone, crafting a J-A-P Profile Generator for Savant-based automation systems.
BlackWire principal Kevin Luther says the new online tool allows dealers to create Savant profiles for any sized J-A-P system “in a matter of seconds, saving dealers hours of complex programming and configuration.”
It’s not that J-A-P or Savant is that complex to set up on their own, “but gluing them together has been difficult because of the complexity and customization,” says BlackWire software development manager Seth Johnson.
He explains that traditional HDMI switches have a set number of inputs and outputs, so they can be easily mapped into a Savant system (if Savant choses to support them). But HD over IP poses a unique challenge in that the number of sources and zones is fluid, and the command sets more involved (and evolved) than traditional matrices.
“Since Just-Add-Power is so flexible, each system will have a different number of inputs and outputs, and each system is going to require a different Savant Profile,” Johnson says. “With Savant there isn’t a way to write a generic or one-size-fits-all profile.”
Unlike typical Savant profiles, J-A-P’s configuration files are generated outside of Savant’s Blueprint programming environment. Johnson explains the process:
A dealer configures a Just-Add-Power system using J-A-P’s standard programming software. That program gives you a configuration file, which you upload to the BlackWire site. BlackWire parses through that file and converts it into a Savant Profile that is customized to that particular J-A-P configuration. The dealer then loads that unique profile file into Blueprint, where they make all of their connections for programming.
“Some of the more complex Just-Add-Power configurations can be megabytes in size and quite literally hundreds of thousands of lines of intricate XML and network commands,” Luther says. “Our tool turns the nearly impossible exercise of writing these files into a two-click process.”
The Profile Creator is compatible with J-A-P systems that run over Luxul networking gear.
The service, available now at the BlackWire online store, is free of charge to authorized dealers.
This isn't the first time BlackWire has saved the day for integrators. Last year the company created software to integrate Ring doorbells with Control4 automation systems.To save Main Street, state lawmakers in the 1930s passed “fair trade” legislation that set floors for retail prices, protecting small-town manufacturers and retailers from big business’s economies of scale. These laws permitted manufacturers to dictate prices for their products in a state (which is where that now-meaningless phrase “manufacturer’s suggested retail price” comes from); if a manufacturer had a price agreement with even one retailer in a state, other stores in the state could not discount that product. As a result, chain stores could no longer demand a lower price from manufacturers, despite buying in higher volumes.
These laws allowed Main Street shops to somewhat compete with chain stores, and kept prices (and profits) higher than a truly free market would have allowed. At the same time, workers, empowered by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, organized the A. & P. and other chain stores, as well as these buttressed Main Street manufacturers, so that they also got a share of the profits. Main Street — its owners and |
to that.
"Season roundly dismisses the ideas: that race is a predictor of intelligence; that racial purity has scientific benefits and that any one race is superior to another."
Channel 4's Race: Science's Last Taboo season of documentaries begins on October 26It’s a sad reality that crime and poverty move in circles, with one leading to the other and generations of families caught up in a cyclical mess.
In April, the White House released a report titled “Economic Perspectives on Incarceration and the Criminal Justice System” which revealed that a significant percentage of people in prison in America grew up in the foster care system.
As the report notes multiple times, the growth in incarceration rates are not at all due to increased crime but rather changes in policy.
“[C]rime rates have fallen sharply; between 1980 and 2014 violent crime rates fell by 39 percent and property crime rates fell by 52 percent.”
It is a well known fact that the US justice system is bloated with the largest prison population in the world, but the reality of the causes and effects of that gigantic population is staggering.
In addition to the 13 percent of prisoners who grew up in the foster care system, 10 percent were homeless in the year leading up to their imprisonment.
65 percent of prisoners did not complete high school and 14 percent have less than an 8th grade education.
Over half have mental health problems, 65 percent regularly used alcohol, while 70 percent were regular drug users.
Please, read more about the history of our prison population here.One of the founding members of Charlie Hebdo has accused its slain editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, or Charb, of “dragging the team” to their deaths by releasing increasingly provocative cartoons, as five million copies of the “survivors’ edition” went on sale.
Henri Roussel, 80, who contributed to the first issue of the satirical weekly in 1970, wrote to the murdered editor, saying: “I really hold it against you.”
In this week’s Left-leaning magazine Nouvel Obs, Mr Roussel, who publishes under the pen name Delfeil de Ton, wrote: “I know it’s not done”, but proceeds to criticise the former “boss” of the magazine.
Calling Charb an “amazing lad”, he said he was also a stubborn “block head”.
“What made him feel the need to drag the team into overdoing it,” he said, referring to Charb’s decision to post a Mohammed character on the magazine’s front page in 2011. Soon afterwards, the magazine’s offices were burned down by unknown arsonists.
Delfeil adds: “He shouldn’t have done it, but Charb did it again a year later, in September 2012.”
The accusation sparked a furious reaction from Richard Malka, Charlie Hebdo’s lawyer for the past 22 years, who sent an angry message to Mathieu Pigasse, one of the owners of Nouvel Obs and Le Monde.
“Charb has not yet even been buried and Obs finds nothing better to do that to publish a polemical and venomous piece on him.
“The other day, the editor of Nouvel Obs, Matthieu Croissandeau, couldn’t shed enough tears to say he would continue the fight. I didn’t know he meant it this way. I refuse to allow myself to be invaded by bad thoughts, but my disappointment is immense.”
Matthieu Croissandeau, Nouvel Obs’ editor, said: "We received this text and after a debate I decided to publish it in an edition on freedom of expression, it would have seemed to me worrisome to have censored his voice, even if it is discordant. Particularly as this is the voice of one of the pioneers of the gang."
This is not the first time Delfeil has disagreed with the modern Charlie, accusing Charb’s predecessor of turning it into a Zionist and Islamophobic organ.
That was after Philippe Val, the previous editor, fired one of its historic figures, Maurice Sine, for publishing a cartoon on the marriage of Nicolas Sarkozy’s son, Jean, to a Jewish retailing heiress, which he considered anti-Semitic.
Delfeil said he would not say anymore on recent events. “I have refused to speak to the TV and radio, to everyone. I kept my message for Obs, and I am not prepared to open this subject again,” he said.ConocoPhillips Canada says it will lay off 250 to 300 employees, mainly from its Calgary head office, in September.
The employees were informed about the looming cuts on Thursday, but details of how they will affect specific parts of the business are still being worked out, company spokesman Rob Evans said in an email.
Evans said Friday the cuts are part of a global staff realignment to match future activity levels, with Canada looking less attractive than some of its other operations.
"Low commodity prices, combined with our inability to get product to new markets, has resulted in lower prices in Canada relative to other parts of the world," Evans said.
"Coupled with increased local cost pressures such as corporate taxes, regulatory compliance costs and property taxes, staying competitive in a global portfolio is a challenge for some parts of our Canadian business."
The cuts at ConocoPhillips' Canadian operations form part of the roughly 1,000 job cuts the company plans across its North American operations.
"We have been transparent with our employees and they were aware that targeted workforce reductions in certain areas of our business may be necessary from time-to-time to align our current organizational capacity with expected future activity levels," he said.
Evans said the company will not be commenting further.
Last September, ConocoPhillips Canada announced a 15 per cent reduction of its workforce — about 400 employees and 100 contractors.
In March 2015, the company announced it was cutting seven per cent of its Canadian staff — about 200 jobs.
The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers estimates at least 44,000 direct jobs have been lost in the oil and gas industry since the downturn started.“ARROW”
MONDAYS (8:00-9:00PM ET) on The CW
After a violent shipwreck, billionaire playboy Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) was missing and presumed dead for five years before being discovered alive on a remote island in the North China Sea. Oliver returned home to Star City, bent on righting the wrongs of his family and fighting injustice. As the Green Arrow, he protects his city with the help of former soldier John Diggle (David Ramsey), computer science expert Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards), brilliant inventor Curtis Holt (Echo Kellum), street-savvy Rene Ramirez (Rick Gonzalez), and meta-human Dinah Drake (Juliana Harkavy).
Following Oliver Queen’s shocking decision to turn himself over the FBI and reveal his identity as the Green Arrow to the public, Oliver has spent the past five months in prison while his team was left behind to protect Star City. In the wake of Ricardo Diaz’s escape, Oliver has yet again turned into someone else inside Slabside Maximum Security Prison. He is not the hero we once knew; Oliver has isolated himself, avoided conflict, and ignored the enemies who have taunted him since his arrival. He is determined to keep a low profile to shorten his sentence for the sake of his family. But Oliver’s limits will be tested when he and Team Green Arrow are pitted against the most ruthless villains they have yet to face. Oliver will be forced to seek redemption for his family, his team, and his identity as both he and the team are left questioning: what is the true definition of a hero?
Based on the characters from DC, ARROW is from Bonanza Productions Inc. in association with Berlanti Productions and Warner Bros. Television, with executive producers Greg Berlanti (“The Flash,” “Supergirl”), Beth Schwartz (“Arrow,” “Legends”) and Sarah Schechter (“Supergirl,” “Blindspot”). Consulting Producer - Marc Guggenheim (“Eli Stone,” “Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters”).
CREDITS FOR “ARROW” ON THE CW
Day and time: Mondays (8:00-9:00 p.m. ET)
Network debut: October 10, 2012
Format: After a violent shipwreck, billionaire playboy Oliver Queen was missing and presumed dead for five years before being discovered alive on a remote island in the Pacific. When he returns home to Starling City, he secretly creates the persona of Arrow to right the wrongs of his family and fight the ills of society.
Cast: Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen/Green Arrow
David Ramsey as John Diggle/Spartan
Emily Bett Rickards as Felicity Smoak
Echo Kellum as Curtis Holt/Mr. Terrific
Katie Cassidy as Laurel/Black Siren
Rick Gonzalez as Rene Ramirez/Wild Dog
Juliana Harkavy as Dinah Drake/Black Canary
Colton Haynes as Roy Harper
Kirk Acevedo as Ricardo Diaz
Executive Producers: Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim, Beth Schwartz and Sarah Schechter
Origination: Vancouver, British Columbia
Produced by: Bonanza Productions Inc. in association with Berlanti Productions and Warner Bros. Television
Media contact: Suzanne Gomez, 818/977-4115
Suzanne.Gomez@cwtv.com
Sept 2018After having spent a long time trying to run javascript tests with Rhino, I've finally found something better. Rhino was never really fast enough for me. Spinning up the JVM just takes too long when you're running your tests continuously. A few seconds really makes a difference when you do something hundreds (thousands?) of times per day.
On top of that, testing frameworks like ScrewUnit (aside from being abandonware) have scoping issues that make tests very brittle...unless you run each one in it's own process...again back to the JVM startup problem.
Recently, I started playing around with the Jasmine testing framework for Javascript. It was really nice, but I wasn't convinced it was really going to solve the problems I was experiencing since they were mostly due to global namespaces and Rhino.
Enlighentment came, however, when I tried running Jasmine tests from within Node.js, using a patched version of mhevery's jasmine-node module. If you don't know, Node.js is a Javascript runtime environment based on the V8 engine. It's actually designed for server-side development, but I wondered if I could use it to run tests for my in-browser javascript. The answer is mostly, but the results were very compelling and I'm now doing this on all my web application projects.
Firstly, here's an example project that shows how I set things up.
To understand what's going on here, lets begin at the html. In index.html, we're not doing anything fancy. Just a few tags to load jquery and the javascripts in our app:
The interesting bits start to show up in spec/specHelper.js
specHelper.js is actually a proper node.js module, meaning that it explicitly declares it's exports. What it's doing, actually, is exporting the namespace for our entire application (as the variable 'app'). This means that in our specs:
We can create a completely clean copy of the entire application and store it in a variable that the tests can access. Jasmine's beforeEach function can recreate it before every single test. This means that we don't have to create a new Rhino instance for each test to get a clean environment. As a result, these tests run fast (hundreds of tests per second).
They run so fast, in fact, that I've been using Watchr to run them. Here's my Watchr script
This automatically runs all the Jasmine specs on each change. The tests run so quickly I haven't had the need to optimize it yet. I've been really happy with this setup (despite a few problems with jquery and env.js) and I'm hoping to improve it as the tools mature.About This Game
Minigames
Mayhem : You have 3 minutes to get a high score by any means necessary. Mayhem is easy to learn, but difficult to master.
: You have 3 minutes to get a high score by any means necessary. Mayhem is easy to learn, but difficult to master. Survival : An endless series of progressively harder dungeon rooms. Avoid receiving damage and clear rooms within the time limit for bonuses.
: An endless series of progressively harder dungeon rooms. Avoid receiving damage and clear rooms within the time limit for bonuses. Fading Light: Destroy 10 pyramids as quickly as possible, whilst avoiding the gaze of the searching eyes, and the hordes of bloodthirsty zombies.
Each minigame has a global leaderboard.
Combining its own unique take on the real-time roguelike genre, with a nostalgic 16-bit look and feel, Diehard Dungeon is a game that feels both familiar and quite different at the same time.Followed by a trusty, treasure collecting companion chest, you must make your way through the dungeons many randomly-generated rooms and levels. Armed with a sword and a ‘hand cannon’, all manner of nasty dungeon dwellers, bosses and traps will need to be defeated or traversed in order to emerge from the dungeon victorious!To aid you in your quest, you may be lucky enough to encounter one or more upgrades or new abilities scattered throughout the dungeon, or bump into the remnants of other players (Champions) via the unlockable 'Champion Mode'. Champions wander atop the dungeon walls, ready to unleash their souls upon passers by. Be careful though, as not all Champions are helpful.A randomly generated dungeon is created every playthrough, with many secrets and multiple outcomes.The game features a dynamic difficulty and ranking system - the better you do, the more challenging the game will become. Only the most skilled dungeon escapees will attain the highest ranks.Business leaders in the Twin Cities are worried about a number: 100,000.
That’s how many jobs will go unfilled by 2020 if current demographic trends don’t change. The problem is such a threat that the region’s business leaders created an organization — Make It. MSP. — that’s tasked with resolving it.
The response they’ve come up with: do a better job of recruiting people to move to the region — and then do a better job of keeping them here once they arrive. That includes everything from helping newcomers make the transition, especially in making social connections, and making special efforts to retaining people of color who report having an especially hard time feeling welcome and valued.
It also involves hats.
At a conference earlier this week, Peter Frosch, the vice president of the regional economic development organization Greater MSP, said the mission is to build an atmosphere, “so that innovative, talented and ambitious people can come here and stay and thrive regardless of their background.
“When I talk about people, I’m talking about people who are young, people who are new here, people from diverse backgrounds and people with the skills our employers need most,” Frosch said.
But the region has work to do, and the challenges are different for white workers than they are for people of color. For white job recruits, the region is doing well at retaining them, but not so well at recruiting them in the first place. Based on an analysis performed by Myles Shaver at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, the Twin Cities is first in retaining those with a bachelor’s degree or higher among the nation’s 25 largest regions.
But it is 19th in bringing them in. For example, 3.3 percent of the working population of the region — more than 73,000 people — arrived in 2015. That’s behind the percentage of newcomers as share of population in places like Portland, Denver and Seattle, which was above 5 percent. “People who are here tend to stay here,” Frosch told those gathered at the Guthrie Theater Monday. “But we see relative low rates of attraction from other states as we look at faster growing parts of the country.”
Keeping professionals of color
For people of color, the problem is the opposite. The region has done pretty well at persuading professionals of color to take a chance on the Twin Cities, with surveys showing such professionals more likely to consider a move to the region.
But the Twin Cities is No. 14 of the 25 largest cities at retaining those same people once they arrive (it does better among people of color who have children). In fact, a survey of professionals of color showed that 60 percent are considering leaving in the next three-to-five years. “We see a continued failure to include people of color in employment and educational opportunities, despite the fact that these are the fastest growing parts of our population,” Frosch said.
Courtesy of Make It. MSP. Tasha Byers
At the conference, Tasha Byers, who leads the professionals of color retention team at Make It. MSP., used a rescue beacon worn by firefighters to issue what she called a “heightened alert.”
“We have professionals of color here who are struggling … we’re struggling to belong,” she said. “And we must hear the alert.”
Based on a survey and focus groups of 1,200 people of color, many feel that diversity and their cultures aren’t valued, they “feel they don’t feel welcome or belong in certain spaces or venues” and that diversity and inclusion aren’t valued by employers, Byers said.
Shawntera Hardy, the commissioner of the state Department of Employment and Economic Development, said the state has record numbers of job openings with low unemployment. Not everyone is sharing in the prosperity, however, with some population subgroups having jobless rates nearly 25 percent. “We have a number of Minnesotans sitting on the economic sidelines,” Hardy said. And too many don’t have access to the loans that are needed to start and grow a business. She complimented Make It. MSP. for spending its first year in existence asking people what they think and listening to the answers.
We’re hiring
At the same time, finding employees for high-skilled jobs is becoming more competitive, said Christa Nelson, senior recruiter for Health Partners. As recently as 2009, the pool of candidates was deep; nearly everyone offered a job accepted one, and most jobs were filled within the region, she said.
But the acceleration of baby boomer retirements and a decline in natural population growth means the region needs to import more people, both domestically and internationally.
Courtesy of Make It. MSP. Shawntera Hardy
Nelson said Health Partners is casting a wider net and having to relocate workers from elsewhere, something that rarely happened in the past. That means the company is having to fill in job candidates on what it is like to live and work in the region.
Make It. MSP. created a website that companies can point job candidates to and built what it calls the recruiter toolkit — with information, photos and videos — that recruiters can use to tailor their pitches. The organization also surveyed 1,800 people who lived in 20 different areas to gauge their perceptions to recruiters could address negative images. “Did they view us as anything more than a place that’s a frozen tundra for six months of the year or the place where Mall of America stands?” she asked.
Those images did come up, she said. But so did knowledge of the number of Fortune 500 companies with headquarters in the region. “How can we use that data to help them to see how great it is to work here,” Nelson said.
Hats and hellos
The transition from newcomer to established resident is difficult enough that businesses have been created to help. Melanie Allen formed a company, Welcome Matters, that contracts with companies to help their new hires with simple tasks, like deciding where to live, as well as more complex ones, such as how and where to make friends. “There’s nothing more frustrating than being boots on the ground and not knowing which way to turn,” Allen said.
Moira Grosbard, meanwhile, created Network Careers specifically to work with “trailing spouses.” “You bring someone here for a job but the partner isn’t as excited,” Grosbard said. “It isn’t what they wanted to do, so often, at the end of the day, your corporate new hire is going home to someone who really just wants to leave.”
Grosbard and Allen ran focus groups among newcomers and found another vulnerable group: singles. “If they haven’t grown up here, if they don’t have family, they have no connections to the region, really the workplace is the only way they can get to know people,” Grosbard said. And while big companies have programs to help employees meet others and engage in off-work activities, medium and small workplaces can’t afford such help.
Courtesy of Make It. MSP. Ashley Hanson is a producer of St. Paul Hello, an effort founded by artist Jun-Li Wang to give newcomers to the city warm hats.
Danielle Steer, who moved to the region from the San Francisco Bay area, is one of the leaders of Make It. MSP’s efforts toward social inclusion. They set a goal of connecting with 10,000 newcomers, something done via informal events like “Break The Bubble,” which are social meet ups around the region; “Newcomer Nosh,” which involves that elusive dinner invitation; and “Minnesota Nice Breakers,” a group that attends already scheduled events and seeks out newcomers. They also asked 800 newcomers to respond to a survey about their experiences.
“The majority said that personal and social connections were important concerns for them before they moved here and once they got here,” said Steer who is manager at Impact Hub MSP. That could be family, friends, coworkers or other “peer-to-peer” contacts.
The biggest challenges face those who arrive with no social connections, she said. “Those people have various challenges in assimilating because it can be a bit more difficult to break into social networks here,” Steer said. Many respondents said they were satisfied with the region’s quality of life, but dissatisfied with their personal lives. “That’s dangerous when you think about the future health and wealth of the economy and the different organizations that are part of this,” she said.
Making newcomers feel welcome can be as simple as a warm hat, said Ashley Hanson, who works with St. Paul Hello, an idea started by St. Paul artist Jun-Li Wang after she realized how a good hat makes winters easier.
The biggest cheers of the summit came when Hanson announced that the program of inviting newcomers to ceremonies and presenting them with winter “Welcome Hats” would expand: St. Paul Hello will become MSP Hello.
“This is about all of us becoming more radically welcoming,” Hanson said. “Anyone wearing one of these hats, they are new to Minnesota. Please say hello to them.”Content: Schrödinger’s Cat and the Raiders of the Lost Quark
Check price and availability in your Xbox LIVE region
Game Description: Schrödinger’s Cat is a fun, frantic, wacky and colourful puzzle-laden platform game, set in a unique and quirky quantum physics world. There’s chaos at the Particle Zoo! What used to be a cheery theme-park environment is now overrun with hungry leptons, sticky-fingered gluons and massive, stubborn bosons. The Zoo is put on lockdown, and the emergency services are called in to sort everything out. Those emergency services? Schrödinger’s Cat, of course!
Purchase Schrödinger’s Cat and the Raiders of the Lost Quark for Xbox One from the Xbox Games Store
Product Info:
Developer: Italic Pig and Team17 Digital Ltd
Publisher: Team17 Digital Ltd
Website: Schrödinger’s Cat and the Raiders of the Lost Quark
Twitter: @italicpigThere are few experiences I cherish more as a games reporter than walking into a room full of new, unfinished video games, each one of them ready for me to play. It makes it so easy to be excited about the future of gaming. Every time.
I don't tell you this to gloat, but instead to share my optimism with you.
I remember, before I was a games reporter, the excitement of going to GameStop on a big day of new releases. I more vaguely recall being surrounded by games in the arcades back when I was a kid. None of that compares, though, to being in a big room full of new video games, half of which you've never heard of, all of which could be the next wonderful game to be excited about and none of which are even done yet. It's like being on several frontiers at once.
Maybe you've been to a PAX East? Or an E3? Or some other show where a bunch of unreleased games are on display? If so, you've gotten a taste of this, but those events are usually so overcrowded and loud that they're not ideal. I'm fortunate to be able to attend smaller, quieter events where I can check out a bunch of games with little line-waiting and—get this—with the people who made them standing next to me to tell me what's up. I love this.
This is a long preamble just to tell you that I went to an Xbox showcase a couple of weeks ago, ostensibly to see a batch of indie games coming to the Xbox One (*Few of the games were Xbox One exclusives.) I saw some awesome stuff.
The event was set up in a garage-sized event space in San Francisco and was packed with games, press and game developers. I never leave myself enough time for these things and I got there with maybe half an hour before closing time and raced through, playing as many games as I could and leaving, about 45 minutes later (I also always push the limit) excited yet again about the future of games.
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I'd like to now tell you about a bunch of these games, if you're up for it.
Oh, and some context. As I noted, the event was set up by Microsoft's Xbox team and branded to promote ID@Xbox, the indie game development program Microsoft has for their new console. Microsoft is clearly trying to prove that they care as much about indie game development as Sony has, Sony largely beating them to the punch of making support for indie development a press conference-worthy thing. The San Francisco event was intentionally or unintentionally scheduled opposite Sony's unveiling of their Morpheus virtual reality headset, and so wherever you might have been back when you first heard about that, I was possibly getting giddy over some indie games for Xbox One.
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I really wish I had taken a photo of the SF showcase to give you some flavor, but I did see that Microsoft just posted a video today (handy!) that they shot at the event:
Perhaps a more exciting way to show you how game-stuffed this thing was would be to show you a screencap from Microsoft's press website to just point out that, yes, all of these games, pretty much, were under one roof.
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Pretty cool, huh?
I walked into the venue and, remember, I only had half an hour. So I asked a powerful person at Xbox which games I should check out. He directed me to these two:
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The first game here is called It Draws a Red Box, though the signs I saw all said #IDARB, which is a way cooler way to refer to the game. It's a multiplayer sports game. Single screen, arcade throwback.
The press sheet I was handed indicated that "#IDARB is a chaotic 8-player eSport jumping jetpack future arena ball game that is as inspired by Bomberman and Smash Bros. as it is by cans of soda, paint-by-numbers books, and driving five miles faster than the speed limit." It's made by Other Ocean, who's head of development, Mike Mika, among a million other things, is the guy who hacked Donkey Kong so that his daughter could play as Pauline and rescue Mario. The guy who showed me the game, Other Ocean's Frank Cifaldi, elaborated about the game's design a little more by describing the game as a Super Mario hockey basketball rocket pack sports simulation. Yeah, it's like all of that.
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You can see the game in action, briefly, in the video embedded above, starting at 16 seconds or so. It's really simple. Get the ball into the goal. You can pass to teammates, steal, hop up platforms, do some weird burst move. It's for eight players, for Xbox One, PC, and Linux. And if you're thinking: "That's an awfully simple-looking game for a $500 console," well, that's true. It seems like a fun game to play casually with some friends, all squeezed onto or in front of one couch. Follow the game's development through the official #IDARB Twitter feed.
The second game up there is called Fru. It's the most clever Kinect game I've ever seen, which isn't saying a lot, but really! This game is promising. I think you'd like it. And you don't need me to describe it to you, because you can just watch someone play it...
...or you can just download the PC version of it from the developer's website. (We did!) That downloadable version was made in 48 hours for a game jam. It's just a proof of concept. The team making the game is essentially building a new version for the Xbox One. They expect it'll take them about a year or so. Keep an eye out for news on the game. It was really fun to play.
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If I had time, I would have checked out Super Time Force.
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Wow, that looks good. It really is too bad I couldn't/didn't/had-enough-confidence-that-it'd-be-neat-that-I-didn't-feel-the-need-to.
But I did look at Hyper Light Drifter! This is a game for which we've run the headlines "Hyper Light Drifter, You Look So Hot" and "Hyper Light Drifter Still Looks Like The Coolest Game In Town".
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And with good reason...
How cool is that?
True, that's not gameplay. You can see gameplay here:
Hyper Light Drifter is a top-down adventure game. Some Diablo. Some Zelda. I played a co-op arena battle mode, because that's the kind of mode that works when people like me are speed-dating a room full of games. This game, lovely as it is, was also the event's reminder that cool-looking indie games are usually not any closer to coming out than cool-looking big-budget games. Hyper Light Drifter is slated for PC, Mac and Linux at the end of this year (agony!) and for console—Xbox One, PS4, Vita, Wii U, Ouya—in early 2015 (arghhhh!).
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Goofiest game at this event? Probably Roundabout, which is indeed a game about a limousine that can't stop spinning on its center point. Lead creator Dan Teasdale described it to me as a Behind the Music of Revolving Limousines. Yeah, that too.
Here's a teaser, which even includes some of the intentionally-cheesy full-motion video clips in the game:
(Recognize anyone in the video? Hi, Eka!)
The game is sort of like Kuru Kuru Kururin, a Nintendo game never released in the States. Spot the similarities:
Teasdale told me that European reporters pick up Roundabout fairly quickly, because they have played Kuru Kuru Kururin. I hadn't played that game and I got the hang of it quickly, too. Maybe this helped?
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Roundabout is fun. It has a dash of Crazy Taxi to it, as you spin the limo through the game's city streets, picking up passengers and dropping them off, trying to avoid obstacles along the way. You can get power-ups to make the limo jump, shrink, drive on the water and lord knows what else. It's coming to PC, Mac, Linux and Xbox One.
Moving on...
The developers of a game called The Last Tinker pulled me over so I could see their game. I still don't know what to make of it.
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It's colorful, right?
The idea is that the world of paper and glue has been separated into different colored zones, each representing different moods or ways of life. Exploring each zone will teach the player new moves and modes of play. Green represents fear, blue is sadness, red is anger. I didn't fully get it, though the red bit made sense, since it involved combat. I was more intrigued by the developers' comments that a lot of the gameplay wouldn't be violent.
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I am a sucker for color-in-the-world games like De Blob, so here's hoping it turns out well.
Footage:
This next one's cool, too.
It's called Chariot and is mainly designed to be played two-player co-op, though you can solo it. In co-op, one of you plays as the princess, the other as her suitor. You're pulling ropes connected to a chariot that carries the spirit of the dead king. It's a physics-driven side-scroller with lots of challenges that involve having to hang from the chariot, swing from it, reel it in and so on.
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Did you play the part of Gears of War... 2, was it?... where two players have to carry a trunk or bomb or something, each holding one end of it? It's vaguely like that. Vaguely...
I'd never seen Chariot before and was told it was debuting at the show. One of the game's producers handed me a fact sheet. Fall 2014. Xbox One, PS4, Wii U, PC.
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Cool.
And... "Target audience: Males 24-35 who are gamer dads/cousins/older brothers looking for co-op games to play with friends or their younger siblings."
Wait... what?
Game stars a guy and a girl. Is made to be played co-op. And it's ostensibly targeting men? This made no sense to me and reeked of someone not having a clue about who plays video games these days (or maybe I don't, to be fair!). I asked the producer about this and he sheepishly claimed it was a marketing thing but then pointed out that there's surely a difference between games a dad might play with their daughter and games a hardcore gamer might play. To which I reminded him: women are hardcore gamers, too. Really, this threw me for a moment and I think is a vestige of a narrower way of thinking about who likes what kind of games. I am going to go out on the shortest of limbs and guess that gamers of either gender would enjoy Chariot. Attention game developers: I think women might enjoy many of your video games. That said, I am but a man and I liked Chariot. It's good.
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By the time I was done with Chariot, my half hour was up. I missed a bunch of games but did at least steal a couple of moments to stare at Habitat, some sort of space-junk-assembling game that I made a note to find out more about.
And that was that.
Yeah, I missed the Sony VR debut, but what a fine way to miss it, huh? I got to saunter into a room full of games, most of which I'd never heard of, all of which I'd like to play more.
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I find it hard to be cynical about video games when creativity abounds in every corner. I hope you all get to experience one of these room-full-of-games moments some day. And if not, I'll do my best to bring you there with me in spirit. They're a lot of fun.
Note: The original, too-clever-for-its-own good headline for this story was: "Happiness Is Being In a Room Full of Unfinished Xbox One* Indie Games"National Capital Commission directors will meet by teleconference Monday to consider a “strong suggestion” from Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly that they add the mayors of Ottawa and Gatineau to the 15-member board as non-voting, ex-officio members.
In an interview with the Citizen, Joly, the minister responsible for the NCC, said she asked for “significant governance changes” in a letter Monday to Russell Mills, chair of the agency’s board.
If the NCC agrees, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson and Gatineau Mayor Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin would be able to ask questions and participate in debates — but not vote — at all public and in-camera meetings of the NCC board, other than those involving matters such as commercial negotiations or solicitor-client privilege.
They would have to abide by the NCC’s code of conduct and confidentiality provisions and declare any actual or perceived conflicts of interest.
In addition, Joly encouraged the NCC to invite the mayors of 11 smaller surrounding municipalities to attend board meetings when items affecting their communities are on the agenda.
She also served notice that she intends to appoint an indigenous person to the NCC board of directors this year to fill an upcoming vacancy. The board has had indigenous members in the past but currently lacks any.
Watson and Pedneaud-Jobin have been asking for a seat on the NCC’s board for two years, arguing that board members aren’t well informed about local issues and sometimes interfere with progress in their cities.
Mills, NCC chief executive Mark Kristmanson, and five other board members live in the National Capital Region, but the remaining eight directors represent other parts of Canada.
The former Conservative government summarily dismissed the mayors’ request in 2014. And last fall, Mills saw a problem with balancing the mayors’ commitments to their constituents with the board’s mandate to serve all Canadians.
But in an interview Tuesday, Mills said appointing the mayors to the board as non-voting members “deals with the concerns that I had before.
“It can enable us to deal with things maybe more quickly that we could before if the mayors are in the room,” he said. “It’s come around to the point where it will be a positive thing and will help the NCC, rather than hurt us.”
If the directors endorse the idea Monday as expected, Watson and Pedneaud-Jobin would be invited to participate in the board’s next meeting in April, Mills said.
An ex-officio seat on the NCC’s board, even without the ability to cast a vote, would be a big win for the City of Ottawa, a source familiar with the issue told the Citizen, because it would ensure that conversations about Ottawa don’t happen without an elected representative at the table.
In her interview with the Citizen, Joly said it was clear as soon as she was appointed to cabinet last November that “we really had to look into the governance aspect of the NCC.”
Many national capital residents were frustrated with the federal agency “because of how it was used by the Conservative government,” she said.
All successful cities adopt “a co-ordinated approach” to urban planning, transit, tourism and economic development, Joly said. Rather than hindering decisions made in Ottawa and Gatineau, the NCC could be “the driving force behind that co-ordinated approach.”
Having the mayors on the |
Mal Heart?
MALEK: I read this very experimental script on the first season we were shooting [Mr. Robot]. It was really poetic and cool, and it left so much to the imagination. So much of it was just scene descriptions, and we would improv the meat of the dialogue. That was something I looked at and was like, “Well, I’ll probably never get a chance to do something like this again.” I think it’s done now. Sarah Adina Smith directed it and is editing it, and is probably submitting it to festivals right now.
DOWNEY JR.: Oh, I wanna see it!
MALEK: Maybe we’ll screen it together. It won’t be as elaborate as your Star Wars screening, but … Am I supposed to talk about that? Or maybe not?
DOWNEY JR.: [laughs] Listen, it’s a two-way street, pal. First of all, are you in town next Wednesday?
MALEK: I’m not. What kind of fun adventure do you have planned out?
DOWNEY JR.: I had some ideas, but whatever. I guess if I want to see you for the foreseeable future, I just have to come to set again.
MALEK: [laughs] That was amazing. You turned me into a hero when you came to set. I’m not kidding. They were like, “You know him?” “How do you know him?” I knew it was very cool to know you, but the world started paying me more attention on that day on set. Maybe I elaborated on our relationship too much and started fantasizing it was more than it actually was. No, I just told them how close we were and that we hang out, we celebrate holidays together, we watch movies together, all of which is true!
DOWNEY JR.: [laughs] I mean, it was great to see you, very nice to catch up with [Christian] Slater. And, without giving anything away, I was just happy that I was able to see a scene with you and Slater that left everything to the imagination.LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister David Cameron’s plan to change the European Union’s treaties would take a long time but he could achieve “substantial” reforms to Britain’s relationship without it, Germany’s Europe minister said on Thursday.
Germany's Minister of State for Europe Michael Roth speaks during a news conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York January 22, 2015. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
Cameron has promised to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the bloc ahead of a membership referendum by the end of 2017 and has said he believes treaty change will be needed to achieve some of his planned reforms.
German minister Michael Roth said Berlin wanted Britain to stay within the EU and would take a constructive role in the renegotiation, but warned that if Cameron wanted treaty change it would not be quick.
“Let us not deceive ourselves, this process won’t be easy. Negotiations on a treaty reform are complicated and usually take a long time,” Roth said at an event in London, citing the 10 years needed for the last new treaty.
Instead, Roth told an audience at the London School of Economics that Britain could consider a quicker approach.
“Substantial changes doesn’t mean a treaty change... There is room for maneuvering but it is up to the British friends to put concrete ideas on the table.”
Cameron is due to set out his plans at a dinner with other EU leaders in Brussels on Thursday, saying that he needs a new deal to keep Britain inside the bloc.
While Cameron has said he supports the EU’s principle of freedom of movement, his plans to curb welfare payments to EU migrants in Britain has left some concerned he will seek to limit it.
“Freedom of movement belongs to the core identity of the European Union and we won’t change it. Cherry picking is not a sustainable concept for the European Union,” Roth said.
Roth, a member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Social Democrat coalition partners, stressed that EU institutions such as the European Commission and the European Parliament would have to take the lead rather than individual EU members.
“The EU institutions are in the driver’s seat when it comes to finding a sustainable solution which is acceptable for all partners,” he said.Volland has been ruled out for eight weeks due to a complex muscle fibre tear in his right thigh, while Mehmedi will have to rest for three weeks due to an adductor strain.
Although there is still hope that Mehmedi could return for the final round of Bundesliga matches in 2016, the Swiss forward is likely to be given the winter break to make a full recovery.
"Two injuries on one day - that's quite frustrating," said Leverkusen's director of sport Rudi Voller to the Express newspaper.
"Kevin is not going to be able to play again this year while it is going to be touch and go with Admir.
"But moaning about it gets us nowhere. Now it will be up to other players to lead the line."
That should mean returns to the starting XI for former Manchester United forward Javier Hernandez and Stefan Kiessling, who have both had injury-plagued seasons so far.
Leverkusen host Freiburg on Saturday before facing Monaco in their final group game in the Champions League, although both have already qualified for the last 16 and coach Roger Schmidt may choose to rotate his team for that fixture.
They then face Schalke, Ingolstadt and Cologne before the winter break.Glenn Beck spent his entire radio show today discussing the news that the FBI has discovered thousands of emails on a computer belonging to Anthony Weiner, some of which could possibly be related to the agency’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
Despite having no information about what these emails might contain or whether there is even a single one that is relevant to the Clinton investigation, Beck had no qualms about wildly speculating and floating all sorts of evidence-free theories about what is “really” going on while declaring that Donald Trump has now been handed “the greatest gift given to any candidate of all time in the history of America.”
After repeatedly declaring that Clinton is corrupt to her core and can never be allowed to become president, Beck eventually admitted that if it turns out that there is nothing on Weiner’s computer that is related to the FBI investigation of Clinton’s server, then FBI director James Comey’s announcement amounts to “one of the most irresponsible things to ever happen.”
“For him to go for the subpoena and announce it and open this thing up when he says he doesn’t know if there’s even anything in those emails,” Beck said, “that’s too big of a risk of anyone’s career; and not his, hers.”
If Comey actually believes the results of the investigation that he announced back in July when he recommended that no charges be filed against Clinton over her use of a private server, Beck said, there is no reason for him to have made this latest announcement about the newly discovered emails.
“If he actually believes that, you’re not going to open an investigation and announce it without any real evidence and destroy her career,” Beck said. “You change the course of the country. You change the course of this person’s life. This is one of the most irresponsible things to ever happen, if it is indeed true that he doesn’t have any evidence.”
“Can you imagine if this were to happen to Donald Trump?” he asked. “Can you imagine what we would be saying? If this would have happened to any Republican president—Mitt Romney—and they said, ‘We have no evidence’?”Overview What is it?
The door handle button, the headlight washer nozzles, the sun visors and the spare wheel cover. That’s a comprehensive list of the parts that have been carried over from the old G-Class. Apparently there’s a bracket underneath that also has the same part number as before, but even the engineers can’t remember quite where it is. Everything else – everything – is new.
About time, really. The old G had been around since the dawn of the motor carriage (well, 1979), an old soldier still refusing to desert its post.
That post is off-roadability. Surely Mercedes must have been tempted to take the new one in a more urban direction, since that’s the landscape the G seems most able to conquer? “Not at all”, says Gunnar Guthenke, the G-Class’s boss, “above all it had to be authentic, so there were three elements we absolutely had to keep: the super-tough ladder chassis, the three locking differentials and the low range gearbox”.
Reassured? Off-road is still the focus, because authenticity comes from ability. But Guthenke also knew things had to change, “again we identified three key areas: to drastically improve interior comfort, to drastically improve ride comfort and to further improve off-road behaviour”.
The outcome is unusual: a full-length ladder frame chassis that incorporates independent front suspension with tightly packaged double wishbones, surmounted between the uprights by a chunky brace. The body is 55 per cent stiffer, all the components tucked within the ladder frame for protection. The chassis itself is actually heavier than before, but overall the G is 170kg lighter.
It’ll wade water 100mm deeper than before (now 700mm), can lean over to 35 degrees and climb and descend 45 degree slopes. There’s no height adjustable chassis because Mercedes doesn’t believe the suspension airbags are durable enough in extreme conditions. In the UK only one engine will be available initially, the one that accounts for nearly two-thirds of global sales. Not the diesel as that comes next year, but the AMG twin-turbo V8. It’s the 4.0-litre from the AMG GT R, with 577bhp and 626lb ft. In left-hand drive markets there’s also a G500 using a detuned 416bhp/450lb ft version of the same engine.Just a few days ago, news broke that the Twins were interested in signing veteran free agent 1B/DH Mike Napoli. It was rather curious considering that the Twins already have first base locked up this season with Joe Mauer, while the designated hitter will most likely be Kennys Vargas and/or Robbie Grossman. Oh, and don’t forget Miguel Sano, who is locked in at third base, but would slide over to first or DH whenever necessary.
Though rumors of bringing in Napoli were apparently overstated, we might have an answer as to why those talks started in the first place: it’s been reported by Darren Wolfson that the Twins have been shopping Sano on the trade market. After all, if Sano were to be shipped off, suddenly there would be an even greater need for a right-handed power hitter in the lineup.
At first glance, it’s a terrifying idea. We all remember David Ortiz, and while some have those fears regarding a potential loss of Vargas, Sano is a player that is far more similar to Ortiz due to his superior power and plate discipline. Thus, a trade of Sano would feel an awful lot like Ortiz 2.0. However, we should also note that Ortiz was simply non-tendered, while Wolfson’s report states that the Twins are possibly interested in trading Sano. Hence, someone would come back to the Twins in return.
Now who might that be? I see that Brandon Warne of The Athletic and Zone Coverage asked on Twitter if Twins fans would be willing to part with Sano and a minor league prospect for Tampa Bay Rays starting pitcher Chris Archer. While Archer had a 4.07 ERA this past season, he struck out 29.2% of the batters he faced (the 2017 league average was 21.6%) and he would be the ace pitcher the Twins organization has sought for years. With the New York Yankees looking like the front runners to acquire Pirates ace Gerrit Cole, getting Archer would be an excellent counter-punch from the Twins to remain relevant both in the AL Central race and in the Wild Card. Though Cole is two years younger and has the better career ERA (3.50 to 3.63) and FIP (3.27 to 3.46), Archer has the superior strikeout rate (25.9% to 22.8%) and has pitched his entire career in the more difficult league. Toss in the fact that Archer is under contract for two more seasons along with two club options while Cole has just two more years of arbitration, and the potential of getting Archer would be a huge get for a Twins team that is looking to remain in playoff contention for several years.
On top of getting Archer, Warne also suggests that the Twins could sign free agent 3B Todd Frazier, making the 2018 team better than its current iteration. Again, parting with Sano would be difficult, but I agree with Warne that there’s not much difference between Frazier and Sano. Sano would give you a little more power and the better batting average, but Frazier is clearly the better defender and they’d likely provide similar value this next season. The main downside, though, is that keeping Sano would be far cheaper, while Archer and Frazier would cause the Twins to add at least $15 million to the 2018 payroll.
I really hope that Sano isn’t actually on the market, but he’s the type of player that could easily fetch an established ace starting pitcher in return. While we remain hopeful that the Twins will sign Yu Darvish or Jake Arrieta, it’s possible that acquiring that pitcher via trade may actually be more likely for the organization.Omg.. dudes.. i cant believe i havent shown you my NVArt entry.. anyways here it is..
This is my entry painting for the NVArt challenge on CGTalk. It is a mobile Mars exploration and science station.
Martian Mining Corp built a heavy-duty science vessel to explore Martian surfaces and find new metals and mineral-rich mining spots. The huge circle-type antenna on the back of the vehicle allows the crew to scan and gather valuable information about the deep ground below them without ever leaving the vehicle. A ground-type vehicle also excludes any type of signal interference with orbital satellites.
What i did was that i gathered a whole bunch of Syd Mead's paintings and started to analyze them. I had a lot of trouble coming up with something unique and interesting. After sketching for two or three weeks, i decided to make a painting about a scientific mars explorer vehicle with unique wheel and suspension systems.
Photoshop
Wacom Intuos 4
Google SketchUp
Took me about 3 months to finishDrinking concentrated blueberry juice improves brain function in older people, according to research by the University of Exeter.
In the study, healthy people aged 65-77 who drank concentrated blueberry juice every day showed improvements in cognitive function, blood flow to the brain and activation of the brain while carrying out cognitive tests.
There was also evidence suggesting improvement in working memory.
Blueberries are rich in flavonoids, which possess antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.
Dr Joanna Bowtell, head of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Exeter, said: “Our cognitive function tends to decline as we get older, but previous research has shown that cognitive function is better preserved in healthy older adults with a diet rich in plant-based foods.
“In this study we have shown that with just 12 weeks of consuming 30ml of concentrated blueberry juice every day, brain blood flow, brain activation and some aspects of working memory were improved in this group of healthy older adults.”
Of the 26 healthy adults in the study, 12 were given concentrated blueberry juice – providing the equivalent of 230g of blueberries – once a day, while 14 received a placebo.
Before and after the 12-week period, participants took a range of cognitive tests while an MRI scanner monitored their brain function and resting brain blood flow was measured.
Compared to the placebo group, those who took the blueberry supplement showed significant increases in brain activity in brain areas related to the tests.
The study excluded anyone who said they consumed more than five portions of fruit and vegetables per day, and all participants were told to stick to their normal diet throughout.
Previous research has shown that risk of dementia is reduced by higher fruit and vegetable intake, and cognitive function is better preserved in healthy older adults with a diet rich in plant-based foods.
Flavonoids, which are abundant in plants, are likely to be an important component in causing these effects.
The new paper, “Enhanced task-related brain activation and resting perfusion in healthy older adults after chronic blueberry supplementation“, is published in the journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism.When Trinidadian-Canadian Jamaal Magloire founded the Toronto Revellers — now the city's largest Caribbean masquerade band — he says it was for his community and the younger generation.
The former Toronto Raptor and band leader of more than 2,000 masqueraders, started the collective 11 years ago.
"I'm very passionate about this culture," Magloire told CBC Toronto's Dwight Drummond from the band's Scarborough camp, where staff are putting the finishing touches on an array of masquerade costumes for Saturday's Toronto Caribbean Carnival parade.
"The way I was treated as an NBA basketball player is what we try to pass onto the young revellers."
Toronto Revellers masquerade band take part in the 2010 Caribana parade. (Adrien Veczan/Canadian Press)
A Toronto native born to immigrant parents from Trinidad and Tobago, Magloire, 39, says he is trying to give back to his community for supporting him on and off the court during the 12 years he played professionally.
"I go back in time and think about the times I didn't play in games, or I was benched, or I had a bad game, and these are the same people that you see here today that used to call me on the phone, used to give me words of encouragement, used to continue to push me," he explained.
Former Toronto Raptor Jamaal Magloire is giving back to the Caribbean community that supported him on the court. (Pawel Dwulit/Canadian Press)
Now Magloire is showing off his culture in a whirl of colour, sound and community at the city's 50th annual Caribbean Carnival parade this weekend — a spectacle that's credited with keeping the tradition and spirit of the Caribbean celebration alive in the city.
"This is a way for us to showcase one of the many cultures that Ontario has to offer," he said. "You know how diverse Toronto is? You can walk down the street and see so many different ethnicities and the fact that the Caribbean has their culture to offer towards the whole world is something that I want to be a part of and it's something I take very seriously."
'Let the rhythm move you'
Young Toronto Revellers help staff add the finishing touches to their masquerade costumes for Saturday's Toronto Caribbean Carnival parade. (CBC)
The Toronto Revellers' theme this year is called "Music: Let the rhythm move you."
In the last five months, Magloire says his staff members have been working tirelessly to make the theme come to life through their masquerade costumes.
Each section of the Mas band is accompanied by a colour signifying a genre of music and an accompanying song, he explains.
Magenta and violet coloured costumes will accent a nod to Toronto with Drake's song, Hotline Bling, while green and yellow spell out Bob Marley's chart topping song, One Love, and white symbolizes Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's composition, Winter Dreams.
"This is our display that we are going to present to the world," Magloire said.Following on from his acclaimed debut Code [Ostgut Ton] and his 12” Calm Down [MDR], due to be released on June 24th. Neume consists of three new tracks and the Berghain resident is staying true to his synonymous breakbeat techno sound.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/226737186″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”300″ iframe=”true” /]
If the preview is anything to go by, the title tracks eerie intro will hopefully lead into a mesmerizing EP. Meta appears to be more of an upbeat number with some piano chords rippling before a teasing vocal sample before the end of the preview we have available on Soundcloud.
Vis seems to separate itself from the previous two tracks with a more friendly sounding opening, which is reminiscent of the hands-in-the-air anthems from 1990s Ibiza.
Keep your eyes peeled for that June release date, as we are surely to have an EP that will send you nicely into the summer months.Even the NBA MVP appreciates the high fashion of a throwback hockey jersey.
Russell Westbrook, a guard for the Oklahoma City Thunder, accepted an award for "Clutch Player of the Year" while wearing a custom Mighty Ducks of Anaheim jersey at the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Sports Awards 2017 award ceremony in Los Angeles.
Instagram from @russwest44: The Kids Choice Sports Awards Experience @nickelodeon #KCS17 #whynot
Westbrook's jade and eggplant purple jersey had an "A" on the front, his customary No. 0 and his nickname "The Brodie" sewn on the back.
The awards, which will air on Nickelodeon at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Sunday, also featured Nashville Predators defenseman P.K. Subban playing "Beats 'N Seats challenge," an epic game of musical chairs. Subban posted a video from the event's red carpet, where he shot lefthanded against the goalie standing in.
Instagram from @subbanator: View: InstagramA view of the Louvre pyramid at the Louvre museum in Paris. (Chris Sorensen/Gallery Stock)
There are a lot of wonderful things about France in the springtime: the flowers blooming in the Luxembourg Gardens, the Parisians ambling along the Promenade Plantée, the green woods around the Château de Chenonceau in the Loire Valley and the fabulous produce that makes its way into Paris’s restaurants. But as traveling abroad so often does these days, my recent trip to Paris reminded me just how utterly horrible it can be to try to see some of the world’s greatest works of art.
At the Louvre, my husband and I ducked briefly into the crowds around the “Venus de Milo” and skipped the “Mona Lisa” altogether in favor of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Virgin of the Rocks.” And after braving the masses around “The Winged Victory of Samothrace,” which is easier to see than some of its equally famous counterparts thanks to its position on a grand staircase, we fled back to the marvelous — and shamefully under-attended– Islamic Art wing. The Louvre’s audience-control issues aren’t unique to that institution; at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, you have to work your way up to Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” through the crowds of people clustering around in the hopes of snapping a selfie with the monumental work, which at least gives your eyes a chance to linger on all of Rembrandt’s magnificent faces.
Though I’m frustrated by trying to look at art through a flurry of lofted cellphones*, I can’t exactly blame anyone for the impulse to snap a picture of a great work. We live in a moment when an experience might as well not have happened unless it’s documented and broadcast as widely as possible. But it is completely exhausting and discouraging that museums haven’t found a way to balance the demands of museum-goers who want to take snapshots of art and people who want to actually look at it with their eyes instead of through a lens.
The addition of cellphones and digital cameras may have changed what crowds do when they get up close to famous works of art, but the crowds themselves, and the difficulties museums face in dealing with them, aren’t exactly new issues.
In 1907, the Louvre put the “Mona Lisa” under glass after another picture was vandalized, a decision that “has caused dismay to art-lovers, who declare that the effect of the picture is ruined by the false lights and reflections,” the New York Times reported. The painting was stolen in 1911, and after it was recovered in 1913, it was displayed in Italy on its way home to France. “So great was the pressure of the crowds around” the Brera Gallery in Milan “that about 200 police officials and carabineers had difficulty in preserving order.”
When the Khrushchevs visited France in 1960, Madame Khrushchev behaved a lot like modern tourists at the Louvre: “The museum tour left little time for contemplation,” write one correspondent. “She stopped for only a few of the major pieces — such as Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa and Bonaparte’s crown.” And when the French government finally allowed the painting to be displayed in America in 1963, “The president’s mother, Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy, could not squeeze through the mob, so she found a seat in a side gallery.” More than a million people visited the “Mona Lisa” when it went on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York later that year.
Sending works like the “Mona Lisa” on tour might help disperse the crowds at the Louvre by letting more viewers see the piece in their home countries. But Louvre officials have said that the painting won’t be traveling; it’s simply too fragile to weather overseas trips.
So what’s to be done?
What about dedicated spaces for important works? The Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which houses the Temple of Dendur, is one of the most magnificent exhibition spaces anywhere. But it works because of the temple’s scale; even if the “Mona Lisa” was exhibited in a bigger room, or even if the “Venus de Milo” had a more dedicated gallery, the pieces aren’t monumental; you’d still want to get fairly close to them to get the full effect.
That leaves carefully timed tickets as the most realistic way to thin out crowds around the most popular exhibitions. That adds logistical complexity,and potentially extra costs to a visit to a museum like the Louvre, where entrance fees already start at 15 euros (about $17). Giving audiences a limited amount of time with a piece, whether they want to contemplate it or simply document that they were there, might not seem fair. But the current massive crowds aren’t serving anyone, whether your goal is to grab an Instagram-worthy shot in a sea of other cameras or an intimate communion with a lady with an enigmatic smile.
* People who take pictures with tablets in museums, on the other hand, are history’s greatest monsters.Mike Jones, executive producer of the re-releases of the Marvel: Ultimate Alliance games for current devices, reveals the release date of the titles for PS4, PC, and Xbox One.
Although comic book-themed video games have seen a mixed bag of releases over the years, the last generation certainly had some standout examples for fans. While Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham games set the standard to which all single player superhero experiences should be held, the Raven Software-developed Marvel: Ultimate Alliance titles certainly held a place in the hearts of fans – particularly when the series’ co-op gameplay was taken into consideration. Now, the games are getting a re-release, and it turns out that the titles will be available very soon.
As it happens, both Marvel: Ultimate Alliance and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 will be re-released for PS4, PC and Xbox One tomorrow, on Tuesday, 26 July. It marks a very swift turnaround from when the games were initially confirmed for another release during San Diego Comic-Con. What’s more, the games are going to be seeing a little bit of a spruce up for the new generation of consoles and devices.
The news was confirmed by executive producer Mike Jones, while talking with Marvel.com. Both Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 1 and 2 will have a bit of a graphical and user interface update, although the feel of the original games is still going to be there. “We wanted these re-releases to be as faithful to the original Ultimate Alliance games as possible – the definitive versions,” said Jones.
The two Marvel games will only be available as a digital download, with no confirmed plans for a physical release as of yet. Each game can be purchased for $39.99, with a bundle deal available at $59.99 for both games. At the moment, it has also not been confirmed as to whether the updated versions of the games will include those characters that were originally only available as DLC, or whether these extras will require an additional purchase at a later date.
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance was originally released by publisher Activision back in 2006, and was available for almost every device on the market at the time, while its sequel first appeared three years later, this time developed by Vicarious Visions. The games were extremely well received by fans, with particular love for the local multiplayer gameplay. Given the scarcity of local co-op games in the current market, these re-releases could potentially find a lot of love from gamers.
When the re-release of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance was first outed by the Taiwanese Ratings Board, many fans were ecstatic. Having the chance to play the games again with graphical enhancements was bound to be high on the wish lists of many, and fans are now going to have that chance. Hopefully, the games will live up to their prior reputation, and with Jones refusing to rule out future iterations of the series, a successful return could lead to even more games in the franchise.
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 will be re-released for PC, PS4, and Xbox One on Tuesday, 26 July.
Source: Marvel.comWith Liverpool's season kicking off against Southampton on Sunday, ESPN FC blogger, David Usher, takes a look at five of the biggest questions that loom large over Anfield.
What is Liverpool's best back four?
Defensively, Liverpool were not good enough last season, conceding 50 goals from 38 Premier League fixtures. Ideally, Brendan Rodgers will be hoping to shave at least 15 goals off that total and has invested heavily in defensive reinforcements in an effort to do so.
Dejan Lovren and Alberto Moreno have not come cheap and both will be expected to contribute straight away. All of last year's regular defenders are still on board and the ranks have been swelled further by the return to fitness of left back Jose Enrique, who missed almost all of last season with a serious knee problem.
Young Spanish right-back Javier Manquillo has also arrived and caught the eye at Anfield last week in the 4-0 win over Borussia Dortmund, so competition for places at the back is as fierce as it has ever been at Anfield. Rodgers needs to avoid falling into the trap of chopping and changing too much and must quickly settle on his best four if any kind of defensive stability is to be achieved.
Lovren is expected to be paired with Martin Skrtel -- leaving Mamadou Sakho, Daniel Agger and Kolo Toure on the sidelines -- but the full-back positions appear to be up for grabs. Glen Johnson's form has not been great in 2014 and his place will come under threat from young pretenders Manquillo and Jon Flanagan.
On the opposite flank, Enrique still seems a little short of full fitness, so Johnson may line up there until Moreno has settled in and has some training sessions under his belt. There's certainly plenty for Rodgers to think about moving forward.
Brendan Rodgers' new recruits will place Glen Johnson under pressure to keep his starting place in the team.
Can others step up to compensate for the absence of Luis Suarez?
Whatever way you try to dress it up, the fact remains that the Reds have lost their best player, and those 31 goals won't be easy to replace.
Often when you have one man playing to such an incredible level, teammates will often defer to him and settle into supporting roles, but in fairness that never happened too much with Liverpool last season. The 70 goals that were not scored by Luis Suarez are proof of that.
Daniel Sturridge and Raheem Sterling, in particular, stepped up to the plate to ensure the Reds were far from being a one-man attack, but with Suarez gone the load is going to have to be shared. Everyone will need to raise their game to make up for the loss of the talismanic Uruguayan, and Liverpool will certainly need a big year from the likes of Philippe Coutinho as well as new boys Lazar Markovic and Adam Lallana.
Can Steven Gerrard's body handle the extra fixture load?
Last year, Rodgers rarely had to concern himself with having to rest his skipper, as the absence of European football and the lack of any meaningful domestic cup run meant the Reds were usually playing just one game a week.
That is no longer the case, and Gerrard's playing time will have to be managed carefully this year. At 34, he simply cannot play two games a week on a regular basis, as he will inevitably break down. Last year he picked up a hamstring injury after playing twice in the space of a few days coming off the back of playing a full game for England.
Gerrard's retirement from international football helps Rodgers massively; not just because he misses the England games, but also because he can now have his fitness staff implement a personalised training program for his captain without it being interrupted by the frequent international breaks.
The temptation will be there to play Gerrard as much as possible, as he is so integral to how Liverpool play. But to get the best out of him, Rodgers will occasionally have to insist that the club legend put his feet up from time to time, even if he doesn't want to.
Liverpool's talisman won't be able to play every game. His match time will need to be strictly managed.
Can Liverpool's squad cope with competing on four fronts?
Despite the impressive job done by Rodgers in his two years at Anfield, the fact remains he has yet to win a trophy. Last season's league campaign went a long way toward winning over the Anfield supporters who doubted him, but he will surely be wanting to put some silverware in the cabinet as soon as possible.
His record in the domestic cups has been poor. He fielded weakened sides in his first season at the club and paid the price with disappointing defeats to Swansea City and Oldham Athletic. Last year he took both cup competitions seriously but was unfortunate to be drawn away to Manchester United and Arsenal.
Liverpool won't want to give up on any competition though this year brings the added burden of the Champions League. Rodgers has strengthened his squad significantly and there is depth in most areas. He'll need that depth if he is to win any of the four trophies on his radar.
Will Liverpool's swashbuckling style translate to the Champions League?
As Liverpool were demolishing the likes of Arsenal, Spurs and Everton among others at Anfield last season, it was difficult not to wonder how Europe's elite would fare against Rodgers' rampant Reds. This year we'll find out.
Suarez may no longer be there, but last weekend's destruction of Dortmund showed that Liverpool still pose that same threat at home, particularly in the early stages of games when they play at a tempo few can live with. It was only a friendly, of course, but it was a timely reminder of what this team is capable of on home soil.
As threatening as Liverpool are in front of the Kop, they have often been vulnerable on their travels due to an inability to keep clean sheets. It's difficult to imagine them going to some of Europe's more difficult venues and being able to "shut up shop" as the great Liverpool sides of the past were able to do.
Liverpool's European Cup successes came off the back of keeping it tight away from home and taking advantage of the Anfield atmosphere. Ties were often settled by aggregate scores of 1-0 or 2-1. With this side, you could be seeing scores of 10-7 over two-legged ties!
Dave Usher is one of ESPN's Liverpool bloggers and the founder of LFC fanzine and website The Liverpool Way. Follow him on Twitter: @theliverpoolway.Atlanta (David Tulis/AP)
Congratulations to Atlanta, which for the second year in a row has been declared the most unequal city in the United States.
How does a city win this coveted title, you may ask? Well, it is not easy. It requires having the household incomes of your wealthiest residents be worth nearly 20 times — again: twenty times — the incomes off your poorest residents in 2013, according to a new report released Tuesday by the Brookings Institution. It requires having households in your 98th percentile register incomes of more than $288,000, while having those in the 20th percentile earning a hair under $15,000.
Now, the gulf may be the biggest in Atlanta, but dollar-for-dollar, Atlanta’s richest residents are far outshined by their peers out west. San Francisco had the second-biggest gap between its richest and poorest residents, but its richest residents made so much more money than anybody else on the Brookings list: Households in the richest percentile there made more than $423,000, which is a crazy amount of money. (Stop what you are doing right now and go invent something. Disrupt somebody, disrupt something, disrupt anything. You are wasting your time reading these words when you could be inventing a dating app for people who are allergic to tomatoes.) Meanwhile, the bottom percentile in that city earned $24,000. This may be a good time to mention that Census data shows that a quarter of Atlanta’s residents lived below the poverty line between 2009 and 2013, compared to 13.5 percent of San Francisco’s residents over that span.
The Brookings researchers looked at the country’s 50 biggest cities and examined recent trends, looking in particular at the richest people (those that earn more than 95 percent of other households) and the less well-off (households that earn 20 percent of what other households earn). Brookings did the same thing last year, finding that big cities have more income inequality than the rest of the country and reporting that rich households in big cities are richer than the national average, while poor households in big cities are poorer.
So what happened in 2013 versus 2012? Well, the gap grew. In 2013, the big-city gap between the richest and poorest households was larger than it was a year earlier; the richest homes earned 11.6 times as much as the poorest homes, up from a ratio of 10.8 in 2012. This gulf was ahead of the national average in both years, too. And the overall trend is going in a really good direction — if you are rich, as my colleague Emily Badger points out. Raise a glass of something very pricey for your people in Seattle, Cleveland, Louisville and Portland, because incomes were up for the people who live there and were already pretty rich. A dozen cities in all saw the incomes of their richest residents go up “by a statistically significant margin” last year, the Brookings report says. Seattle’s wealthiest residents saw their |
18 June in the colours of the rainbow, a symbol adopted by the LGBTI movement.
The lighting of the bridge was seen as a nod to Istanbul Pride Week, starting on 19 June and running through 25 June, although no official statement to this effect was released by any department in charge of the bridge.
The backlash against the move was swift and vicious, particularly on social media.
One user wrote: "May Allah punish whoever engaged in this Perverted Propaganda on the 15 July Martyrs Bridge in the name of LGBT during the month of Ramadan."
Ramazan ayında LGBT adı altında 15 Temmuz Şehitler Köprüsü'nden bu Sapıklık Propagandası'nın iznini kim verdiyse Allah onun belasını versin! pic.twitter.com/tkUTrOYrlA — Fâtih Tezcan (@fatihtezcan) June 17, 2017
Another wrote: "Last night the Bosphorus Bridge was lit in the colours symbolically used by the LGBT perverts. Pity.
Dün gece Boğaz Köprüsü LGBT'li sapkınların simgesel olarak kullandığı renklere büründü.
Yazık... pic.twitter.com/VYh48LfYC0 — XiaomiLoverUtkuAblak (@miuablak) June 18, 2017
The Istanbul municipality was quick to respond and deny responsibility for the lighting. In a series of messages on Twitter, the municipality stated the bridge is not part of its jurisdiction, including its lighting.
The Istanbul municipality said the bridge falls under the responsibility of the national highway authority, which operates under the transport ministry.
In its final message, the municipality said the issue had been resolved.
Konu, Karayolları Genel Müdürlüğü ile görüşülmüş ve aydınlatmaların rengi görseldeki gibi değiştirilmiştir. (2/2) pic.twitter.com/Kcd5p4l1QL — İstanbul Büyükşehir (@istanbulbld) June 17, 2017
Translation: The subject has been discussed with the Highways general directorate and the lighting has been changed as depicted in the images.
Debate raged on social media and in the media over the weekend as to whether lighting up the bridge in rainbow colours was intentional and the motives behind it.
Some were quick to point the finger at Gulenists, followers of the US-based Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen whom the authorities accuse of being behind last July’s coup attempt.
One prominent Turkish columnist even asked if this was retaliation by Istanbul’s beleaguered mayor who on Friday saw his son-in-law arrested for the second time for alleged financial links to Gulenists.
Others said the bureaucrats in the highway administration probably had no clue that the rainbow colours symbolised the LGBT movement.
From applause to condemnation
The Istanbul Pride march started being held in 1993 but really took off in 2003, reflecting Turkey’s growing acceptance of diverse views and lifestyles.
Although unimaginable in most of Anatolia, the event flourished in Turkey’s major urban centres with the Istanbul march drawing ever larger crowds in the city’s most famous gathering spot Istiklal Avenue since 2003.
Istanbul Pride events attracted tens of thousands of participants from 2010 to 2014, with the Turkish authorities even earning praise from the European Union in 2014 for ensuring that the large gathering was held without incident despite it coinciding with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Ramadan falls on different dates in the Gregorian calendar each year since the Islamic Hijri calendar is based on the lunar cycle.
In 2015, the Istanbul governor’s office denied permission for the march. Police used water cannon and tear gas to disperse marchers who had gathered regardless.
Permission for Istanbul Pride events continues to be refused.
Observers say the denial of permission to hold Pride events and the increasing vitriol against the LGBT community on social media reflects the increasingly intolerant nature of the country’s current leadership.
In the last few years, Turkey’s fall from being highly praised to strongly criticised has been drastic.
In terms of LGBT rights and issues Turkey was the recipient of high praise until 2014 for being the host of the biggest gay pride event in the Muslim world. The government has never officially sanctioned these events but was lauded for ensuring the safety of participants.
While homosexuality is not a crime in Turkey, homophobia remains widespread.
Istanbul Pride organisers had not commented on the lighting up of the Bosphorus Bridge.
They have, however, vowed to defy this year’s ban as well and make themselves heard and seen on the streets.
The Pride Istanbul website is currently running a crowd funding programme to finance its events this year and using one of its popular slogans: "We are here, we are not leaving, get used to it!"
Meanwhile, the Istanbul chief of an ultra-nationalist group has threatened to attack any pride participants.
"Whatever happens we will in no way allow this march to proceed. We have to prevent such immorality or else it will seriously spread," Kursat Mican of the Alperen Hearths group
told a local broadcaster.
"We will not allow this, we won’t let them march even if the state allows them to."
"We will go to whichever area they go to stop them. If we want to we will find 200,000 people to stop them."Looks like it's the turn of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) to embark on the path of aggressive Hindutva in Maharashtra. The organisation will soon begin a drive in the state asking Hindus to prevent their daughters from being "lured" into marriage with Muslim youths and being converted to Islam.
VHP will also embark on a re-conversion drive to bring back people, who have converted to Islam and Christianity, into the Hindu fold.
"We will undertake an awareness campaign against love jihad (in Maharashtra)," a senior VHP functionary, Prof Venkatesh Abdeo, told dna. Abdeo said he was the first to write a book in English and Hindi on the issue 12 years ago after "love jihad" cases had been reported in Kerala.
"We will ask families to keep an eye on whom their daughters are talking to on the phone, and also watch their movements. (We will request them) to ensure that Hindutva traditions are imbibed in the family, through satsang and bhajans at least once a week, and that the family dines together," said Abdeo, who blamed nuclear families for parents being unable to supervise their daughters who fall in love with Muslim youths.
"Even educated girls fall prey to love jihad and marry boys from slums. Most of the perpetrators are sadak chaaps (lumpens)," said Abdeo, adding that recently they had received two cases involving such girls. He also alleged that once these girls were "lured" by Muslim youngsters and converted to Islam, they were even forced to "become terrorists due to force of circumstances."
"Soon, we will start focusing on re-conversion... The efforts of the VHP have seen conversion of 50 lakh people being stopped. We have also brought about re-conversions and ensured that around 7 lakh Hindus, who were originally Muslims and Christians, were brought back into Hindu fold," said Abdeo. Of these, four lakh were Christians and the rest Muslims, he said, adding that around 80,000 of these re-conversions had taken place in Maharashtra.
The VHP leader said while people in backward areas were lured and converted to Islam, it was those in tribal areas who had been converted to Christianity "through a conspiracy of inducements."
"They admit in private that their forefathers belonged to Hindu culture, but the mullahs and maulavis make them hardliners and keep them away from Hindu samaj," said Abdeo. Those who were willing to re-convert to Hinduism underwent a "shuddikaran" (purification rite) and were given a certificate about them having become Hindus, he added.
Abdeo denied that caste discrimination was a factor behind conversion from Hinduism to other faiths, and claimed the shackles of caste had loosened over the years.Are the Linux community a bunch of commies or are they more democratic than the big companies selling you software?
People love a good debate. We asked (with tongues in our cheeks) whether Linux was best understood as being Marxist or capitalist.
The comments that followed were a lot of fun, but most were also well thought out and got us thinking about how Linux and the free software movement fit in to some of the wider philosophical, economic, religious and ethical debates that have pre-occupied human beings over the centuries.
Seeing as even Linus Torvalds has been engaging in such idle speculation, as was shown in his summertime interview with the BBC, we thought it would be fun to continue the conversation.
We're going to take a sideways look at Linux and free software by exploring it through the guise of several of these ongoing debates, taking a look at a few theories and seeing how they might be applied to our favourite operating system.
A warning first: to us, the most important thing about Linux and free software is that it's a practical reality. It's simply cool that this stuff works, it's free and people can have great fun using and making it - and some can even make a bit of money at the same time. Everything else is just gravy, so don't get too upset by anything you read!
Having mentioned Linus Torvalds' interview with the BBC, let's start there. In it, he said "…open source only really works if everybody is doing it for their own selfish reasons… the fundamental property of the GPL v2 is a very simple 'tit-for-tat' model: I'll give you my improvements, if you promise to give your improvements back."
What makes Torvalds' observation interesting is that it links in with discussions in philosophy, ethics, biology, psychology and even mathematics dating all the way back to Plato (at least!). In The Republic, Plato is discussing justice and morality, and wondering whether these are a social construction or some abstract good.
In doing so, Glaucon, one of the characters, proposes the idea of a magic ring that makes the wearer invisible. He suspects that both a just and an unjust person wearing the ring would act in the same way: taking what they like from the market, going into houses and "lying" with anyone they fancy, or killing their enemies.
He says: "If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot…" since "... injustice is far more profitable than justice." What a depressing take on people!
Whether you agree with Glaucon or not, it's obvious this is the same point that Torvalds was making: without social constraints, such as the GPL v2, I wouldn't be able to trust that if I give you my code improvements, you'll give me yours back.
Why would you? After all, if you just took my code and continued to improve your software, you'd have an advantage over me, having to do less work for a better result - and people are selfish!
It seems that even Plato at least speculated, as did Torvalds, that the world doesn't work by everyone saying: "let's all sing Kumbaya around the campfire and make the world a better place."
Free riders and security
Bruce Schneier addresses the same problem in his latest book, Liars and Outliers, making it clear just how current this conversation is, both inside and outside the world of technology. In the book, he describes something called the hawk-dove game, from game theory.
The concept is that in a wild population of birds, all competing to share a limited amount of food, some birds are hawks and some doves. Hawks are aggressive and will fight for their food: when they meet another hawk, the two will fight, with one getting the food and the other being injured and possibly dying. Doves are passive, and when two meet over some food, opt to share it between one another instead. If a hawk and a dove meet, then the hawk will always get the food, as the dove will choose to retreat.Bernie Sanders's campaign just suffered a serious blow. Sanders can no longer access the Democratic National Committee's database of registered voters, after a glitch allowed the campaign to download data from rival Hillary Clinton.
This is a big setback, if the DNC doesn't restore Sanders's access quickly. The voter list is crucial for organizing voters in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses, where votes take place in less than six weeks.
The Sanders staffers were allowed access to Clinton's data in the first place due to a software error, the Washington Post reported. Four of them looked at Clinton's data, three at the direction of their boss, Josh Uretsky, who was fired.
The data was only available for about 30 minutes, according to Buzzfeed. The Sanders campaign said this type of error has happened with the database vendor, NGP VAN, before.
Uretsky told CNN he was just trying to assess the extent of the damage, and to see if the same glitch had affected the Sanders campaign: "To the best of my knowledge, nobody took anything that would have given the (Sanders) campaign any benefit."
Still, the DNC has cut off access until the Sanders campaign can fully explain itself and prove it's deleted Clinton's data.Why is tanning dangerous?
NEW: The MRF is proud to offer the Truth About Tanning electronic postcard in the following languages:
As many as 90% of melanomas are estimated to be caused by ultraviolet (UV) exposure. This includes UV exposure from the sun and from artificial sources, such as tanning beds. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classifies tanning beds and tanning lamps into its highest cancer risk category – carcinogenic to humans, the same category as other hazardous substances such as asbestos and plutonium.
Numerous individual studies, including an analysis of several studies combined (meta-analyses), have consistently shown that indoor tanning increases the risk of developing all forms of skin cancer, including melanoma.
Misleading Information
The tanning industry has tried to tell consumers that vitamin D is necessary and that it should be sought from tanning beds. However, the majority of tanning bulbs actually emit UVA radiation, and UVB radiation is needed for the body to produce vitamin D. That fact is, all necessary vitamin D can be found in a healthy diet or from a vitamin supplement. If you are concerned about your vitamin D levels, consult your doctor, not a tanning salon!
Staggering Statistics
Research indicates that just one blistering sunburn can double your chances of developing melanoma later in life. In addition, using tanning beds before age 30 increases your risk of developing melanoma by 75 percent. Occasional use of tanning beds triples your chances. Research also suggests a strong dose-response relationship - meaning the more sessions, hours and years spent tanning, the higher the risk of developing melanoma and other types of skin cancer.
Melanoma is the most common form of cancer for young adults 25-29 years old and the second most common form of cancer for young people 15-29 years old. Melanoma is the leading cause of cancer death in women 25-30 years old and the second leading cause of cancer death in women 30-35 years old.
For more melanoma facts and figures, view the MRF’s Melanoma Fact Sheet.
There is NO Such Thing as a “Safe Tan”
Tanned skin is a result of damage to skin cells. Research suggests that the cumulative damage to skin cells can lead to wrinkles, age spots, premature aging and skin cancer. Tanning is so dangerous that several countries, including Brazil, have made it completely illegal.
What about getting a "base tan" before you go on vacation? Well, studies have actually found that a base tan fails to protect against sunburn and provides very minimal sun protection - equivalent to an SPF of about 3.
Tanning is Addictive
The connection between UV radiation and melanoma is clear, yet tanning is more popular than ever. This has prompted researchers to explore the addictive nature of tanning. Resulting research shows tanning is, in fact, addictive, similar to other cancer-causing activities (e.g. tobacco use). UV light has been shown to increase the release of endorphins, the feel-good chemicals that relieve pain and generate feelings of well-being. This could potentially lead to dependency.
In fact, a recent study found that some people who have been diagnosed with melanoma continue to use indoor tanning beds – further supporting the idea that tanning is addictive.
The bottom line? Intentional UV tanning of any kind, in the sun or in a tanning bed, is never recommended.
The MRF is committed to reducing melanoma by educating people about the dangers of tanning and the importance of catching potential threats early. As part of these efforts, the MRF actively opposes tanning through UV radiation. Based on current evidence, the MRF supports the views of the Surgeon General, and recognizes that while spray tanning and lotions do not expose users to UV radiation, there are other concerns associated with the use of these products. Below is the Surgeon General’s position on sunless tanning, as stated in the Call to Action to Prevent Skin Cancer:
“To reduce harms from indoor tanning, some organizations have promoted the use of topical sunless tanning products as a way to get a tanned appearance without UV exposure. One concern about this method of tanning is that dihydroxyacetone (DHA), a commonly used ingredient in sunless tanning products, is approved by FDA for use in cosmetics and drugs for external application only. When this product is used in spray tanning booths (spray-on tans), inhalation is usually unavoidable.
In addition, the promotion of sunless tanning products does not address the underlying social norms that drive tanning behaviors.
Sunless tanning products are often used in conjunction with, rather than in place of, UV tanning. Furthermore, their use does not appear to lead to safer outdoor sun exposure and could potentially increase the likelihood of sunburn.
Other methods used to achieve tanned skin, such as pills and injections, have additional health risks.
However, over-the-counter sunless tanning creams and lotions may be an option for those who want to have tanned skin while avoiding the health risks of UV exposure and inhaled and absorbed DHA.”
While further research will help in better understanding the specific health impact of sunless tanning products, they may play a role in further perpetuating harmful perceptions that people’s natural skin color must be modified to be beautiful. The MRF encourages people to embrace and value the skin in which they were born.Subaru on Thursday announced that it was recalling 633,842 vehicles to check for a problem with a fuse in a puddle light that could short-circuit and lead to a fire.
The move affects Subaru Legacy and Outbacks made in 2010 and 2011, Tribeca models made from 2006 to 2012, and Forester models made from 2009 to 2012.
The company believes that only 54,000 vehicles are actually equipped with the small accessory lamps under the side of the vehicle, said Subaru spokesman Michael McHale. The potential fire hazard arises when moisture containing road salt gets into the lamp housing and makes contact with the circuit board, he said.
McHale said no fires have been reported, and that there have "less than ten" incidents of smoke in the puddle lamps due to the problem. "There have been no incidents of injury or accidents," he said.
Owners of affected vehicles with puddle lamps are encouraged to contact their dealers, who will install a smaller fuse to correct the problem.
The news comes on an otherwise positive day for Subaru. The company said it sold 36,653 vehicles in December, more than any other month in its history. December also concluded Subaru's best year of sales, with 336,000 vehicles.The idea of Brockhampton has always been appealing—a large group of very talented friends working together to form rap’s first boyband. It’s only now with the June 9 release of Saturation and its August sequel Saturation II that everything is falling into place.
Since the release of their debut singles in 2015, which have now been scrubbed from the internet, Brockhampton have continued to improve with each release. From the fragmented All-American Trash to the cohesive Saturation albums, they are becoming their best selves by being even closer collaborators. They persisted, experimented, and the results are on their records.
Saturation was initially announced as a mixtape but it soon expanded in scope. Changing its status to an album, Brockhampton made their debut proper. Building on everything they learned creating their first mixtape, All-American Trash, they’ve kept growing and evolving with Saturation and Saturation II. From album to album, Brockhampton are improving in front of our eyes.
Brockhampton are often compared to Odd Future, if only because there isn’t another large rap group with an off-kilter approach receiving major attention right now. But in a few crucial ways, they’re fundamentally different. Outside of a few songs on the collaborative tapes they released and Tyler’s older material, Odd Future never made an obvious effort to flaunt their collective chemistry in their music. Brockhampton, however, are all about collective energy.
Finding more in common in how they operate with Wu-Tang Clan than Odd Future, Brockhampton are the first truly post-OF group to come along and shake up hip-hop. Even though Kevin Abstract is the architect and mastermind behind the group, both Saturation albums are very much a group effort.
Considering how they operate, the Odd Future comparisons fail to make much sense. They’re undoubtedly influenced by the group, and Tyler in particular, but that is the case for a huge number of rising rappers who are now in their late teens and early twenties. Tyler certainly paved the way, but now Brockhampton are shooting off down a new fork in the road, a path uncharted.
Rather than following a blueprint, they’re tinkering with it, and making it their own to inspire even younger artists. Learning from their experiences over the past couple of years, they’ve nailed the accelerated album cycle approach, outdoing even the biggest acts with unlimited resources when it comes to constant content. What makes them different from say, Drake, is that everything they’ve been putting out has been consistently great.
With the trajectory they’re on right now, it won’t be all that long until they’re fulfilling that boyband dream of theirs. The progression from Saturation to its sequel isn’t immense, but it’s noticeable enough that the prospect of a third album has expectations high—perhaps not unreasonably so considering that Brockhampton keep outdoing themselves.
What makes them great isn’t simply how well they present themselves, either, as they’ve shown an interest in furthering their lyrical capabilities, too. Dom, who had a standout verse on the bittersweet “Trip” speaking about thoughts of suicide, proves himself the most adept when it comes to tackling issues many youth face. But he’s not the only one going a lot deeper on Saturation II.
Ameer opens up the track “Fight” with one of his finest moments in Brockhampton so far. “And when I grew up I learned what racism was / And what teaching it does / And like my teachers would say / ‘Little black boys have a place in the world’ / Like hanging from trees / Or dead in the streets like I seen on TV.” Considering he’s faced criticism before regarding the lack of variety in his subject matter, this feels like a direct antithesis to the idea Brockhampton don’t really rap about anything, as Pitchfork suggested in their review of the first record. Ameer even addresses such criticisms directly on “Chick,” rapping, “I’ma be a star even if I say the same things.”
Moments like this highlight just how astute they are when it comes to their surroundings and their own failings, aiming to better themselves rather than staying stuck in place. They’re both dismissive of criticisms and willing to prove them wrong, which makes them one of the most exciting rap acts around. Maybe they’re not yet revolutionary for rap in the same way Tyler and Odd Future were, but if Saturation II is any indication, they’re getting there.
There is, however, one way in which they’re definitely breaking new ground. In previous interviews, Kevin Abstract has stated that he wants to be an idol for gay kids. As much as there are gay idols in pop and rock music, rap culture has a long history of homophobia. In recent years, artists like Le1f and Angel Haze have been vocal about their sexuality in their music, and Kevin is building on their progress as part of a group of artists with varying sexual orientations.
In a now deleted tweet, he explained, “The goal is to fucking normalize this shit so if a gay black kid wanna talk about hooking up with dudes next to his homie it’s not a big deal.” It’s all about avoiding the segregation of queer artists from straight artists. Kevin Abstract has all the tools to be a rap star, it’s just that Brockhampton, and Kevin in particular, are blowing up without adhering to the traditional ideas of hip-hop masculinity.
His verse on “Junky” is not only one of his best verses so far, it’s also one of the best rap verses of the year so far. It’s impassioned, addresses the hatred he faces, and tackles it head on. “Where I come from niggas get called ‘faggot’ and killed,” he proclaims, before adding, “So I'ma get head from a nigga right here / And they can come and cut my hand off and / And my legs off and / And I'ma still be a boss 'til my head go, yeah.” Put up to the spotlight, this is one of the hardest verses rap has given us this year, and for a genre that still struggles to understand sexuality beyond the “norm,” this is a big moment.
In a video for All Def Music, YouTubers Zias and B Lou reacted to the “Junky” video, saying, “I ain’t gonna lie that was probably like, the gayest, dopest verse I’ve heard.” And they’re right; it’s unapologetically gay, and it’s also hard as fuck.
Brockhampton are firing on all cylinders right now, hitting every target they aim for. It speaks volumes about the group as a whole that Kevin’s verse doesn’t really overshadow the rest of the group’s contributions to the track, even if it’s the most immediately attention grabbing.
Everyone’s verse on the track speaks to their demons and what they’ve been coping with, and how others perceive them, but Kevin’s is the verse that feels the most important for a culture that’s still got a lot of growing to do. How often have queer rap fans been able to look towards someone in the genre and think, “This is someone I can look up to”? Rap needs someone like Kevin Abstract.
But what makes Brockhampton so great isn’t the individual members and what they do—it’s what they manage to create collectively. Together they are unstoppable, and they’re on a legendary run right now. Their work ethic is challenging the likes of Future’s incredible 2015 mixtape run, especially if they can keep things going with Saturation III. And Brockhampton haven't given us any reason to doubt them yet.
Brockhampton's group chemistry is unmatched, and they’re finally earning the boyband tag they’ve long claimed. At this point, they might redefine boybands for a new generation the way Odd Future did for collectives. With their live shows looking wild, it’s evident that this collective energy isn’t exclusive to their records, either. But we’ve already seen this with their videos, filmed on the streets of South Central L.A. and Van Nuys, often with a disregard for their own safety. It all feels youthful and punk, a remedy to the overly authoritarian chaos of 2017.
Brockhampton are open, honest, and refreshing. When so many rappers are calling Marilyn Manson their biggest influence out of nowhere and wearing metal t-shirts to keep up with trends, Brockhampton only seem all the more genuine. Rather than creating an artificial alternative persona to stand out, these guys are truly standing up for kids that are actually different.After Team Liquid's 41-minute win over Team 8, Xpecial spoke to theScore eSports about Fenix's confident play, their upcoming match against Team Impulse and Team SoloMid's summer performance
Last split, everyone on Liquid was talking about how FeniX was the "scrim god" but his play on stage didn't really live up to expectation until this summer. What changed for Fenix between the splits.
It's definitely a combination of everything. He was confident, but in some ways he was overconfident and in some ways he wasn’t as confident. He would try to push his advantage a lot, he would get a CS lead, but he would be vulnerable to ganks because he was playing so aggressively. He felt that he could destroy this guy in lane, and he would often get ganked.
A lot of the time, honestly, he wouldn’t lose when we won. He would lose because he got ganked. He would die First Blood and stuff like that, and those were reasons why he wasn’t performing as well. People saw he wasn't performing to the level we said he would and were dismayed about that. But now he’s more comfortable, he is playing with confidence.
We are also making him ward more and be more vision controlling rather than just trying to straight out mechanically outplay them. When you watch someone like Bjergsen for example, last split he was winning, he still got wards, he still had vision and he was indestructible. We’re trying to get FeniX to do the same thing, but Fenix is doing great and we’ve seen him show-off his mechanical skill a lot this split.
Gravity has emerged as a very strong competitor after some offseason roster changes. As a support player, what can you say about Bunny’s development both as a shot-caller and as a top level support this split?
I think Bunny has improved a lot from his time on Curse. He was seen as a fairly good support player that can only play Thresh, and we saw in this split that he's using a lot more champions and also innovating in his support role as well with the Shen pick.
In terms of Gravity, I don’t think they're a very strong team internationally because their play is very erratic and they don’t really set rule, which is good and bad. It's bad in that they should not be consistent. but they are somehow winning a lot of their games.
I think their playoffs will see a lot of those weaknesses and I don’t think they’ll make it to worlds with how they’re playing right now
Team Impulse were hit with a serious blow when XiaoWeiXiao was suspended for ELO boosting. Although it's never fun to see a fellow competitor take a late-season hit like that, what do you as a team need to do to put yourselves in the best position to secure the first-round bye?
We’re just going to beat TiP. Just traditionally TiP hasn't done so well with their playstyle against us. They are a very early game centric team, but our lanes and our players are very strong in the early game as well and they never seem to get a big advantage.
The only games where they have beaten us are mainly the ones where they snowballed on us, and as long as we can avoid that I think that we will beat them out in terms of team fighting.
In terms of rotations, everything beyond the early game we’re stronger than them in. Without XiaoWeiXiao as well, they’re not going to have their late game team fights with XiaoWeiXiao carrying, so I’m not worried about TiP. We’ll just play our game and play it well.
TSM have been experiencing some late-season struggles heading towards the playoffs. Can you evaluate what's hurting TSM and how this will affect their play in the coming weeks?
It's hard for me to evaluate what is wrong with them, as I don’t really know the inner workings of the team anymore. I see it as more of a team that's been getting by solely because of Bjergsen getting ahead. Now that Bjergsen isn't getting the pressure that he needs mid to carry the game, TSM doesn't really have a carry that is getting a big enough lead to allow him to win these games that they should have won in the first place.
When we look at games from last split, and a lot of games in this split as well, you see four players on TSM being behind and Bjergsen being up five kills and 4k gold and he’s the one that’s carrying. That’s not happening this split, and it shouldn't happen at all.
I assume they’re getting better, but without that carrying TSM is just not good and I don’t know what they can do to fix this. It looks very dire for them, but I always see TSM do well in playoffs so we’ll have to see. We can’t underestimate them.
How excited are you for possibly taking a trip over to the east coast and what does Liquid need to do to get to the finals? Who is your biggest threat heading into the playoffs and who are you most excited to play in a best of five match?
So depending how we place tomorrow [Sunday], if we beat out TiP we will likely have to play tie breaker game against CLG and we’ll win that as well. We are pretty much guaranteed to go to Madison Square Garden because we will be in Top 4 and Top 4 will eventually play at MSG.
Our goal is to really take first. We really don’t care about who we play against. The toughest opponent, I would say for us, is Gravity. Even though I said they are very erratic and they are hard to predict and they aren't consistent, they have been doing extremely well. They are the only team that has beaten us twice this split, and they seem to have our number. I’m not afraid of any team but it seems like Gravity is our biggest weakness.
In terms of who I want to play against, I think I would like to play against CLG probably. I just think they don't have our number, I mean they beat us last time, I do want revenge against them. If we beat them tomorrow, I don’t really care, but if they lose tomorrow and end up in the playoffs then it would be really good for us.
This interview was conducted with the assistance of Nicholas Doucet and has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Skye Bui has a passion for dry humor and eSports. Follow blahblahblah on Twitter.A top aide to Mayor Bill de Blasio had his iPhone swiped from his hand as he rode a Manhattan subway this week, police sources said Wednesday.
Mahen Gunaratna, 30, Hizzoner’s deputy communications director, was robbed Tuesday at about 5:20 p.m. after he boarded a Brooklyn-bound train on the 4 and 5 line at 14th Street-Union Square station, sources said.
Gunaratna was holding onto a subway pole with his right hand and holding his phone in his left when the train pulled into the Fulton Street station – two stops from where he got on, according to sources.
Just as the doors were about to close, one of two thieves snatched his phone and both crooks fled out of the train.
The quick-thinking victim chased the suspects out of the station, but he lost sight of them at the street level, sources said.
Police described the suspects as two men about 5 feet 8 and 140 pounds.
No arrests have been made.
It is unclear if the stolen cellphone was a work phone or a personal phone.
Gunaratna refused to discuss the incident when asked by The Post at City Hall, and referred questions to the press office.
“It’s certainly unsettling and a major inconvenience,” de Blasio spokesman Eric Phillips said in an email.
Phillips added: “Mahen was on the train and someone grabbed his phone and took off. He gave chase but lost them somewhere on Broadway.”
At a March 2016 press conference, de Blasio was quoted as saying, “You have an almost million in one chance of being a victim of any kind of crime on the New York City subways and most of those crimes are property crimes.”
Gunaratna has worked as de Blasio’s deputy communications director since January, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Before that he worked as the director of research and media analysis for the de Blasio administration between January 2014 and January 2016, but left that post to work on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Additional reporting by Yoav GonenThe GMB in behavior and neuropsychiatric conditions
Clarke et al. [5] Mice Investigated impact of GF state and colonization of initially GF animals on: Immune response measured by TNF-alpha HPA axis reactivity measured by corticosterone release to environmental stressor BDNF expression in hippocampus Hippocampal weight 5 HT concentrations in hippocampus Tryptophan availability and metabolism Serotonergic gene expression Body weight 5 HT and 5 HIAA concentration in hippocampus Anxiety like behavior Male GF animals have significant elevation of hippocampal concentration of 5HT and 5HIAA in addition to and increased level of tryptophan in plasma of male GF animals Colonization of GF animals reversed tryptophan to baseline values and anxiety response normalized but did not reverse neurochemical changes in hippocampus or immune response
Desbonnet et al. [18] Mice Mice treated with a combination of antibiotics from weaning onward. Authors assessed: Gut microbiome composition Body/tissue weight Behavioral assessments including: exploration and non-spatial cognition, anxiety, social interaction and social memory Corticosterone response to acute stress Serum tryptophan and metabolites Hippocampus BDNF mRNA expression Monoamine levels in brain Microbiota depletion with chronic antibiotic treatment reduced anxiety, induced cognitive deficits, altered dynamics of tryptophan metabolic pathway and reduced BNDF, oxytocin and vasopressin in adult mouse brain
Sudo et al. [6] Mice Investigated impact of GF state, specific pathogen free state and gnotobiotic state in mice on: ACTH and corticosterone levels in response to acute restraint stress Gene expression levels of CRH, glucocorticoid receptor and NMDA receptor subunits in cortex, hippocampus and hypothalamus BDNF levels in hippocampus and cortex Maternal behavior Stress response measured by ACTH and corticosterone levels were elevated in GF mice compared to specific pathogen free mice GF mice exhibited reduced BDNF expression in cortex and hippocampus Commensal gut microbes play a role in shaping HPA axis development
Christian et al. [7] |
we know that speed contributes to crashes."
Burke said speed limit enforcement was one of several important factors in reducing traffic crashes, and in Chicago there has historically been little of it.
"We have so little enforcement of traffic laws outside of the cameras," he said. "That's partly a function of not having enough police to do it."
Other important factors include street design and education.
Nonetheless, he said, any type of speed enforcement program should be transparent and consistent.
Burke, an avid bicyclist, said Chicagoans need to slow down to save lives — and he even recommends moving cameras around the city to make them less predictable.
"You're probably not going to get there much faster going above the speed limit because in Chicago there's always another red light, there's always another backup. The speeding is not only unsafe, it's largely unnecessary."
Still, Cochran and Washington Park Advisory Council President Cecilia Butler are skeptical the cameras in their community are helping.
"You have people who are speeding up to avoid people who are slowing down," Butler said. Morgan Drive, home to top revenue generating camera, is "already a difficult road to drive on, if you are unfamiliar. This makes it more unsafe."
She said to her the camera was installed in a spot that doesn't make much sense.
"No one crosses [the street] there, yet it is there," she said.
Cochran, like Arena, said some areas are better than others for speed cameras.
Still, the alderman says there is not much even he nor others can do when caught on camera speeding by parks and schools.
"I write a check," he said.
Read about the cameras in your 'hood here:
5 Wicker Speed Cameras Issue More Than $1 Million in Fines Over 10 Months
Columbus Park Speed Camera Takes About $2,800 Per Day from Austin Drivers
Downtown Speed Cameras Issue More Than $800K in Tickets... And Counting
Speed Cameras Have Cost Drivers $2.6 Million in Humboldt Park Alone
Speed Cameras Well-Positioned To Catch Those Rushing To School in 19th Ward
McKinley Park Speed Camera Issues Almost 12K Tickets, $1 Million in Fines
Two Speed Cameras Rake In Big Bucks from Far Northwest Side Motorists
Uptown Speed Camera Near Cemeteries Dishes Out Sixth Highest Fines in City
Lakeview Speed Camera Citations on the Rise
Speed Cameras Near Union Park Dish Out Nearly $1.5 Million in Fines
Lincoln Park Speed Cameras Nab $1.1 million in Fines
Drivers Treat Irving Park, Foster Like Highways, Speed Cameras Show
Belmont Cragin Speed Cameras Rack Up Nearly $2.5 Million in Fines
Washington Park Speed Camera Issued $3.1 Million in Fines, Highest In City
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:30-foot fall in greenbelt knocks woman unconscious, medics airlift her out Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Emergency units near the scene where a woman fell 30 feet near Twin Falls in the Barton Creek Greenbelt on Sunday, June 11, 2017. (KXAN/Alyssa Goard) [ + - ] Video
AUSTIN (KXAN) – A woman in her 30s fell about 30 feet in the Barton Creek Greenbelt in southwest Austin late Sunday afternoon, said Austin-Travis County EMS.
It happened at about 5:20 p.m. in the Twin Falls area of the greenbelt, ATC EMS said.
Medics said the woman was unconscious when they reached her, and they were aiding her breathing.
At about 6 p.m., emergency responders hoisted her into a STARFlight helicopter hovering overhead. She was flown to St. David's South Austin Medical Center with critical, life-threatening injuries, ATC EMS said.
The Austin Fire Department also assisted in the rescue operation.I am a young gay man in college. My father generously pays for my tuition and rent. The problem is that he does not know I am gay. He has made it very clear that if I were, he would not only withdraw all financial support but also cast himself entirely out of my life. His suspicion arose in high school when he found love letters between me and another male student. I swore they were meaningless and have since been defending my heterosexuality. Questions about my sexuality are inevitable whenever I come home. My father has demanded I produce archives of all emails and text messages for him to review, although I have successfully refused these requests on the grounds that he has no claim to my adult communications. Is it ethical for me to continue accepting financial support for my education and my career that will come from it? Could I continue to lie to accept the support and one day disclose my sexuality and pay him back to absolve myself of any ethical wrongdoing? NAME WITHHELD
Amy Bloom: It’s terrible that it should be so hard to get a college education in this country without accumulating massive debt. But what’s happening here is an issue not just of finances but of a real wish on the part of the father to control and bully his son. The fact that the father demands that the son produce archives of all emails and text messages for him to review? That’s just abuse. That’s not about money, and it may not even necessarily be about his being gay. If there were no questions, you could say nothing about your private life and your sexuality.
Lots of people keep these things from their parents, and you can do that in a completely honorable way. The letter writer can, in his position of dependency, lie to his father and know that although he is not taking the bravest or most admirable stance, his lying is understandable. You can certainly forgive yourself for the lying in this circumstance and maybe be mindful of the fact that this will not last and that you won’t have to keep lying.The Mexican government has been sending its critics among journalists and activists text messages loaded with advanced spyware in an attempt to tap into their data, according to a new report.
An investigation by the Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto in Canada and Article 19, an NGO dedicated to the freedom of expression, concluded that a series of links sent to critics of the government beginning in 2015 contained a piece of malicious software known as Pegasus.
Between January 2015 and July 2016, dozens of ominous text messages were sent to journalists and activists, claiming an irregularity with their visa status: "USEMBASSY.GOV/ WE DETECT A PROBLEM WITH YOUR VISA PLEASE GO TO THE EMBASSY TO SEE DETAILS." The text ended with the link "hxxp: // smsmessage [.] Mx" where they could go, the message said, to learn more about their predicament.
If they opened the link, the malware would then download onto the user's phone, allowing it to extract the information contained within — files, contacts, messages, and emails — and forward it to a hidden server. The malware also took control of the phone's microphone and the camera — all without the user knowing.
In their new report — "Government Spy: Systematic monitoring of journalists and human rights defenders in Mexico" — the Citizen Lab and Article 19 assert that all evidence points towards the Mexican government itself being behind the espionage.
The Pegasus software, the report says, was developed by an Israeli firm known as the NSO Group, which has been compared to a "cyber arms dealer." A spokesperson for the group previously told the New York Times that it only offered its services to legitimate governments. The malware's purchase "has been documented by at least three units in Mexico: the National Defense Secretariat (SEDENA), the Attorney General's Office (PGR) and the National Security and Investigation Center (CISEN)," the report reads.
Far from being random, the researchers say, the messages were highly targeted, sent as the recipients were nearing publication of news stories or releasing information in investigations that would be damaging to the government and particularly Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Among those swept up in the hacking: activists with the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Center for Human Rights (Centro Prodh); members of the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO); journalists working for the Mexican nonprofit Against Corruption and Impunity; and other journalists working at Aristegui Noticias, the news site run by Carmen Aristegui; and Carlos Loret de Mola, an anchor for TV network Televisa.
This story was originally posted in Spanish.Why All Good Web Hosting Firms Recommend RAID 10 to Their Clients
Category : Security
Posted on : Jun 04, 2015
By : AltusHost
Every single person on this planet who owns a website, or just a computer, fears one thing – losing important data.
It doesn’t matter who you are, or what you do, in this modern day and age, we all heavily rely on our files and documents.
That’s a fact. They’re our livelihood. Without them, we’re as good as being stranded naked on a deserted island.
Every knowledge base business uses documents as a core part of their work. These documents need to be organized, protected and shared with colleagues whose job is to collaborate and use this data to produce some sort of product or service that will benefit a certain number of people.
Just think about it. We spend loads and loads of time adding essential files, creating new content, doing and gathering research that’s crucial for the success of our business, downloading and uploading important videos, and one day, just out of the blue – it all suddenly disappears.
Our hard disk dies, and it’s all gone. Forever.
The horror.
It doesn’t matter if this particular HDD is on your laptop or your server – at some point, it will go under.
Like I already wrote on this blog, hardware is still not immortal. Sooner or later, your hard drive will die on you. It’s inevitable.
How Can I Protect My Files? Can I Recover My Data From a Dead Hard Drive?
You can try to retrieve information from your dead hard drive, but you can never be sure just how successful you’ll be in that mission.
Data recovery is very expensive. I have been through this once. One of my hard drives stopped getting detected. I tried many things, but I just could not get it up and running again.
Finally, I decided to seek help of data recovery professionals. Firstly, it was very difficult to find such people. When I found a few, they asked for insane amounts of money for their service. Even after searching the internet I could not find anything cheaper. In the end, I simply gave up.
If you’re interested in going down this road, be ready to spend some serious cash on this sort of action. And even then there is no guarantee that you will get your complete data back.
Before you go on how I should have tried DriveSavers or Kroll OnTrack as well, I have to stop right there and say: “I did. It didn’t work.”
So, Where Should I Store My Files? How Can I Reduce This Risk Of Losing My Entire Database?
Use RAID 10 Disk Setup.
For those who are not familiar with the term, RAID, a.k.a. Redundant Array of Independent Disks, offers us the opportunity combine several independent and relatively small disks into a single large storage unit.
There are several reasons why you should go for something like this.
The original one is, like I wrote above, to have a larger “single” storage space. Others include having redundancy and error avoidance, or speed increases (at least for reading), or making concurrent access more efficient, etc.
How Does It Work?
Data is distributed across the drives in one of several ways, referred to as RAID levels, depending on the specific level of redundancy and performance required.
The different schemes or architectures are named by the word RAID followed by a number (e.g. RAID 0, RAID 1).
Each scheme provides a different balance between the key goals: reliability, availability, performance, and capacity. RAID levels greater than RAID 0 provide protection against unrecoverable (sector) read errors, as well as whole disk failure.
So, Basically, If I Use RAID-10, I Can Never Loose My Files?
Basically, yes.
If one of your HDD starts to die on you, you’re still left with three solid backup disks.
Confused? Don’t be. Let me break it down for you.
Like I wrote above, RAID setup is a way of combining multiple hard disks into a one big logical unit.
It comes in several flavors. RAID 0,1,10,2,3,4,5 etc. Every flavor and every combination is different, so you need to fully educate yourself on which RAID levels and arrays matches your demands.
For an example, RAID 10, oftenly referred to as “RAID 1+0”, is a combination of RAID 1 and 0. It combines the mirroring of RAID 1 with the striping of RAID 0.
RAID 10 works by striping and mirroring your data across at least two disks. Mirroring, or RAID 1, means that it writes your data to two or more disks at the same time, so that, even if one disk fails completely, you’re left with the mirror that has your information safely preserved.
This is the RAID combination ideal for highly utilized database servers or any server that’s performing many write operations.
For a RAID 0+1 or RAID 1+0 (also called RAID 01 and RAID 10) array to work, you need at least four hard disks. This array has two failure tolerant disks, which means that at any given moment, you can spare at least two of them.
Of course, you never want to end in a situation where you’re short on backup disks, so all you gotta do is hot-swap the dead disks and RAID 10 will instantly re-build the the new ones, and you’re good to go.
You can do all this without even being forced to shut down your server, which means that you won’t experience any downtime and your users won’t even know that you had problems. Amazing, right?
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Before you go, please remember to share it with you friends and colleagues!
Thank you so much. See you soon!
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Goran @ AltusHost B.V.Claiming that H-1B visas lead to outsourcing of US jobs, an American professional body of engineers has opposed the move of expanding the most popular working visa among IT professionals.
"The H-1B programme shouldn't be used to facilitate the transfer of high-paying jobs to other countries. If Congress wants a full US economic recovery, it shouldn't even think about expanding it," IEEE-USA President Marc Apter said.
Beginning Monday, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services will start accepting applications for the H-1B visas for the fiscal year 2014 starting October.
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)-USA is the largest body of electrical and electronics engineers in the US.
In a statement, the body alleged that most of these visas are being grabbed by those companies which outsource American jobs overseas."Starting next week, proponents of an H-1B visa increase will bemoan the fact that the H-1B cap is already used up. But it was outsourcing companies businesses who use the visas to take American jobs who used nearly two-thirds of them" Apter said.
Referring to data compiled by the US Department of Labour Office of Foreign Labor Certification, the body said the top 10 companies applying for H-1B visas in the first three months of fiscal 2013 are all offshore outsourcing companies.
These 10 organisations collectively had 1,12,739 positions representing 73.4 per cent more than the base annual H-1Bcap of 65,000 certified to be filled by an H-1B worker. Many of these work visas are issued to scientists and engineers, it said.
Moreover, 64.1 per cent of the 1,75,806 certified H-1B applications from just 1 October to 31 December 2012 went to these 10 companies, and there are many more than 10 out sourcers, IEEE-USA said.
The engineers' body has sought a legislation providing employment-based green cards for skilled immigrants earning advanced STEM degrees from US colleges and universities, and their dependents.
Green cards, unlike H-1B visas, allow immigrants to start their own companies, many of which will create jobs in the United States, it said.
ALSO READ Govt must slash spending by Rs 1 trillion to meet fiscal target: Barclays
Please read our terms of use before posting commentsThe “Cost Disease” is Really Just a Symptom
At Slate Star Codex (“Considerations on Cost Disease,” Feb. 9), Scott Alexander has a long, long, LONG article speculating on possible causes for the “cost disease — that is, the escalating unit costs and prices in certain economic sectors relative to their outputs. Or as he describes it:
“LOOK, REALLY OUR MAIN PROBLEM IS THAT ALL THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS COST TEN TIMES AS MUCH AS THEY USED TO FOR NO REASON, PLUS THEY SEEM TO BE GOING DOWN IN QUALITY, AND NOBODY KNOWS WHY, AND WE’RE MOSTLY JUST DESPERATELY FLAILING AROUND LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS HERE.”
Public school expenditures per student have more than doubled in real terms since 1970, while test scores have remained flat. Average university tuition has increased tenfold since 1980; you can judge for yourself whether the quality of a university education has improved in that time. Healthcare costs have quintupled since the 1970s; average health insurance premiums have risen from ten days’ pay to sixty days’ pay. And while life expectancy has risen since then, expectancies are similar or higher in many other developed countries with healthcare costs as low as 25% of ours. The final two items are costs per mile of infrastructure like subways and housing costs, both of which have skyrocketed.
The cause isn’t labor costs, Alexander notes, because in all these industries average pay has either remained flat, fallen or just roughly kept up with the general growth in wages (which hasn’t been much in recent decades). He goes on to consider a series of other possible causes, some of them more satisfactory explanations than others.
The most plausible — indeed probable — is that “markets [might] just not work” (i.e. the competitive mechanism assumed by neoclassical economics isn’t actually operating for some reason). He dismisses the possibility that it could be “pure price-gouging” because profits haven’t increased enough to account for the increased costs. But that assumes the corporation is run primarily to make profits for shareholders, as opposed to providing senior management with bloated salaries.
In any case the “Cost Disease” was observed by radical critics of capitalism as far back as Paul Goodman and Ivan Illich. Illich noted that because of radical monopolies that suppressed competition from cheaper vernacular alternatives, and rendered comfortable poverty impossible, it typically cost 300% or 400% more than necessary to make or do anything. Goodman described the way that the organizational culture of bureaucratic hierarchies systematically inflated operating costs:
To sum up: what swell the costs in enterprises carried on in the interlocking centralized systems of society, whether commercial, official, or non-profit institutional, are all the factors of organization, procedure, and motivation that are not directly determined to the function and the desire to perform it. Their patents and rents, fixed prices, union scales, featherbedding, fringe benefits, status salaries, expense accounts, proliferating administration, paper work, permanent overhead, public relations and promotions, waste of time and skill by departmentalizing task-roles, bureaucratic thinking that is penny-wise pound-foolish, inflexible procedure and tight scheduling that exaggerate congingencies and overtime.
But the “Cost Disease” really isn’t a disease at all. It’s a symptom of more fundamental phenomena, and results from structural forces at the heart of capitalism.
First, the large oligopoly corporation operates from a position of false abundance. Because each industry is dominated by a handful of corporations that follow the price leader system, price competition is replaced by administered pricing in which costs can simply be passed on to the consumer. This ability to set prices on a cost-plus markup basis results in the same cost-maximization incentives that, as Seymour Melman noted in The Permanent War Economy, prevail in the Military-Industrial Complex and in regulated utilities.
Because of oligopoly prices and restricted competition, the large corporation is typically able to finance its new investments entirely through retained earnings — and not only that, but to have retained earnings far in excess of rational projects to spend it on. So big business treats expenditures on capital improvements as “free money” and undertakes projects that a genuinely competitive enterprise would regard as a waste of money.
Because of this artificial abundance of capital for reinvestment, and the ability to pass on costs of wasteful investment to consumers as a markup, big business also has an incentive to pursue a strategy of capital substitution, in order to improve labor discipline and reduce the bargaining power of labor, to an extent that would otherwise be unprofitable.
The resulting wasteful internal capital expenditures of the large corporation resemble Friedrich Hayek’s prediction of the kinds of capital investment that would prevail in a planned economy without rational price signals.
[We should expect] the excessive development of some lines of production at the expense of others and the use of methods which are inappropriate under the circumstances. We should expect to find overdevelopment of some industries at a cost which was not justified by the importance of their increased output and see unchecked the ambition of the engineer to apply the latest development elsewhere, without considering whether they were economically suited in the situation. In many cases the use of the latest methods of production, which could not have been applied without central planning, would then be a symptom of a misuse of resources rather than a proof of success.
From this false abundance — the result of administered pricing and enormous retained earnings — everything else follows. Monopoly capitalism’s chronic tendency towards surplus investment capital creates structural imperatives for waste. This is encouraged, among other things, by accounting mechanisms that treat the consumption of resource inputs as such as the creation of value.
This is the case with the standard corporate accounting rules, which treat labor — and labor alone — as the sole source of direct costs. The result is efficiency experts obsessively looking for ways to shave off every possible minute of labor time — often at the cost of severe degradation of efficiency from eviscerating the human capital, the human relationships and distributed knowledge, that are the sources of so much of an organization’s productivity. Meanwhile, even as management strains at a gnat in order to reduce labor costs, it swallows a camel in its prodigiously wasteful spending on administrative salaries and capital projects.
Under these same accounting rules, management salaries and capital expenditures are treated as indirect costs, which become part of general overhead. And this overhead is disposed of by a bit of accounting legerdemain known as “overhead absorption,” in which it is figured into the internal transfer price of goods which are “sold” to inventory. And since inventory is an asset, the higher the level of overhead and the resulting markup of these artificial transfer prices, the higher the asset value of the goods sitting in the warehouse.
So we see corporations constantly downsizing workers and speeding up production in order to “save money,” yet at the same time paying monstrous management salaries and pouring money down irrational capital spending ratholes that would rival the irrationalities of the old Soviet planned economy.
The same accounting principles operate in calculating Gross Domestic Product: Any expenditure entailed in producing a good or service adds to the total GDP, and is therefore counted as producing value. So the more inefficient production is, the more resources wasted in producing goods and services, and the higher the rate at which natural resources are briefly channelled through our living rooms on their way to the landfill because of planned obsolescence, the higher the measure of our national “prosperity.”
Alexander argues that the Cost Disease casts new light on the conventional framing of a lot of political issues. Most of the controversy over things like universal healthcare, free college, or right-wing approaches to education reform that treat “the teachers’ unions” as the primary enemy, actually results from a zero-sum fight over how to “distribute our losses.”
For example: some people promote free universal college education, remembering a time when it was easy for middle class people to afford college if they wanted it. Other people oppose the policy, remembering a time when people didn’t depend on government handouts. Both are true! My uncle paid for his tuition at a really good college just by working a pretty easy summer job – not so hard when college cost a tenth of what it did now. The modern conflict between opponents and proponents of free college education is over how to distribute our losses. In the old days, we could combine low taxes with widely available education. Now we can’t, and we have to argue about which value to sacrifice. Or: some people get upset about teachers’ unions, saying they must be sucking the “dynamism” out of education because of increasing costs. Others people fiercely defend them, saying teachers are underpaid and overworked. Once again, in the context of cost disease, both are obviously true. The taxpayers are just trying to protect their right to get education as cheaply as they used to. The teachers are trying to protect their right to make as much money as they used to. The conflict between the taxpayers and the teachers’ unions is about how to distribute losses; Somebody is going to have to be worse off than they were a generation ago, so who should it be?
The typical progressive approach is to guarantee a product like education as a healthcare as a human right, which in practical terms means leaving the bureaucratic, high-overhead institutional culture intact but spending enough taxpayer money to buy the product for everyone at the godawful monopoly price.
In the context of cost disease, these look like industries constantly doubling, tripling, or dectupling their price, and the government saying “Okay, fine,” and increasing taxes however much it costs to pay for whatever they’re demanding now. If we give everyone free college education, that solves a big social problem. It also locks in a price which is ten times too high for no reason.
Not only is this fiscally unsustainable, but it stigmatizes people as “freeloaders” who wouldn’t have needed assistance in the first place absent unbelievable waste and price gouging by unaccountable bureaucracies.
Technologies of abundance are, by their nature, radically deflationary. Their ultimate tendency is to reduce the marginal cost of goods and services, and the labor required to produce them, closer and closer to zero. Only in a profoundly dysfunctional economic system could the technologies of abundance and resulting reduced need for labor be regarded as catastrophic for workers. Nevertheless, catastrophic they are — the reason being that the cost savings from increased productivity, rather than going to benefit labor in the form of receiving the same standard of living for fewer hours of work, are instead extracted by the propertied classes in the form of artificial scarcity rents.
And the response of “progressives” is essentially Hamiltonian: first, to prop up the price of goods and services through unnecessary management and overhead, and embedded rents on copyrights and patents, in order to generate a sufficient revenue stream to pay workers; and second, to make production artificially labor-intensive in order to provide sufficient “jobs” to earn the wages to buy these goods and services at their gross inefficiency-based prices. The result is something like one of those machines designed by Rube Goldberg.
What we should be doing instead is:
1) Destroying all unnecessary waste of inputs, all unnecessary production, all planned obsolescence, and unnecessary labor, in order to reduce necessary labor time and production costs to the absolute minimum; while at the same time
2) Abolishing the privileges and monopolies by which the propertied classes enclose the productivity gains of technological improvement for themselves, as a source of rents, and
3) Taking advantage of small-scale, ephemeral means of production to remove the largest share of production possible from the sphere of paid employment to direct production for use in the social sphere; so that
4) All the cost savings of increased efficiency go to the public in the form of reduced work hours and reduced prices, while the remaining hours of paid labor are evenly distributed and pay enough to buy back the full value of everything produced.Free game alert! If you passed up on Oculus Studios and Force Field’s Landfall earlier this year then now’s the time to check it out; it’s going to be completely free to play this weekend.
From 10am PT on July 28th through to 10am July 30th you can download and play the entire game without paying anything. You’ll also be able to challenge the developers during a livestream event on Friday 7pm – 10pm CET / 2pm – 5pm ET / 11am – 2pm PT.
Not only that but Force Field is adding three new Striders — the name for the game’s mech units — across the course of the weekend. Landfall was the last game released by Oculus to use a gamepad on Rift. It combines top-down, twin-stick shooting with tactical warfare.
We were quite fond of Landfall when it launched. Our Games Editor David Jagneaux gave it 8/10. “With Landfall, Force Field has delivered one of the best examples of gamepad-focused VR we’ve seen in some time,” he said. “The action is intense, the gameplay is crisp and precise, and the tactical strategy required to emerge victorious feels both creative and fresh. Updates will be needed to keep people coming back for more, but this is an excellent twin-stick shooter that delivers on all fronts.”
That’s a good as reason as any to check it out.
Tagged with: LandfallShare. The hits just keep on coming. The hits just keep on coming.
Quick on the heels of some excellent news for PlayStation Plus subscribers – that a bunch of great games are heavily discounted alongside a free copy of BioShock Infinite – comes even more good news.
Red Barrels’ horror game, Outlast, will be free for PlayStation Plus users when it debuts on PlayStation 4 in February.
Exit Theatre Mode
News comes by way of Outlast’s Facebook page, which succinctly confirms the news: “Outlast will be free in February for all PlayStation Plus users (PS4 only),” the post reads.
When Outlast was released on PC back in September of 2013, we really liked it. We’ll update our review for any PlayStation 4-centric news, notes, and concerns when it comes out in February.
Colin Moriarty is IGN’s Senior Editor. You can follow him on Twitter.28th July 2010, 06:45 pm
A “one-hole context” is a data structure with one piece missing. Conor McBride pointed out that the derivative of a regular type is its type of one-hole contexts. When a data structure is assembled out of common functor combinators, a corresponding type of one-hole contexts can be derived mechanically by rules that mirror the standard derivative rules learned in beginning differential calculus.
I’ve been playing with functor combinators lately. I was delighted to find that the data-structure derivatives can be expressed directly using the standard functor combinators and type families.
The code in this blog post is taken from the Haskell library functor-combo.
See also the Haskell Wikibooks page on zippers, especially the section called “Differentiation of data types”.
I mean this post not as new research, but rather as a tidy, concrete presentation of some of Conor’s delightful insight.
Functor combinators
Let’s use the same set of functor combinators as in Elegant memoization with higher-order types and Memoizing higher-order functions:
data Void a -- no constructors type Unit a = Const () a data Const x a = Const x newtype Id a = Id a data (f :+: g) a = InL (f a) | InR (g a) data (f :*: g) a = f a :*: g a newtype (g :. f) a = O (g (f a))
Derivatives
The derivative of a functor is another functor. Since the shape of the derivative is non-uniform (depends on the shape of the functor being differentiated) define a higher-order type family:
type family Der (f :: (* → *)) :: (* → *)
The usual derivative rules can then be translated without applying much imagination. That is, if we start with derivative rules in their functional form (e.g., as in the paper Beautiful differentiation, Section 2 and Figure 1).
For instance, the derivative of the constant function is the constant 0 function, and the derivative of the identity function is the constant 1 function. If der is the derivative functional mapping functions (of real numbers) to functions,
der (const x) ≡ 0 der id ≡ 1
On the right-hand sides, I am exploiting the function instances of Num from the library applicative-numbers. To be more explicit, I could have written “ const 0 ” and “ const 1 “.
Correspondingly,
type instance Der (Const x) = Void -- 0 type instance Der Id = Unit -- 1
Note that the types Void a and Unit a have 0 and 1 element, respectively, if we ignore ⊥. Moreover, Void is a sort of additive identity, and Unit is a sort of multiplicative identity, again ignoring ⊥. For these reasons, Void and Unit might be more aptly named “ Zero ” and “ One “.
The first rule says that the a value of type Const x a has no one-hole context (for type a ), which is true, since there is an x but no a. The second rule says that there is exactly one possible context for Id a, since the one and only a value must be removed, and no information remains.
A (one-hole) context for a sum is a context for the left or the right possibility of the sum:
type instance Der (f :+: g) = Der f :+: Der g
Correspondingly, the derivative of a sum of functions is the sum of the functions’ derivatives::
der (f + g) ≡ der f + der g
Again I’m using the function Num instance from applicative-numbers.
For a pair, the one hole of a context can be made somewhere in the first component or somewhere in the second component. So the pair context consists of a holey first component and a full second component or a full first component and a holey second component.
type instance Der (f :*: g) = Der f :*: g :+: f :*: Der g
Similarly, for functions:
der (f * g) ≡ der f * g + f * der g
Finally, consider functor composition. If g and f are container types, then (g :. f) a is the type of g containers of f containers of a elements. The a -shaped hole must come from one of the contained f a structures.
type instance Der (g :. f) = (Der g :. f) :*: Der f
Here’s one way to think of this derivative functor: to make an a -shaped hole in a g (f a), first remove an f a structure, leaving an (f a) -shaped hole, and then put back all but an a value extracted from the removed f a struture. So the overall (one-hole) context can be assembled from two parts: a g context of f a structures, and an f context of a values.
The corresponding rule for function derivatives:
der (g ∘ f) ≡ (der g ∘ f) * der f
which again uses Num on functions. Written out more explicitly:
der (g ∘ f) a ≡ der g (f a) * der f a
which may look more like the form you’re used to.
Summary of derivatives
To emphasize the correspondence between forms of differentiation, here are rules for function and functor derivatives:
der (const x) ≡ 0 Der (Const x) ≡ Void der id ≡ 1 Der Id ≡ Unit der (f + g) ≡ der f + der g Der (f :+: g) ≡ Der f :+: Der g der (f * g) ≡ der f * g + f * der g Der (f :*: g) ≡ Der f :*: g :+: f :*: Der g der (g ∘ f) ≡ (der g ∘ f) * der f Der (g :. f) ≡ (Der g :. f) :*: Der f
Filling holes
Each derivative functor is a one-hole container. One useful operation on derivatives is filling that hole.
fillC :: Functor f ⇒ Der f a → a → f a
The specifics of how to fill in a hole will depend on the choice of functor f, so let’s make the fillC operation a method of a new type class. This new class is also a handy place to stash the associated type of derivatives, as an alternative to the top-level declarations above.
class Functor f ⇒ Holey f where type Der f :: * → * fillC :: Der f a → a → f a
I’ll add one more method to this class in an upcoming post.
For Const x, there are no cases to handle, since there are no holes.
instance Holey (Const x) where type Der (Const x) = Void fillC = error "fillC for Const x: no Der values"
I added a definition just to keep the compiler from complaining. This particular fillC can only be applied to a value of type Void a, and there are no such values other than ⊥.
Is there a more elegant way to define functions over data types with no constructors? One idea is to provide a single, polymorphic function over void types:
voidF :: Void a → b voidF = error "voidF: no value of type Void"
And use whenever as needed, e.g.,
fillC = voidF
Next is our identity functor:
instance Holey Id where type Der Id = Unit fillC (Const ()) a = Id a
More succinctly,
fillC (Const ()) = Id
For sums,
instance (Holey f, Holey g) ⇒ Holey (f :+: g) where type Der (f :+: g) = Der f :+: Der g fillC (InL df) a = InL (fillC df a) fillC (InR df) a = InR (fillC df a)
or
fillC (InL df) = InL ∘ fillC df fillC (InR df) = InR ∘ fillC df
Products also have two cases, since the derivative of a product is a sum:
instance (Holey f, Holey g) ⇒ Holey (f :*: g) where type Der (f :*: g) = Der f :*: g :+: f :*: Der g fillC (InL (dfa :*: ga)) a = fillC dfa a :*: ga fillC (InR ( fa :*: dga)) a = fa :*: fillC dga a
Less pointfully,
fillC ( |
you. Your opinion is important to us; you can find current discussions at facebook.com/peoplemag.It is going to be a while before we get to see Deadpool 2, which we all hope will feature a marketing campaign as excellent as the one that was done for the first movie. The marketing for Deadpool was so great, in fact, that it has actually been nominated for an industry award. That being the case, Ryan Reynolds has once again suited up as Deadpool in order to praise the marketing for the movie and to campaign a bit for the award, in the most Deadpool of ways.
Deadpool was recently nominated for a Clios Key Art Award, which probably doesn't mean much to anyone outside of the movie industry. For fans of Deadpool, it does mean that we get a little more new action from the Merc With a Mouth and a great breakdown of how 20th Century Fox and the team behind Deadpool were able to so successfully market the movie. Be warned, the video is very NSFW, as it very well should be.
As many frustrated fans of the character will remember, Ryan Reynolds and director Tim Miller had been trying to get Deadpool made for quite some time, but 20th Century Fox had very little faith in the idea. But after some test footage leaked at San Diego Comic-Con, the movie was greenlit and the rest was history. Deadpool wound up being a massive success, but he wasn't exactly a character that had as much recognition in the public eye as Batman. Plus, it was a very different and unique sort of thing. So, the marketing campaign was a crucial thing for the movie and it wound up being very memorable and very successful.
Related: Deadpool Slams Hugh Jackman with Savage #10YearChallenge Tweet
Part of the problem in getting Deadpool made was that the movie needed to be rated R, which concerned the studio. As Ryan Reynolds points out in the video, they decided to announce to fans that Deadpool was going to get its R rating in a creative way; by murdering Extra host Mario Lopez in an online video. The gamble paid off for Fox studios as the movie went on to gross more than $750 million worldwide, which makes it the highest grossing film in the X-Men franchise to date. That was just one of the very many creative and entertaining ways the team used to market the movie.
No official release date for Deadpool 2 has been announced yet, but the movie got a green light very quickly from Fox once they realized they had a massive hit on their hands. Hopefully they can strike gold twice with another round of brilliant marketing, but that is a tall order. Deadpool isn't likely to garner a lot of major awards season nominations as ceremonies like The Golden Globes and Academy Awards approach, but this nomination for the marketing feels well earned. Be sure to check out the new video featuring this popular Marvel character for yourself below.THUNDER BAY -- Fourteen-year-old girls are selling themselves on the street for $10. Alone, abused and exploited these girls have no one other than the men exploiting them to turn to.
THUNDER BAY -- Fourteen-year-old girls are selling themselves on the street for $10.
Alone, abused and exploited these girls have no one other than the men exploiting them to turn to.
Sarah Watt, a Joseph Esquega Health Centre addictions medicine coordinator, said getting them and other high-risk populations, from exploited girls to people with chronic mental health issues, to know that health care is out there for them and often necessary can be difficult.
"I think a lot of them have some fear or worry of stigma coming into the clinic," she said.
Hooked on drugs and being bought and sold, Watts said these girls don't know any better and don't know that there are people who care about them.
"I think that's where it needs to start. Really there are people outside of these men who are exploiting them. There are people who care for their well-being," she said.
It's why on Wednesday the clinic announced a pilot program partnership with the Guardian Angels. Clinic medical director Cheryl Everall said the group meets people every day who either don't know they need medical attention or don't know there are services out there for them.
"This population is the least likely to seek medical services early on," she said.
"For example if someone has an early abscess or infection due to IV drug use they often do present to the Guardian Angels so we would provide them with access to antibiotics, appropriate medical care versus waiting until later on when they present to hospital with end stage complications."
While the details are still being worked out, Everall said just getting access to these people through the Guardian Angels and into the clinic for preventative treatment could go a long way.
"Our goal is to provide an easy access point of care, non -judgmental, stigma-free availability to these patients," she said.
It's difficult to quantify the amount of people on the street who have addictions, mental health and other complications. Everall pointed out the fact that the city has more methadone clinics than Ottawa as a sign that it's a major problem. She's hoping this pilot program can also help get a better sense of how big the city's problems are.
"We know we have a lot of issues with addiction, chronic mental health, going on in this community and many vulnerable patients who are not accessing services," she said.
Guardian Angels' Ian Hodgkinson said the organization has been busy over the past five months working on partnerships in the community. Health care is just one thing that people in the community need.
"It's volunteering, it's good people trying to do the right thing," he said of the group. "It's just one of many other organizations in Thunder Bay doing amazing things."
Just being out in the neighbourhood, Hodgkinson said the Guardian Angels meet people every day who need help. He wants the group to help get them access to services they might not otherwise know about.
"We can be those people to bridge that gap," he said.
The group also announced a partnership with Home Depot Wednesday. The store will offer free after-hours classes to Guardian Angels' members for basic trades skills.Just days after a lightsaber-wielding flash mob invaded Bristol, a slew of Starfleet Officers descended upon London on to celebrate the release of Star Trek Online.
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Organizers claimed it was the largest gathering of begarbed Trekkies ever, but how many showed?
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This Valentine's Day, 99 Trek fans showed up to the London Star Trek MMO event clad in cosplay - that number seems a tad but suspect, but regardless, it's nice to see unabashed Trek fans taking it to the streets. Plus, the world can never have too many Beverly Crushers. Well, unless they're evil, alternate dimension Beverly Crushers. Who'd probably have goatees, I guess.
Also keep your eyes peeled for Jean-Luc Picard if he was seemingly played by Grant Morrison. Set all phasers to Barbelith!
Top image from EvilBatDuck on Flickr. [via London Times]INFOGRAPHIC: A Map of the Literary Genres
Benjamin Samuel Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 25, 2015
According to the fine folks at Pop Chart Labs, there’s a theory that genres exist for the benefit of bookstores and at the expense of readers. Similar to a Las Vegas casino, booksellers manipulate the environment to lure you toward the money makers — I imagine librarians will be the first to object to this theory. So Pop Chart decided to look beyond these commonly accepted distinctions to see how the genres relate and where books belong based on content rather than commerce. “We went in with the idea that we were looking not at commercial distinctions, but instead peering deep into the text of the book, at almost the cellular level,” said Rachel Mansfield of Pop Chart.
The approach created some difficult decisions and surprising results: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe found its home under the “Christian” genre, rather than the expected fantasy. Explore the chart and discover what kind of books you really like. The poster is available for $29.Robert Kaplan has received some thoroughly-deserved derision recently, but this argument is at least thought-provoking:
… globalization and the communications revolution have reinforced, rather than negated, geopolitics. The world map is now smaller and more claustrophobic, so that territory is more ferociously contested, and every regional conflict interacts with every other as never before. A war in Syria is inextricable from a terrorist outrage in Europe, even as Russia’s intervention in Syria affects Europe’s and America’s policy toward Ukraine. This happens at a moment when, as I’ve said, multinational empires are gone, as are most totalitarian regimes in contrived states where official borders do not conform with ethnic and sectarian ones. The upshot is a maelstrom of national and subnational groups in violent competition. And so, geopolitics — the battle for space and power — now occurs within states as well as between them. Cultural and religious differences are particularly exacerbated: as group differences melt down in the crucible of globalization, they have to be reforged in a blunter and more ideological form. It isn’t the clash of civilizations so much as the clash of artificially reconstructed civilizations that is taking place. Witness the Islamic State, which does not represent Islam per se, but Islam combusting with the tyrannical conformity and mass hysteria of the Internet and social media. The postmodern reinvention of identities only hardens geopolitical divides.
His core thesis seems quite obviously correct: “We are entering an age of what I call comparative anarchy, that is, a much higher level of anarchy compared to that of the Cold War and post–Cold War periods.”Mike Tyson once bit off a man's ear. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson nearly pulled a teammate's tongue out while playing football.
In Alan Shipnuck's cover story for the latest issue of Sports Illustrated, the Rock recounted one of his craziest moments playing football.
Johnson's frustration at not being an impact player boiled over one day after practice, when he was heckled by his friend and fellow linemate Kevin Patrick. "I was always running hot because I wasn't getting the playing time that I thought I deserved," says Johnson. "The truth of the matter is Warren Sapp was just a better player, but when you're young, you can't see that. Me and Kevin were in a coach's office, and he was talking s---, as always, but this time I just lost it. It was like a movie fight—the desk got turned over, stuff was flying all over the place. We spilled out onto the weight room floor, still going at it. He wouldn't stop talking, so I decided to pull his tongue out. I stuffed my big ol' hand into his mouth, and I had a couple of fingers around his tongue, but it was so damn slippery! I was quite serious about pulling it out, but I couldn't quite get a hold of it. Eventually I gave up, the fight ended, and two minutes later we were hugging each other. It was so dumb.
• Brian Kendrick hungry to succeed on WWE’s new cruiserweight show
You can read the story in its entirety here.
The Rock and his teammate hugged it out after the incident.
Well at the time trying to rip my teammates tongue out during a fight was a good idea. 😈 We hugged it out after. https://t.co/3XdikN1dPS https://t.co/SNz8zBwEle — Dwayne Johnson (@TheRock) November 30, 2016
I don't think I'll be able to watch Tooth Fairy the same way ever again.The apologists for homeopathy are upset again: this time with Professor Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh’s new book. Why? Because once more homeopathy is exposed for what it is: a placebo.
Dr Damien Downing, the Medical Director for the Alliance for Natural Health (ANH), seems particularly put out. So much so that he has released a rather silly critique. (This link seems to be down. Try here)
After some empty carping he suggests that Ernst is not a very good scientist and then goes on to wrap himself in the flag of good science, “The scientific method ‘consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses’ (Wikipedia) – not of unsubstantiated dogmatic statements. Science has no room for dogma.”
This is one point I can agree with; compared to the statements of some other protagonists it’s pretty reasonable: science should have no room for dogma. However, Downing is not averse to peddling some homeopathic propaganda.
This is clearly seen in the way he handles evidence. He refers to, what I would expect, is his best scientific evidence base for homeopathy: the homeopathy evidence section of “The National Library for Health“. He points out that it currently, in his view, “contains 32 systematic reviews and meta‐analyses of [homeopathy’s] use in a wide range of disorders“. He opines, “Of the 32, 7 report a statistically significant clinical effect from homeopathy, 6 show a non‐significant trend in its favour, and 3 show no effect; 16 concluded that there was “insufficient data” to draw a conclusion either way.”
Now I’ve very closely examined this database in the past and could not disagree more strongly with this ‘analysis’. It completely misses the main point: if you are concerned with either treating patients, or recovering from illness, what you really need to know is how many of these reports show that homeopathy works as well as the recommended conventional treatment: the answer is none.
[three more items of ‘evidence’ have been added since I looked at the database, none of these have, as yet, been through the complete review process so it would be premature to cite these – hence my review is still relevant.]
Next, the idea of a “statistically significant clinical effect” needs some thought. Note that it does not claim that there is a clinically significant effect. That is, an effect that would be worth having. This is good, because none of the reports show any.
A statistically significant effect just means that the statistical tests used on the data indicate that if the study was repeated it is likely that the difference in outcomes between groups given homeopathic sugar pills and ordinary sugar pills would be seen again. In other words, the difference between these two groups is not likely to be just the result of chance. However, not likely here usually means nineteen times out of twenty. Not too reassuring when you see the number of outcomes measured in some of these studies, or the number of researchers in the world looking at this issue.
Neither do tests of statistical significance account for a range of other impediments including experimenter bias, publication bias, lack of blinding, high drop-out rates from control groups etc.
One of the silliest things in Downing’s statement is the citing of studies that he contends show “a non‐significant trend” in favour of homeopathy. If the trend is not statistically significant, then it’s very likely to be nothing more than random noise in the experiment. This is non-evidence, not evidence.
So we have no evidence to support the use of homeopathy; the authors of these ‘positive’ studies actually ask for more research. All we have is a small number that claim to reach statistical significance for the particular ‘homeopathic’ intervention showing an effect in excess of a placebo.
The next sleight of hand is the contention that, “16 concluded that there was “insufficient data” to draw a conclusion either way.” The “insufficient data” part seems to be presented as a quotation. This phrase does not appear in sixteen of the reports.
Also, the observation that researchers have looked for an effect and not found one tells its own story. Whilst, in an absolute sense absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; this is too simplistic. We need to remember to account for prior probability. If something genuinely doesn’t exist then, by definition, we are never going to find evidence of its existence: there is an absence of evidence of unicorns because they are a myth. Similarly, absence of evidence for the deeply physically implausible practise of homeopathy is telling us something.
However, if we are looking for something that is likely to be real, the quality of the search for evidence is also important: absence of evidence in high-quality research is clearly informative in a way that a similar result in low-quality research is not.
Seen in this light one of the observations contained in this database, that Downing has mysteriously overlooked, is vital:
“… Studies of high methodological quality were more likely to be negative than the lower quality studies …” [Cucherat et al]
In other words, the better the quality of the search for a homeopathic effect the less likely one is to be found!
This moves us onto the oddly vexatious topic of the famous review by Shang et al. For Downing, “…the authors identified 110 relevant studies and then excluded all but 8 of them from the final analysis – and declined to name them! This would seem to be blatant research misconduct.”
Reality is somewhat different. The research progressively excluded studies on the basis of transparent quality criteria. They were particularly interested in bias and found that is correlated strongly with sample size. That only eight of over one hundred trials of homeopathy made the cut tells us something important about the quality of research conducted into homeopathy. That the eight best studies, taken together, showed that homeopathy is no more than a placebo is an entirely proper conclusion – consistent with the findings of Cucherat et al. Any plea to include more of the original 110 is a plea for the inclusion of bias: not good science. [this subject is excellently explored on Paul Wilson’s blog]
Again, the better the quality of the search the more negative the findings about homeopathy. This is, of course, what would be expected if there were no benefits from homeopathic remedies (aside from the placebo effect): seemingly positive results are just noise in the signal and can be removed by proper filtering.
The assertion that the authors refused to name the final eight studies is a persistent piece of homeomythology. I have commented on this before at some length. The truth is that Shang and his co-authors unwisely omitted the names of the eight studies from the original paper; some people pointed this out and they named them in the 17th December 2005 issue of The Lancet. They have also made the details of the included and excluded papers available on a website. This all happened in 2005! It would seem to me that to raise the banner of good science requires that one, at the very least, keeps up to date with developments!
On the subject of Shang et al, Downing confuses proper scientific conduct with mis-conduct. This egregious folly can only be the result of a shocking lack of competence or letting personal dogma cloud his judgement. I prefer to think it is the latter. In any event, given this woeful performance, it would seem rather embarrassing to vilify Ernst as a bad scientist.
Unfortunately Downing is not alone in perpetuating the myth of the secret eight; worse still others completely fail to understand Shang et al.
It’s worth noting that Downing’s much vaunted “National Library for Health” database contains one review that, taken at face value, is very problematic for a homeopathy advocate.
A meta-analysis of homeopathy for postoperative ileus by Barnes et al was not able to reach a definitive judgement. However their data indicated that studies working with potencies below 12C (there could be some active agent left) provided a statistically significant reduction in time to first flatus (vs. placebo) whereas those using potencies above 12C (odds are that just the solvent is left) did not. Now, because homeopathic ‘remedies’ are usually diluted to potencies beyond 12C it both flatly contradicts both usual homeopathic practise and the ‘less is more’ notion of the ‘law’ of infinitesimals.
Finally, the most positive review contained in this database, covering trails of a homeopathic ‘medicine’ for vertigo (that many homeopaths wouldn’t recognise as proper homeopathy anyway!) made this plea:
“… The positive effects of Vertigoheel in vertigo are based on good levels of evidence, but larger trials are required …” [Karkos et al]
If this is the best evidence that apologists for homeopathy have to offer one wonders why they bother. The real answer is that this debate is not about the evidence at all; it is about some believers in an out-moded quasi-religious system of medicine clutching at fig-leaves to cover their embarrassment.
Science certainly has no room for dogma. Propaganda isn’t that helpful either, but that is all Downing and other apologists are peddling.
AdvertisementsEarlier this year, Marvel Comics held a retailer summit where executives David Gabriel and Axel Alonso did their best to blame a sales slump that began in October on pretty much everything in the universe other than Marvel Comics’ own business practices. In the course of two very unfortunate days where Alonso and Gabriel seemingly spoke candidly in the closed retailer meeting only to see their comments go viral after website ICv2 was allowed to document the entire thing, Marvel managed to blame readers not wanting any more diversity, creators going to Image, limited series being a “death knell” for comics, not being able to lower trade prices because it would reduce sales of existing more expensive ones, artists being late on super-mega-crossover events, the election of Donald Trump, event fatigue, artists not “moving the needle” on sales, and rival DC Comics for Marvel’s sales woes. How did things get to this point?
A redditor on /r/comicbooks has taken Comichron’s monthly sales estimates, which use Diamond’s rankings and math to come up with actual unit sales numbers for comic books sold to retailers in the direct market each month, and figured out that nearly thirty Marvel comics seem to be at or near what would be traditionally considered the cancellation mark. With Marvel shipping 93 comics in April, many of which are second issues of the same title shipped bi-weekly to spike sales, that ends up being more than a third of all of Marvel’s monthly offerings (if counting the double-shipped titles as single series). Here’s the list:
CA: Sam Wilson – #21 – 18,650
Gwenpool – #14 – 17,972
Captain Marvel – #4 – 17,893
US Avengers – #5 – 17,880
Ultimates 2 – #6 -17,350
Dr. Strange & Sorcerers Supreme – #7 – 16,887
Man-Thing – #3 – 16,199
Hawkeye – #5 – 16,031
Totally Awesome Hulk – #18 – 16,009
Spider-Man 2099 – #22 – 15,273
Elektra – #3 – 15,113
Silver Surfer – #10 – 15,041
World Of Wakanda – #6 – 14,547
Nova – #5 – 14,525
Silk – #19 – 13,524
Thunderbolts – #12 – 13,780
Kingpin – #3 – 13,765
Rocket Raccoon – #5 – 13,373
Power Man & Iron Fist – #15 – 13,055
Bullseye – #3 – 12,912
Star-Lord – #6 – 12,278
Squirrel Girl – #19 – 11,074
Occupy Avengers – #6 – 10,296
Unstoppable Wasp – #4 – 9,780
Great Lakes Avengers – #7 – 8,370
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur – #18 – 7,966
Patsy Walker AKA Hellcat – #17 – 6,943
Mosaic – #7 – 5,876
Now, eleven of these twenty-eight titles are already known to be canceled, or at least are not offered on Marvel’s July solicits. Those include Mosaic, Patsy Walker AKA Hellcat, Star-Lord, Power Man & Iron Fist, Rocket Raccoon, Kingpin, Thunderbolts, Silk, Nova, Black Panther: World of Wakanda, and Elektra. In addition, Bullseye and Man-Thing are mini-series, and thus set to end anyway, and probably some others were minis solicited as ongoings in an attempt to fool people into thinking they were more “important.”
It looks grim, for sure, but it’s also the natural progression of titles as far as Comichron’s estimates go. In March, there were 24 titles that sold less than 18,000 copies according to Comichron’s estimates, including Uncanny Inhumans, Deadpool the Duck, Doctor Strange Sorcerers Supreme, Ultimates 2, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Black Widow, Captain America Sam Wilson, Occupy Avengers, Hawkeye, US Avengers, Silver Surfer, Totally Awesome Hulk, Black Panther World of Wakanda, Spider-Man 2099, Silk, Nova, Doctor Strange Punisher Magic Bullets, Rocket Raccoon, Power Man and Iron Fist, Star-Lord, Thunderbolts, Spider-Woman, Unstoppable Wasp, Spider-Man Homecoming Prelude, Great Lakes Avengers, Prowler, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, Patsy Walker AKA Hellcat, and Mosaic, with the lowest, Mosaic, selling an estimated 6,812 copies. That’s actually 29 titles, one more than April, though many titles overlap and some here are also minis.
But this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. According to Comichron’s estimates, there were 28 Marvel titles below 18,000, including Venom Space Knight, Agents of SHIELD, Contest of Champions, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Star-Lord, Web Warriors, Guardians of Infinity, Hyperion, Nova, Angela Queen of Hel, Illuminati, Drax, X-Men: Worst X-Man Ever, A Year Of Marvel’s Amazing, Patsy Walker AKA Hellcat, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, Hercules, Weirdworld, Red Wolf, Dark Tower: Drawing Of The Three Bitter Medicine, Haunted Mansion, Spider-Man/Deadpool, Starbrand and Nightmask, Marvel Universe Avengers Assemble Civil War, Marvel Universe Ultimate Spider-Man Contest of Champions, and Marvel Universe Guardians of the Galaxy. Of those, many, like Patsy Walker Hellcat, Nova, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and Star-Lord are amongst the same titles on this year’s list, and they’ve lasted this long at that level. A number of them are also mini-series or titles geared outside the traditional Marvel superhero market, like Haunted Mansion or the Marvel Universe books, which are all ages books based of Marvel’s animated TV shows. A number of them, of course, were in fact canceled over the last year.
All of these numbers must come with an asterisk of course, as Comichron’s estimates are just that, estimates, and according to Bleeding Cool Rumormonger-in-Chief Rich Johnston, often inaccurate. Johnston says numbers are off by about 15% on average, and notes that they don’t include digital or international sales, or the potential for sales in the bookstore market (which is high for many of these titles), and that the numbers aren’t even inaccurate consistently, making it difficult to compare them month to month. The comic book industry doesn’t typically release actual sales numbers, preferring to keep things secretive with Diamond’s index (the numbers Comichron bases their estimates on) ranking titles sold only in the direct market to retailers, and publishers keeping things like digital sales or non-Diamond bookstore market sales as secretive as possible.
Of course, occasionally, a publisher like Marvel will reveal sales for an individual issue, but that usually only happens when the sales are very good, doesn’t include an explanation of what markets are included in those numbers (though we can probably assume all of them, including copies sent to comic creators moms on the comp list), and can be trusted to about the same extent that you can trust Donald Trump if you ask him how he’s doing as president — “Great. Really, really, very very great. Bigliest sales you’ve ever seen, believe me.”
So are Marvel’s April numbers cause for panic, or not? Well, yes and no. Obviously Marvel is worried about its sales in general. Otherwise, Axel Alonso and David Gabriel wouldn’t have said all those embarrassing things back in March. And in many cases, Marvel has already course corrected, with a big X-Men relaunch earlier this year and plans for Marvel Legacy and Make Mine Marvel planned for later this year, after Secret Empire (whose Captain Nazi storyline and vitriolic defense from Marvel staff on social media certainly has nothing to do with low sales, right?), bringing back to prominence many of Marvel’s classic heroes while supposedly continuing to promote all the new ones as well. We’ll see how that goes.
It’s probably not healthy for a third of a publishing line to be constantly on the verge of cancellation, but that’s been the case for a long time, and so far, the industry has managed to push forward by sheer force of will using constant super-mega-crossover events, #1 issue relaunches, price gouging, overshipping comics to retailers, and sales-spiking gimmicks like incentive variant. That these are the same factors that likely kill longterm readership has never seemed to click, but who looks beyond the next six months when running a comics publishing business?
Some might say that Marvel publishes more comics each month than the market can sustain, and others will point to the fact that comic books always suffer from attrition and there’s nothing you can do about that other than relaunch with a new number one every 18 months or so. That’s why some of the oldest comic book series, like Action Comics, Detective Comics, Batman, Superman, Amazing Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Avengers, and their ilk were all canceled and rebooted by 1969. Oh wait, that didn’t happen. Well, it’s the accepted industry paradigm today, for better or for worse.
Back to the topic at hand, it’s not a good thing that almost thirty Marvel comics are in the cancellation danger zone, but it’s also not particularly worse than it was a year ago. In fact, it seems to be the natural progression of Marvel’s strategy, which often seem to be geared more toward flooding competitors out of the market and spiking market share numbers than with actually building long term readership. If you believe Marvel, they’re trying to turn everything around later this year, but that’s also what our Uncle Jim told us about his drinking problem, and we all know what Uncle Jim’s word is worth these days, don’t we? Why won’t you let the people who love you help you, Uncle Jim?! You’re breaking our hearts!
So does the number of Marvel titles selling at or below the traditional cancellation mark mean anything, or not? The answer depends on how you look at it. If the goal of comic book publishing is to build and grow a long term sustainable readership, the mainstream superhero comics industry hasn’t really been doing that successfully for several decades. If the goal is to keep corporate paymasters appeased with increasing profits, Marvel has somehow managed to keep doing that for years by selling more comics art higher prices to the existing readership. If the question is whether Marvel will cancel and relaunch a crapload of titles this year, well, that was always going to happen anyway. Except this time it’s an anti-relaunch relaunch, returning to legacy numbers instead.
But if we’re hoping to use Comichron’s sales estimates to guess which books will be canceled, that’s not the best way to do it. Marvel is as likely to cancel an X-Men book selling 60,000 copies because X-Men should sell more than that than they are to cancel Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, which by the way is still not canceled despite selling below the “cancellation level” for more than a year. Marvel has other factors than estimated direct sales single issue figures to compute. Basically, we just don’t know what factors into the decision for Marvel to cancel a book, and anyone who claims they do without actually working for the beancounters at Marvel, including Marvel editors on Twitter, is just talking out of someplace other than their mouths.
But there are more reliable methods than sales estimates to see which books Marvel have decided to cancel. Amazon trade listings give a pretty good indication. When a listing goes from a “Volume 1” to a standalone, when two extra issues are suddenly added to a collection or the collection is two issues bigger than the previous one for no apparent reason, that’s the best sign a book is being canceled. Another good sign is when Marvel starts messing around with artists two issues before the end of an arc. “Ch-Ch-Changes. Comboman #7 will no longer be drawn by an artist we’ve heard of but by five south American artists we haven’t/currently work for Boundless.” Yeah, that book is so canceled.
One more thing before we go, though. It’s worth noting that, as of this time, DC has not canceled a single Rebirth title. Take from that what you will. Oh, and one more takeaway. Outside the direct market, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur must be a license to print money, and that book will probably live forever.
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About Jude Terror A prophecy says that in the comic book industry's darkest days, a hero will come to lead the people through a plague of overpriced floppies, incentive variant covers, #1 issue reboots, and super-mega-crossover events. Scourge of Rich Johnston, maker of puns, and seeker of the Snyder Cut, Jude Terror, sadly, is not the hero comics needs right now... but he's the one the industry deserves.
(Last Updated )
Related PostsThe Jimi Hendrix estate is set to release a new two hour documentary called Hear My Train A Comin' as well as a live recording from a 1968 concert. The scheduled date of release is November 5th, which will coincide with the airing of the documentary on PBS American Masters. Earlier this year, Experience Hendrix released a fantastic compilation album of previously unreleased material called People, Hell and Angels that is a must listen for Hendrix fans.
Here is a preview of the "Hear My Train A Comin" documentary:
In an interview with the New York Times, director Bob Smeaton shed some light on the new documentary. Smeaton has previously worked on Hendrix documentaries “Hendrix: Band of Gypsys”, “Jimi Hendrix: The Dick Cavett Show”, “Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child” and “Hendrix 70: Live at Woodstock” which has influenced his approach on this newest documentary. Here are some interesting highlights from the New York Times piece:
“The biggest challenge,” Mr. Smeaton said in a telephone interview from London, “was that having done a number of Hendrix projects in the past, I had to find a way of getting everything I wanted into the film without having it run six hours, and without having it turn into the same film I did in the past. You’ve got to hit certain points: when he came to London, when he played Monterey, certain albums, Woodstock, building his recording studio. But you also want to get a different take. And that’s the hardest thing – trying to stay fresh.” “In the past, I’ve interviewed mainly guys,” Mr. Smeaton said. “And with guys, it always comes down to, ‘He was a great guitar player, he looked good on stage, he died too young.’ And that’s all true. But the women offer a different take. They say ‘He was shy,’ or ‘He was gentle.’ The women bring an interesting insight, and maybe for once we know more about him.” Mr. Smeaton added: “The other things that’s important, when you make a film like this, is that you try to get to the real musicality of the guy, rather than just ‘here we go again, another guitar solo.’ There’s a section where Eddie Kramer, his producer, is sitting at the mixing desk, playing each of the four guitar tracks on ‘Little Wing.’ Each part is different, and when you put them together, it’s orchestral. So you hear about Hendrix playing the guitar with his teeth, or behind his head. But he knew what he was doing. And that sometimes gets overshadowed by the crazy hair and the other stuff.”
Does this sound great, or what??
PBS's American Masters website has this description:
The Hendrix estate has cooperated fully with this film, releasing performance footage of Jimi Hendrix that has never been seen before, as well as an extensive archive of photographs, drawings and family letters. A pioneering electric guitarist, Hendrix had only four years of mainstream exposure and recognition, but his influential music and riveting stage presence left an enduring legacy. Presented as part of a year-long celebration concluding what would have been his 70th year (11/27/1942), this is his definitive story, illustrated by interviews with Hendrix and illuminated with commentary by Paul McCartney, Noel Redding, Billy Cox, Eddie Kramer, and others. Poignant, protected footage from his final performance in Germany in September 1970, just 12 days before his drug-related death at age 27, concludes the film.
The legacy of Jimi Hendrix is vast and complicated. Although he only released 4 official albums during his lifetime, Hendrix's catalog has yielded a seemingly never ending supply of material. Hendrix was so prolific in large part because he was a true music lover. He loved performing live and he also loved working in recording studios. In the studio, he was fortunate to have worked exclusively with sound engineer Eddie Kramer who is considered among the very best of all time. After his first album became a smash success, the rest of his career was documented in great detail by the people around him.
Check local listings for showtimes.In the acrid and escalating clash between red and blue America, there is no battleground quite like metropolitan Milwaukee.
Key Throughout this series, click on for more information. A footnote will appear. Click the highlighted text again to close the footnote.
Spectacularly divided, remarkably mobilized, frequently fought over, its politically lopsided communities have been veering apart for more than 40 years.
Democrats and Republicans aren't just strangers to each other in their politics — they increasingly live in separate worlds. In its ultrapartisan geography, this is arguably the most polarized place in swing-state America.
Dividing Lines The growing political chasm that has turned metro Milwaukee into the most polarized place in swing-state America.
First of four parts Part 2 : A perfect brew for party line voting
With entire communities locked in their voting patterns, candidates have little incentive to reach across party lines.
: A perfect brew for party line voting With entire communities locked in their voting patterns, candidates have little incentive to reach across party lines. Part 3 : More polarized, more energized
One of the most polarized places |
best criminal lawyers in the business. But, says a prominent attorney who has worked beside Roy in cases, "1 could make a great trial lawyer out of him. He is spread too thin. He's really not a good trial lawyer because he doesn't have time to do the homework, and it shows in his cross-examination of witnesses." Sometimes it shows in his briefs. In the Henry Ford class action suit, Roy wildly charged that a "Morris" Taubman received inside information about a Detroit land deal from his friend Henry Ford. The man's name is A. Alfred Taubman. The papers also charged that Ford gifted model-agency business to the Leslie Fargo Agency, where Kathleen DuRoss, "a person in a close personal relationship with the defendant. Ford, has an interest." The owner of the agency signed an affidavit swearing that DuRoss has never owned an interest in her business.
Cohn's fabled self-assurance is on display today. Without notes he plucks from his memory the page number of past testimony, marshals his arguments precisely, pausing only to step back, to slide his arms behind his back, and pace before the justices. When Roy is finished. Assistant D.A. Jerrold Tannenbaum, his adversary rises. "Your Honor!" he booms. voice throbbing. "There is no way this court can determine this appeal if the record is falsified." Roy sits motionless, staring straight ahead, arms folded, intently biting his cheek. As soon as his young foe pauses, Roy leaps from his chair. never once taking his eyes from the judges, nudging, almost pushing Tannenbaum from the podium. "I think he owes this court an apology!" he barks. But there is no conviction in Roy's voice. He is used to being attacked. What other lawyers would consider a blight on their integrity, Roy considers perfectly normal. When Henry Ford's attorneys documented in open court the times Ray's ethics have been questioned by judges, Roy shrugged it off. "He actually thinks it's normal to be reprimanded by a judge," says one of Ford's shocked attorneys.
What this attorney doesn't understand is that to Roy the courtroom is not a forum where gentlemanly adversaries gather. It is a battlefield: an arena where his enemies, he believes, try to kill him, The story of his trials, or at least his four New York trials, are recounted in A Fool For a Client, a book Roy wrote in 1971.
To Cohn, a courtroom is not a forum but a battlefield where his enemies, he believes, try to kill him.
CRIMINAL INDICTMENTS
In the United Dye case, in 1964, Cohn was tried by then U.S. attorney. Robert Morgenthau with the support of Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The grand jury indictment charged that Roy sought to obstruct justice in order to prevent the indictment of four men in a stock-swindle scheme and then perjured himself by denying it. Roy retorted that Kennedy and Morgenthau were engaged in a "vendetta"—Kennedy because Roy got the job he wanted as counsel to McCarthy: Morgenthau because he resented Roy's charges that his father, the former Secretary of the Treasury. naively allowed Communists to work in and undermine his agency and the United States. The case ended in a mistrial when one juror's father died. When retried, Roy was acquitted. Cohn's second and third indictments from the Morgenthau office came within two months of each other in 1968 and early 1969. The third indictment was tried first. In the Fifth Avenue Coach Lines case, Roy was charged with bribery, conspiracy, extortion, and blackmail for allegedly bribing a city appraiser to help his client, Fifth Avenue Coach, snare a higher award in a pending condemnation trial. The trial contributed to the Cohn legend when his attorney, Joseph E. Brill, was felled by a heart attack. It tells you something about Roy's Machiavellian reputation that there are those who believe the heart attack was feigned so Roy could offer his own summation. The advantage of defending himself, however, was clear: Since Roy had not been called as a witness in the trial, he was now free to offer his own testimony without being cross-examined. For two days. without a note, Roy delivered an eloquent seven-hour summation, ending with a protestation of love for America. Tears streamed down Roy's and the jurors' cheeks. Then the jury was sequestered to deliberate.
During his first trial, when the jury sent in some questions for the judge, it looked bad for Roy, remembers his friend Neil Walsh, "But Roy insisted we all go to Luchow's for dinner. It was like a funeral. Even Roy's attorney said, 'Roy, you got to admit it looks bad.' But Roy said, - -- -it. We'll win on appeal.' " Now, as the jury gathered and Roy's clse friends huddled and bit their nails, the defendant rushed off to catch the opening-night performance of a new play, The Mundy Scheme, directed by and starring two men who once befriended Roy's beloved mother. Again, Cohn was acquitted.
The third trial came in 1971 and was a spin-off from the Fifth Avenue Coach Lines case. Cohn was accused of bribery, conspiracy, and filing false reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Each of the trials featured former business associates testifying against Cohn in return for guilty pleas and their freedom. Again, Cohn was judged innocent. To this day, a former prosecutor believes he was guilty in each case. But he believes Roy is today almost immune from prosecution, the theory being three strikes and you're out.
Morgenthau and his former assistants tend to be defensive about their prosecution, with reason. Cohn was the victim of some of the same vicious techniques he once employed as a young prosecutor and aide to McCarthy. During the 1964 trial, Cohn's mail and that of his attorney was intercepted, earning Morgenthau a loud and well-deserved rebuke from the American Civil Liberties Union. Stories about Cohn were leaked to the press on the eve of the trials before jurors were selected. According to Irving Younger, former Assistant U.S. Attorney under Morgenthau who penned a confessional for Commentary magazine in 1976, Kennedy and Morgenthau personally assigned him full time to "get" Cohn.
They failed to "get" Cohn but succeeded in granting him an aura of invincibility, respectability, and even sympathy. As Sidney Zion, then a legal affairs reporter for the Times, wrote at the time:
"In liberal salons during the dear old days. the free-association game was a cinch: Say the name Roy Cohn and the response was a chorus of Joe McCarthy-witchhunt-vendetta-trial by headline."In conservative watering places these days, the free-association game is a cinch: Say the name Bob Morgenthau and the response is a chorus of Roy Cohn-witchhunt-vendetta-trial by headline."Thus do the ironies abound as time and positions change, as prosecutors become defendants, friends became informers, and informers become friends.Can it be true that in the final months of the Sixties, Roy M. Cohn is carrying the banner for civil liberties in the Southern District of New York?Is it possible that United Slates attorney Robert M. Morgenthau... has become Joe McCarthy in order to get Roy Cohn?"
LEGAL SKIRMISHES
But there were other charges and judgments against Cohn, ones where the issue remained his, rather than the prosecutor's, behavior. In the civil case SEC v. Fifth Avenue Coach Lines, Inc. (1968), the court declared, "Cohn benefited from the use of Fifth's money to pay the loans made to him by" other directors and sought to "cover up" the participation of two directors in approving questionable schemes. The court enjoined him from violating the securities laws, a warning rap on the knuckles. Roy appealed the decision and los. Legal standards have changed. "Today, a similar warning," says SEC attorney Ted Sonde. who participated in the original case, "would be grounds for dismissal from the bar in most states." Roy remembers the decision more modestly: "They dismissed every charge against me except one; I had been negligent in failing to submit something for board of directors approval."
In January 1970, Cohn and three other men were criminally indicted by a Chicago grand jury for violating Illinois banking laws. Working through Defiance Industries Incorporated, it was charged they connived secretly to gain control of more than 15 percent of the stock of two Illinois banks. In a related civil suit, Cohn and his codefendants were also accused of using the banks for their own purposes, including the cashing of a $50,000 check by Cohn's law firm against a nonexistent checking account. Those charges, remarkably similar to a suit Roy would later lodge against Henry Ford, declared that Cohn used the banks for his own benefit in "total disregard of the well-being of Guaranty, its minority stockholders and its depositors." The criminal charges were eventually dropped.
In United States v. Johansson (1971), the federal government sought to collect back taxes from the proceeds of the third Floyd Patterson-Ingernar Johansson heavyweight championship fight, which Roy promoted as a one-third owner of Feature Sports Incorporated. The lower court held Cohn responsible for the back taxes. On appeal, the higher court found Cohn and his partner Tom Bolan guilty of ignoring the lower court: We "cannot escape a conclusion that both Bolan and Cohn were directly and personally responsible for causing Feature Sports Incorporated to violate the court's orders."
In another confrontation with Illinois banking laws, this time a civil case, in 1973, Illinois circuit court judge Daniel Covelli ordered Cohn and one of his former partners to pay $1.6 million to Louis E. Corrington, former president of the Mercantile National Bank of Chicago. When Cohn failed to appear in court, the judge ruled he had defaulted and awarded the full claim to Corringtou. "Eventually," Roy says. "the suit was dismissed."
In In re: Emilie of Rosenstiel (1976), Cohn was accused of tricking his eighty-four-year-old client, Lewis Rosenstiel, to change his will when he was dying in a Florida hospital. The will change was significant since it would have made Cohn a trustee and executor of the $75-million estate and would have elevated two of Roy's clients—Rosenstiel's granddaughter, Cathy, and her husband, James Finkelstein (son of Roy's client and friend Jerry)—to become trustees of the estate. Dade County probate judge Frank H. Dowling, in a bristling twelve-page opinion, concluded, "Roy M. Cohn misrepresented to the decedent, Lewis S. Rosenstiel, the nature, content and purpose of the document he offered to Mr. Rosenstiel for execution." Cohn, he found, misled his nearly senile client by professing the document he signed with a shaky hand would save one of his five ex-wives from prison. The court voided the amended will. Roy vowed to appeal.
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Cohn blames "the local establishment" for this setback_ He also counterattacks Rosenstiel's tax lawyer, Maurice Greenbaum, who pressed the challenge against Roy. Greenbaum, he claims, sneaked into the hospital room while Rosenstiel "was in a coma and put a pen in his hand and had him sign an X to a piece of paper, which divested him of substantial assets out of his estate" (A purely diversionary tactic," says Greenbaum of Cohn's counterattack.) In other words, if Cohn was guilty, so was Greenbaum. The thrust of Roy's defense was not that his ethics were beyond reproach but that Greenbaum's were no better. It was the same tack he took when criticizing Vice-President Spiro Agnew's 1973 resignation for accepting bribes. "How could one of this decade's shrewdest leaders make a dumb mistake such as you did in quitting and accepting a criminal conviction?" read his open letter to Agnew in The Now York Times. "Alger Hiss and Daniel Ellsberg can still argue their innocence. You no longer can." That Agnew was guilty did not offend Roy. What did was that he admitted it. Despite his threat to appeal the Rosenstiel decision, Roy never did.
In still another clash with the Florida courts, SEC v. Pied Piper Yacht Charters Corp. (1976), Cohn and his law firm were charged with civil contempt for breaching their fiduciary responsibility as agents for a $210,000 escrow fund when they substituted a bond for money in the account. Judge Edmund L. Palmieri said Cohn's denial of knowledge about the terms of the escrow account were "not credible" since he had negotiated the terms himself. The judge denounced Cohn and said he was guilty "of obfuscation by hold assertions of half-truths and untruths" and that he listened to his testimony "with surprise bordering on stupefaction." The case was dismissed—"with prejudice"—when Cohn and his associates replenished the escrow account. Roy says that the judge was prejudiced: "Every time we walk into the courtroom... I think his blood pressure goes up by about one hundred points." He also claims the SEC had granted written permission for what he did with the escrow account. Actually, attorney Michael Harris, of the SEC's New York office, did initial a letter from Roy. But the court found Harris "did not read the enclosed bond" forwarded by Cohn and "was never advised of the true nature of the bond proposed to be substituted. The Court accepts Harris' testimony that he initialed the letter as a courtesy." Besides, the judge intoned, only the court, not the SEC, was empowered to grant approval.
Roy's Florida battles are mere skirmishes when placed alongside his war with Internal Revenue. "Without question," he admits, "I hold the world's record for having been audited by the IRS." They have been auditing his returns for the last nineteen years and claim, says Roy, that he owes the government $1.4 million in back taxes. "Forget about it," says Cohn."I don't even have a bank account. Everything I get, the IRS grabs." They seized his Keogh retirement plan and even a $60 checking account. The IRS is engaged "in a vendetta," he asserts. Nevertheless, he concedes, 'I paid in the last two years a couple of hundred thousand dollars in back taxes." Actually, he paid almost $300,000.
ACCUSED OF MURDER
The IRS is not the only creditor chasing Roy Cohn. From January 1970 to December 1977, no less than twenty-eight judgments were filed against Roy in Manhattan's state supreme court. In fourteen separate cases, judges ordered him to pay the state of New York a total of $71,392.61. In three separate judgments, he was ordered to pay the city $9,328.10• Dunhill Tailors, oil credit card companies, a locksmith, a mechanic, a photo-offset company, a stationery store and office supply company, temporary office workers, travel agencies, and storage companies have all filed claims against Cohn. In seeking payment, these smaller creditors must retain attorneys or bill collectors. It gets pretty expensive, particularly since Roy relishes a fight. For a relatively small bill, it's often not worth the trouble. Rather than pursue Roy, a Manhattan button store swallowed a $60 bill. Asked about these unpaid bills, Roy says that during his nine-year legal battle in New York, monies and energy were diverted to survival, "and there was a total lack of attention to other things." Again counterpunching, he says he was, "a sitting duck" for predators and was hit "with a bunch of phony judgments." Today, however. "ninety to ninety-five percent of the legitimate obligations are all cleaned up," he says.
And, finally, the father of a dead young man thinks Roy "could have" plotted to murder his son. The charge relates to the mysterious sinking on the night of June 22. 1973, of the ninety-seven-foot Defiance, off the Florida coast. The yacht, once owned by publisher Malcolm Forbes, was leased for years by the Cohn firm from Pied Piper Yacht Charters Corporation. Though chartered and used by others, many considered it Roy's yacht.
Before the boat left the West Palm Beach Marina for New York, a number of suspicious things occurred. The local sheriff and Coast Guard had begun investigating reports that the boat was soon to be scuttled. The captain. claiming the Defiance was unseaworthy, refused to take her helm unless she was repaired. The owners refused, and he resigned. He was replaced by David Vogel, owner of a police record in three states who had served time in the federal prison at Lewisburg. A member of the four-man crew, twenty-one-year-old Charles Martensen confided to his father his foreboding that the boat was unseaworthy and might never make it to New York. Nevertheless, the boat left the marina. That night, a fire broke out, and the Defiance went to rest on the ocean's foor. Captain Vogel and two other members of the crew jumped overboard and survived. Charles Martensen did not. According to Captain Vogel, the last person to see him alive, Charles probably got trapped in the galley while trying to silence the roaring flames.
Charles's father. L.T. Martensen, accepted the sinking as an accident—until Captain Vogel called to offer condolences. In describing the events, Vogel said that Charles and he were in the galley together when they suddenly noticed the engine room's bulkhead glowing a bright red, The senior Martensen, a former Navy man and an engineer by training, thanked the captain for his call and went to bed. At 4:00 a.m., he recalls, "The lights went on. Wait a minute. Bulkheads don't glow red!" Then he began to relive the conversation, convincing himself that Vogel sounded as if he had rehearsed his eyewitness account. Alarmed, Mortensen went to the FBI and spent a good part of the next few years sleuthing the case, writing letters. talking to salvage experts, interviewing the crew. On July 11, 1973, he secretly taped this conversation with crew member Gary Tedder:
Martensen: Do you have any suspicion that the fire was not started accidentally?
Tedder: Yeah, I do. That's why I want to go up and see the FBI.... The FBI asked me if I thought the boat was sabotaged. I think it was.
In a letter to the Justice Department, Martensen wrote, "I am convinced that Vogel murdered Charles Martensen by gunshot prior to the arson of the vessel." He urged them to salvage the boat in order to inspect "the skeletal remains of Charley." Hr said it would cost about $100,000. The FBI did not salvage the boat, but it did conduct an investigation. "I must conclude." Assistant Attorney General Richard L. Thornburgh wrote Martensen on April 5, 1976, "that we have not developed such evidence as would demonstrate criminal activity with respect to either the sinking or the Yacht Defiance or the presumed death of your son, Charles Martensen."
The truth of what happened to the Defiance may or may not be under seventy-five feet of water.
The father, who speaks more softly but is no less tenacious than Cohn, remains unconvinced. On a recent visit to New York from his Michigan home, he calmly said, "1 do think Cohn told them to scuttle the boat, I have no question about that." Did he believe Cohn gave the order to get rid of his suspicious son? "He could have." The motive? The $200,000 insurance policy on the yacht.
"He thinks I murdered his son?" Roy exclaimed when told of Martensen's comments. "Let's look at it this way; A, I didn't own the boat; B, I didn't get the insurance; C, the statement is an outrageous falsehood; Four, how am I going to get angry at a man who lost his son?... You got to feel terrible about it. I'm certainly not going to get into a name-calling contest or a criminal lawsuit against a father who lost his son. All I can tell you is that I understand his bitter feelings, and if he read someplace that I gave a party on the boat or it was my boat, even though I never met his son, never heard of his son, never hired his son, never saw his son in my entire life, and never had any insurance come to me, directly or indirectly, I'm still not a bit angry at a man who reacts emotionally... Wow, when you lose a son. I couldn't be sorrier for him and for what happened."
The truth of what happened to the Defiance may or may not be under seventy-five feet of water. Certainly, there is no evidence that I know of to charge Cohn with murder or with ordering the boat scuttled. But what of the $200,000 insurance policy? It was paid to a dummy corporation set up by Pied Piper Yacht Charters, owners of the boat—the same company whose escrow account Roy manipulated. According to court papers, part of the insurance money was dispersed to pay off the yacht's mortgage; another $15,875 went to Cohn's law firm for legal fees; another $7,100 went to the law firm as reimbursement for personal property lost on the boat; and $7,950 was paid to Cohn directly for lost property, Confronted with this information, which contradicted his earlier claims, Roy says simply, "This is possible. I'm not sure whether we were paid by the insurance company or by Pied Piper."
IN THE TOWN HOUSE
Roy lives comfortably, though one could never tell from his cramped ground floor office at Saxe, Bacon & Bolan, Its walls are littered with autographed pictures, plaques, and press clippings. The gallery includes Roy whispering to McCarthy; Roy with Reggie Jackson—"To Roy. Cosell says you're wearing a piece"; Roy with a halo on the cover of an old Esquire; Roy on the front page of the second section of the Times—"Roy Cohn, at Fifty-one, Enjoys Prosperity and Controversy," reads the headline. J Edgar Hoover, Cardinal Cooke, an American Legion plaque, and a photograph of Al Cohn are among the other items on display. Below the pictures is a small flowered couch. A desk perhaps four feet in length, its surface clean except for two piles of papers, a phone, and three flowers perched in a glass of water, is where Roy works. The desk faces a dark mirrored wall.
Cohn used to occupy the far more spacious office on the town house's 11th floor, the one with a cathedral ceiling, bar, greenhouse, where the secretary works, an outdoor patio and adjoining apartment, complete with kitchen, living room, fireplace, and loft bedroom. But Roy gave the office to Stanley Friedman when he joined the firm in early 1978. Friedman, who sports monogrammed eyeglasses is quite comfortable there. Roy—from all accounts a generous man—is perfectly content in the basement. He spends little time in the office anyway. Meetings with clients are held in the living room on the first floor. The most striking piece of furniture in the room is Dora Cohn's former grand piano, on top of which rest autographed pictures of Ronald Reagan, Cardinal Spellman and Roy together on the Defiance, William F. Buckley, former Senator Everett Dirksen, and Roy's favorite aunt, Libby Marcus. The windows face East Sixty-eighth Street. Adjoining this room is a dark sitting room that opens into a drab olive-green dining room. The table is covered with a cloth and surrounded by four chairs that rest on a stained and wrinkled green-and-blue area rug with dirty white ruffles. A stark, somber Lester Johnson painting looms over the entire room. Not very cheerful, is it? I ask Roy's handsome young administrative aide, Vincent Millard, an aspiring actor. "He's very glum," says Vincent. A swinging door opens to the kitchen. On the next floor, there is a bedroom where Roy sleeps when in town.
After changing from his blue, vested suit, Roy appears wearing a camel's hair sports jacket; bright orange-green-and-blue-striped shirt; fire engine-red knitted tie with matching red woolen socks; and tassled Gucci loafers. His outfit for the Yankees game. But first he must stop and have a drink with Altemur Kilic, Turkey's deputy representative to the United Nations. The Rolls, with cocoa-brown leather seats and the RMC license plate, waits outside the Pen & Pencil restaurant, The ambassador is a large man whose only apparent flair is a goatee and moustache. He is not a smooth man capable of genuine diplomatic charm. Nor is Roy, who is too intense. But Roy is shielded by his celebrity. He orders a glass of champagne on the rocks, a side shot of Stolichnaya vodka, and half a lemon. Popping a tiny white pill from a silver box into his cocktail, Roy commences a monologue for the attentive ambassador about America's "fantastic habit of supporting our enemies and opposing our allies.... The Panama Canal treaty was a sellout and a signal to the rest of the world that we're a bunch of patsies... When American leaders lose confidence in the country's goodness, forget about it. Here we are screaming about human rights in South Africa--the same week we give the red-carpet treatment to the Soviet Union!" The ambassador says nothing. When Roy finishes and is about to leave, the Turk asks, "Isn't it impossible to get into Studio 54?"
"No, it's easy." Roy says, "You can go anytime you want. We represent them." The bald ambassador, who knew, blurts, "Thank you very much."
"No problem," says Roy, telling the ambassador of the time he was dining at Windows on the World with Barbara Walters and her mother, and the bouncer from Studio 54 tracked him down by phone. "We have a guy here who says he's the president of Cyprus. What should we do?" Roy asked a couple of questions, then said, "Let him in." The Turkish ambassador would never have to suffer that indignity.
JET-SETTING STYLE
As the Rolls aims for Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx, Roy is asked about his friends. "God. I have so many good friends," he answers. "I could name you fifty people." Or more. The first thing many think of when the name Roy Cohn is mentioned is McCarthy, or even evil. But ask that same question of many who know him and they answer friendship or loyalty. Carmine DeSapio may no longer be leader of Tammany Hall or the Democratic party, but he still gets invited to Roy's parties. Monsignor Gustav J. Schultheiss may no longer be secretary to a cardinal, but on his seventieth birthday, recently, Roy surprised hem with a party. When Abe Beame was denied his party's renomination for mayor and left city hall, Roy continued to invite him to parties. "I hated to see Abe Beame at Roy`s last birthday party," remembers Rubell. "'No one was talking to him. Abe was just walking around. Mary Beame was at a table by herself. Well, Roy sat down for one hour at his own party and talked to them. He even took Mary Beanie on a tour of his house. He understood their pain."
With notable exceptions—welfare mothers, for instance—Roy identifies with victims. "You'll talk to dozens of people who were on the balls of their ass and you'll find that Roy took their case gratis," says partner Friedman. "The reason is simple. He has gone through the trials and tribulations of being a victim. He knows what it is to stand alone. When he's a friend, he's a friend for life." His law firm, like his friends and clients, is part of an extended family. Tom Bolan, his partner for twenty years, allows Roy to sign his name to documents and stashes some of Roy's intemperate letters in a drawer "to cool," The firm's president, John Lang, is married to Rita, daughter of Vina Murphy, the Cohn family's former maid. The Cohns helped finance John's law school education, as Roy now provides a paralegal job with the firm for John Jr. Several of the firm's employees have been there for a quarter of a century, and Roy is fiercely loyal to them. "When I had my three trials, they were all there seven days and seven nights a week." he declares.
"To accept a client," says Roy, "I either have to like the client or feel they are getting a rough deal. The same kind of rough deal I got. I have to develop an equation, a community of interest with the client." Steve Rubell is a client Roy likes. "I speak to Roy about every day," Rubell says. "I call him. He calls me and asks, 'Is everything okay?' I think he thinks I'm a vulnerable person. He thinks I'm too soft." Roy's boyhood friends remain his adult friends. He takes pride in his seven godsons, contributing to their trust funds. "It is," says a disparaging former prosecutor, "right out of Grease. Roy never grew up. He has kept his high school friends. When we were young, there was that same intensity of friendships Roy has today."
Like his friends, Roy's weight also remains fixed. He stays a trim 144 pounds by doing 200 daily sit-ups and water-skiing every day but four over the last three months on Long Island Sound. Those little white pills in the silver box arc saccharine tablets. Food is not important, and Roy has been known to forget to order in restaurants, preferring to pick, with his hands, at the plates of friends.
His life-style is not as rooted as his friends or his weight. Roy is always jetting about the world on business. Rarely does he stay in any one place very long. He vacations each year with clients on the island of Mykonos, with the di Portanovas in Acapulco, on British investor Schlesinger's boat in the south of France. Life changed when his mother died. After returning from Washington in the mid-Fifties, he lived at 1165 Park Avenue with his parents. When Al Cohn died in 1959, Roy remained devoted to his mother, sharing the apartment and enjoying the breakfasts she made for him each morning before she died in 1967. "His life-style changed completely when his mother died," thinks Bill Fugazy. "Roy was closest to his mother. She gave stability to his life. There was a lot of entertaining at home. His father and mother were two superb human beings. Now Roy spends time in Europe. He flies over for a day." He relaxes at Studio 54, Yankee games, or luncheons with socialites.
Roy's liberal, jet-setting life-style doesn't square with his conservative politics. It is just one of many contradictions. He hates "stuffed shirts" yet befriends and represents several of that species. He can be a coldhearted executioner—and a warmhearted friend. He blasts "canaries" like Joe Valachi and John Dean who rat on their friends but has no sympathy for Dashiell Hammett, who refused to finger his Communist friends for the House Un-American Activities Committee. His heroes include such conservative icons as J. Edgar Hoover, William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and Douglas MacArthur, yet his friends include such liberals as Paul O'Dwyer, Herman Badillo. and Fred Friendly, producer of the Edward R. Morrow special that did so much to defang Senator McCarthy. He abhors "Nazi-like tactics" of law enforcement officials who prosecuted him, professes support for the American Civil Liberties Union and those defendants' rights promulgated by the Warren Court—yet blindly supports FBI officials who used such tactics and violated those rights. He is a self-proclaimed "cynic" who nevertheless calls many of his cases "causes," He enjoys a near photographic memory yet has a curious propensity to forget important facts.
I think I'd be the worst person in the world to represent somebody I believe was morally guilty.
To discuss some of these contradictions, the afternoon after the Yankees won their game, Roy allows me to join him on the town house's patio. The "lousy weather bureau," as he calls it, had predicted rain, so he canceled water-skiing and a late swim in his heated Greenwich pool. But now the sun is shining, so he removes the camel's hair sports jacket and powder-blue LaCoste shirt, revealing solid arms and shoulders and an even bronze tan, front and back. "'Just wait a second," he asks, grabbing a deck chair and pushing it into a corner facing the sun, spinning the top of a jar of specially prepared suntan cream and rubbing liberal doses on his face, neck, and shoulders.
Just as Roy closes his eyes, the phone rings. "Tell the judge that's fine," he thanks federal judge John Cannella's Law clerk. Roy is seeking to goose along a new trial motion for formercongressman Frank Branca. who served a prison sentence for conspiring to accept payoffs from mobsters and who is a personal favorite of Brooklyn leader Meade Esposito. Roy is shepherding the case as a favor to his friend Meade, as he handled George Steinbrenner's appeal to baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn when the Yankee owner was suspended because of a conviction. Is it true that the IRS has a lien on all his earnings? "I'm not really clear on that," he surprisingly answers. "I don't think they have a lien on any of my earnings." Handed a twenty-two-page court document—Notice of Tax Lien—from the IRS, itemizing two decades of back taxes owed by Cohn and his firm, he leafs through it and blithely declares, "This is a routine thing. Its no big deal." A big deal, he says, would be if IRS had placed him under "a jeopardy assessment, which means they grab everything you have." Is the reason they do not grab everything because he owns nothing? Not the house in Connecticut or New York, not the shirt off his back or the red-white-and-blue socks with stars he now has on his feet? Is it true that he expenses everything to his firm to avoid the tax collector?
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Ridiculous, he responds. His answer is only half true. Roy says his salary ranges between $75,000 and $100,000 annually from the law firm—not a lot for a man who brings in an estimated $1.5 million in legal business each year. "We have an enormous overhead," Roy explains. "And 1 have no need for it." One reason they have a tremendous overhead is Roy's expenses. Besides owning the town house—technically owned by the 39 East Sixty-eighth Street Corporation—the firm pays part of the rent for Roy's Greenwich house, owns the three cars Roy uses—the 1957 Rolls, a deep-green 1952 Bentley with white upholstery and license plate ROY C, a 1978 white Cadillac convertible—and pays for his phones and most of his meals. Were his expenses $100,000 a year? Roy says that's way too low but refuses to provide a figure. A former associate claims they are between $300,000 and $400,000. "My life is ninety-nine percent intertwined with my clients. My social life is intertwined with my clients,'" says Roy. "My life is ninety-nine-percent business." The law firm, incorporated three years ago, also carries more than a $1 million life insurance policy on Roy and has just introduced a profit sharing plan for its members. In addition to his salary and profit sharing, Roy's arrangement with the firm permits him to retain any business "I try outside of New York and Connecticut" and any earnings from writings, including a book on divorce he hopes to finish soon. Business investments, he says, are limited to Florida real estate. As for incidentals: "I pay for my clothes. I pay for food." Isn't it true that by relying so heavily on expenses, he is slipping the IRS? "I don't know. Partly," he admits. Then why is Roy any different from Henry Ford, whom he accuses of using corporate funds for his personal benefit? "The expenses they pay for Henry Ford were his personal expenses," he says. "The only thing the company pays for me is for entertaining and retaining business," And for using the car to take him to Yankee games.
This is not chiseling in Roy's mind. He knows he is not a greedy man. Even as a boy he would plop money on a desk and anyone who wanted it could take it. He forgets to bill clients, is generous io his godchildren and law associates. Unlike many prominent men, he notices and is kind to doormen, chauffeurs, little people. But Roy feels government was and is out to screw him. They persecute him. Cost him a lot of money and heartache. Besides, it is a contest, a battle of wits. Roy pictures himself as the populist, the little guy taking on the establishment. He is incapable of making a connection between what he does and what he accused Henry Ford of because Ford is a big shot, a country club type, a guy born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Even though Roy was born to wealth—the Marcus family owned businesses that evolved into Van Huesen clothes—and benefited from connections, he sees himself as a victim. Even when he was counsel to McCarthy and compelling a fair number of people to cower, including President Eisenhower and the Republican and Democratic party establishments, Roy saw himself and McCarthy as victims. They got him and McCarthy in the Fifties. They tried to get him in the Sixties. And now he is getting back. Justice—western style.
THE CYNICAL VIEW
Roy's concept of loyalty is not unlike that of a mob chieftain. "From the standpoint of my own personal moral code, I can think of no circumstances under which I would testify against a friend," he says, pushing back the chair to stay in the sun, which is sinking behind the roof. "Life is too short."
What if the friend did something wrong?
"What, selling heroin? I wouldn't represent someone who I believe sold heroin. The moral judgment I make is that I will not handle the hard-drug case; except if the person is guilty, I will negotiate the plea whereby the person |
to the men in our lives: fathers, brothers, sons and grandsons. There are many men who agree that 4:34 has to revert back to the way the Prophet understood it and, I might add, there are many women, particularly in the Islamic world today, who believe that wives should be beaten by their husbands! Therefore this is not a feminist issue. It is a human rights issue.
Now we come to the point from which the translation became controversial. Yet you will notice that it is the use of intellectual endeavor that is relevant, not my gender. If a Muslim jurist had come up with the same arguments and logical reasoning, the 1400+ year mistake would be more readily admitted and changed. Not only is the language of the Sublime Qur’an translation inclusive rather than exclusive, this translation also reverts the translation of 4:34 back to the way the Prophet understood it as shown to us through his behavior.
The part of Chapter 4, Verse 34 in question is more or less read in all present English translations: “Those husbands who fear disobedience on the part of their wives, first admonish them, then abandon their sleeping places, then beat them.” My position is that the understanding of this verse must revert back to the interpretation given it by the Prophet Muhammad, peace and the mercy of God be upon him, through his actions. He never beat anyone much less any of his wives. When there was any marital discord, he went away.
Anyone who claims to follow the Sunnah of the Prophet must do the same thing because the Sunnah of the Prophet is not to beat, hit, hurt, spank, or chastise any woman. The word idribu is a command, an imperative form of the verb, yet a command the Prophet did not carry out if it means “beat” but he did carry it out when it means “go away.” Therefore the Sunnah of the Prophet is “not to beat.”
The word daraba or its imperative form in verb form I, idribu, has 25 meanings. Why take a meaning that goes against the legal and moral principles of the Qur’an that harms someone when the Prophet did not do it? The most conclusive arguments in Islamic tradition to prove or disprove something is using the Qur’an to prove another point in the Qur’an. The present erroneous interpretation of idribu creates a contradiction not in the Qur’an itself.
There are two premises here: First of all, marriage is encouraged in Islam as a moral act. The blessed Prophet said, “Marriage is half of faith.” Secondly, divorce is discouraged as an immoral act but if necessary, allowed. The blessed Prophet said, “Divorce is deplorable.”
Now we get to the heart of the main reason why the word “beat” is a misinterpretation. We read in Chapter 2, Verse 231: “When you divorce wives, and they are about to reach their term, then hold them back honorably or set them free honorably; but hold them not back by injuring them so that you commit aggression.” In other words, the Quran is telling husbands not to harm their wives who want to be set free, not to hold them back by injuring them. The word “injuring” (dirar) also means hurt, harm, use force or commit aggression.
Let’s take an example. A Muslim wife, after many attempts to help her husband’s manage his inappropriate anger, anger that most often is taken out against her, tells her husband that she wants a divorce. He, in his anger, does not at that moment remember that according to 2:231 he is not to hold back by injuring a wife who wants to be set free, and instead, being both judge and jury, beats her as allowed in 4:34. The battered wife, becoming the victim of his anger, is then afraid to speak out again as this last instance has caused her to seek refuge in a shelter for battered women.
Therefore, we see a disconnect between 4:34 and 2:231. Jurists have created a contradiction that is not in the Qur’an by encouraging divorce and discouraging marriage so that we can conclude, a Muslim woman who wants a divorce must be set free without injuring, hurting, or using force against her, but a Muslim woman who wants to remain married does so under the threat of being beaten!
If Muslim wives knew their rights, which one would want to stay married under such circumstances? 4:34 as presently interpreted contradicts 2:231. How can we eliminate this contradiction? There is a very simple solution: Revert the interpretation back to how the blessed Prophet understood it through his behavior.
(Continued in Part II)
Laleh Bakhtiar, Ph. D., educated in classical Arabic, lecturer on Islam at the University of Chicago (Lutheran School of Theology), is the first American woman to translate the Qur’an into English. It is called the Sublime Qur’an.
Photo Credit: Mohd Althani“There has been one rule for the rich and another for the rest of us,” said John McDonnell yesterday as he called on the PM to answer if he had “benefited directly or indirectly” from offshore funds. When McDonnell published his tax return and P60 he disclosed £14,421 in income from his Westminster City council pension. Like other former Westminster City council employees, McDonnell’s pension investments are managed by the City of Westminster Pension Fund Committee. In November 2014, the committee invested £100 million with Longview, an active global equity manager. This is the disclosure of the investment in their annual report:
You will never guess where Longview Partners is domiciled:
“Longview Partners (Guernsey) Limited is licensed and regulated by the Guernsey Financial Services Commission”
Not sure Mao would approve. Although he did always warn of “a serious tendency towards capitalism amongst the well-to-do peasants”…NOTE: Well, I would have updated earlier but I had some car trouble… strikes at the worst of times, it seems. Oh well!
~ Chapter Sixteen ~
"Are you sure these clothes are 'clothes' enough?"
Elsa glanced down at the black miniskirt and deep emerald green halter Anna had been practically forced into as they stood in the line outside Illustrious, a club that Elsa had insisted would give her "the best experience", especially if it was the only one she would go to while on the island. Apparently, it was quickly dominating the nightlife scene, eclipsing all of the smaller spots and rivalling the long-standing titans.
"What do you mean? You're killing it!"
Squirming as she tried, for the umpteenth time, to tug her skirt down to cover a little more of her thighs without revealing the top of her very plain, periwinkle blue boyshorts, Anna stared around at the clothing of all the men and women lined up in front of and behind them. Yes, her outfit blended in seamlessly with all the others on display. That didn't make her any less uncomfortable with being in it.
"I look like a trainwreck," she hissed back. "Elsa, I don't know-"
"Listen," Elsa told her, putting a hand on her shoulder. Her bare shoulder. Why did she even have a bare shoulder?! "Honestly, you look incredible. But people are going to stare if you keep messing with your skirt like that."
Taking the hint, Anna released the hem and tried to stand straight and casual again. "This outfit cost a third of my'mad money', so I guess I better learn to love it."
Pursing her lips, Elsa hissed, "I told you I would buy-"
"Yeah, and you can't keep doing that. I'll… get used to it."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Then she closed her eyes, nodding. "That's… alright, I understand, you don't want to take advantage of my generosity. But that skirt and top were a drop in the bucket for me. What good is having all this money if I can't-"
"I get it, I get it," Anna grumbled.
"Well, if you're through interrupting me…" Anna looked apologetic enough that Elsa smiled, giving her a one-armed side-hug as they moved up in line. "There we go."
"Thank you. For everything. And I'm gonna keep saying that, so if you don't like it, tough." They both smiled at each other. "Even if I think I'm gonna end up cold by the end of tonight."
"Just remember: don't put down your clutch. Your passport is safe behind the SEEK House's security system, but I still don't want you losing your bank card or your phone; that would suck."
"Right, I know. I'll watch it, don't w-"
"And you can always pull me away from whatever I'm doing; girl code. You feeling sick, or needing some air, or wanting to get away from a creepy guy… anything is a valid excuse to bail on this party. Don't forget to use the code."
That had Anna smiling with genuine affection, squeezing Elsa back. "Okay, Mom."
Only then did Elsa sigh. "I shouldn't say this… I told your mom I wouldn't let you drink, and I don't want to betray her trust. But we're both adults." Shrugging, she pushed on. "If you want to drink, that's fine; I know you won't be driving home, since we took a cab."
"Oh, I'm not ready for all that. I mean, I think if I sneeze wrong, I'll end up naked."
"It's not that small!" Elsa hissed.
"I'm naked from my ass down!"
"You're wearing sandals!"
"YOUR sandals, which are even less sandal-ey than mine!"
Someone behind them poked Elsa in the back, so they moved up to maintain the line's motion. "Not that I know what you mean by 'less sandal-ey', but you needed club sandals, not just any old beachy flip-flops! Besides, the little faux-jewel is the same colour as your top."
Thinking about Elsa wearing her pyjamas had been weird enough; actually putting her feet in Elsa's shoes, metaphor or no metaphor, was transcendental. Unbidden by her thoughts, she felt her toes curling up against the leather sole constantly, unable to believe, even now, that she was really about to go clubbing with a member of SEEK on an island off the coast of Spain.
This hadn't been in any of her fortune cookies. Not ever.
"You look good, too," she added as they moved up again. "Seriously, I don't know how you pull that off so fast."
"What, this?" Elsa chuckled as she flicked her fingertips over the front of her blue A-line. "Such a trash bag, but it'll do; it suits the contents."
Anna pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. "I mean, do you want there to be a fight, right here, right now?"
"Fine, I'm not trash," Elsa sighed with an eyeroll. "Was just a joke…"
"Better."
Just when they took a step forward, Anna's phone went off. Nipping it out of her clutch, she glanced at the screen, then giggled.
"Punz got Esmé's voicemail. She's freaking out and trying to figure out how it happened."
With a mysterious grin, Elsa waggled her fingers like a stage magician and whispered, "The world may never know."
"God, you're terrible."
"Elsa?"
Both of them turned to look at the bouncer, caught in mid-laugh. His smooth-shaven head glinted in the streetlights as he motioned for the two of them to come closer.
"Yes?" Elsa asked.
"So it is you," he said with a wide grin, nodding to himself. "Haven't seen you around here since the end of the season last year, how've you been?"
With a professionally-pleased smile, Elsa laughed and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "Good, good! Yes, I wish I could get away more often, come back here."
"Well, I'm pretty sure you count as a VIP, so right this way." Gesturing for the pair of ladies who were first in line to move aside, he unhooked the velvet rope to let Elsa pass through. "Who's your friend?"
"This is Jojo," Elsa offered carelessly as she passed through the checkpoint. "She's a close personal friend."
"I can dig it," he said, nodding with an approving eye at Anna. The redhead blanched and waved back before scurrying after her "close personal friend", not wanting to chance being left behind if she hesitated too long.
The inside was just as packed as she'd expected, dazzling with the flashing lights and thumping bass, writhing bodies on the dance floor. But when they breezed up a winding staircase in one corner, Anna found herself in a richly-decorated lounge. Plush-backed chairs, glass-topped antique wooden coffee tables, attendees with silver trays. There were a goodly dozen people in there already, and the night was fairly young; how many stars would be in there by the end of the night?
"I don't recognise many of them," Anna whispered.
"Oh," Elsa breathed, leaning in and gesturing with her hand. "That's Buzz, he's in all those space action movies? And, hmm… I don't know them… oh, she's that girl from the Maybelline ads, right? We had a brunch once, when I was representing their products last year. Her and a few of the other models."
"And I am Jojo, producer of fine art," Anna said in a snooty British accent. She laughed, but Elsa didn't. "What?"
"That's the God's honest truth, Anna. You're really talented."
Pouting, she nudged Elsa in the ribs. "You don't have to keep buttering me up, I'm in the club already."
"It's not…" Sighing, Elsa rolled her eyes toward the chandelier and raised her shoulders in a shrug. "I'm paying my penance, Lord, but I don't know what I'm paying it for!"
"Guess there really is such a thing as 'too nice'," Anna chuckled.
At that moment, a couple of wealthy-looking women walked up to them, cocktails in their hands. One had long, flowing brown hair and an angular frame off of which hung a loose blouse and a floor-length skirt, both violet. The other had her jet-black hair in an updo, a taut off-the-shoulder green minidress flattering her curvier figure.
"Ah, it's you," the first girl said, a sour look on her face. Her friend swatted her arm, and she forced her features into something vaguely more pleasant. "Elsa, it's been so long!"
"Hello, Meg," she sighed, trying for bored instead of upset or angry. "It has."
Looking between them, the other woman said, "Well, I think it's been too long. Come on, let's do some shots - get caught up, girl!"
"Can't you see I'm here with Jojo?" Gesturing with her hand, she said, "Jojo, this is Meg Areleous and Tiana Chase. We've shared a drink or two before."
"That's one way of putting it," Meg grumbled, but again, Tiana stomped down on the unpleasant girl's sandal with her elegant green heel and cut off any further grumbling.
"I… it's nice to meet you," Anna said politely. However, this caused Elsa to nudge her from behind. She wasn't sure what she was supposed to add or do differently, so she just shrugged and said, "Umm, great club, right?"
"Not bad," Tiana laughed, exchanging a "who is this again?" glance with Meg. "Been better places. Their food sucks, but I guess it's not a restaurant, is it?"
Meg sighed, examining her nails. "Love the atmosphere, hate what they're spinning. What is this drivel?"
"Skrillex remix of Powerline," Elsa said immediately. "You can tell in the drop."
"You would know," Meg said - earning her another kick from Tiana. "Would you stop that?! These gladiators cost me a hundred dollars!"
"Can't that MMA husband of yours afford it?" Elsa asked in an even voice, finally giving as good as she got.
"Yes, but that isn't the point!" Then she smiled poisonously. "I suppose you could buy a dozen pairs without even blinking, couldn't you, Pop Princess?"
The answer Elsa gave sounded so much like something from the Miss America pageant that Anna almost clapped. "My money is better spent on building wells in Africa and funding reading programs in North America and Europe. But yes, I could afford a pair or two."
While Meg's eye twitched, Tiana laughed and raised her glass. "Don't know how the fuck you do it, girl."
"Pure talent," Anna put in, finding her voice again.
"Don't you have somewhere to be, Extra?" Meg snapped. But Elsa suddenly seemed to grow an inch, leaning in toward Meg intently. "What?"
"Be nice to Jojo."
"Why should I?" Elsa's eyes narrowed, and Meg leaned in closer herself. "Oh, what are you going to do, huh, Ice Queen? Stab me with an icicle?"
"Don't push me. You think I can't snap my fingers and have you out of this club so fast you won't know whether to throw up or to cry into that Louis Vuitton knockoff you have dangling from your bony shoulder?"
It took several seconds for Meg to recover, during which Anna and Tiana exchanged helpless glances. Finally, Meg spluttered, "Th-this is authentic, you hoe!"
"Okay, okay," Tiana finally sighed, grabbing Meg's arm and pulling her away. "Nice catching up, ladies; kiss-kiss, stay chill, good times." Then she pulled harder, keeping Meg from doing anything more other than glower.
"What the hell just happened?" Anna whispered. "I sensed there's some history, but like…"
Rolling her eyes, Elsa approached one of the two bars - the one in the opposite direction. "Oh, Meg's not so bad. She just thinks it's her duty not to give me any special treatment because I'm a celeb. And…" Rolling her eyes, she chose a stool and sat down. "And it manifests with her being a complete and total bitch whenever possible. But the motivation is to make me feel less 'worshiped', and I guess I can appreciate that part of it."
"You don't like being worshiped?" When Elsa didn't answer, Anna took a seat next to her, holding her thighs together to make sure nobody got a free show. "Don't know why you're hanging out with me, then. I mean, you saw the poster."
Grinning, Elsa looked over her shoulder at her companion. "That's exactly why. You recognised it was weird for me to see it, instead of just going 'ISN'T IT COOL?!' You're… different. I mean, still kind of a gross fan, but you're self-aware. Almost like a real person."
By the end of that, Anna started to be able to tell she was being teased and glared. "Ha, ha." Then she cleared her throat and asked, "So, what do we order? I'm putting my trust in you."
"A dangerous decision." Waving a hand at the bartender, she told him once he arrived, "Two appletinis." Then to Anna, "In honour of Snow."
"I can roll with that," she laughed. "I'm so ready - let's do this!"
The appletinis were in front of them; the service really was impeccable. Raising her glass, she clinked it against Anna's. "We're going to rock this island!"
~ To Be Continued ~The NHLPA released a list of 21 restricted free agents who filed for salary arbitration with their teams, and this summer Nick Spaling is the lone Nashville Predator heading down that road. He just completed a 2-year contract at just over $1 million per season.
Nick Spaling #13 / Center / Nashville Predators Height: 6-1 Weight: 198 Born: Sep 19, 1988
GP G A P +/- PIM PPG SHG GWG
SOG PCT 2012 - Nick Spaling 47 9 4 13 -10 18 1 0 2 57 15.7
Season GP TOI/60 Pts/60 Corsi Rel On-Ice Sht % On-Ice Sv% PDO Pen Take Pen Drawn OZ Strt% Shots/60 2013 47 13.13 0.97 -10.2 6.7 905 972 0.8 0.6 45.0 5.06 2012 77 13.33 1.23 -4.0 7.8 918 996 0.4 0.8 43.7 6.08 2011 74 10.98 0.89 -9.2 6.1 924 985 0.7 0.7 42.9 4.87 2010 28 9.18 0.70 -10.6 5.3 969 1022 0.0 0.7 51.4 5.14
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Hearings will be held from July 22 to August 6th, and a deal can still be struck between a player and team right up until the arbitration hearing takes place and the decision is announced, so it's very common that such contracts will be agreed to in the late hours leading up to the appointed arbitration time.
Spaling is trying to build off his best goal-scoring season to date, with 9 in 47 games as opposed to his previous best of 10 in 77 games in 2011-2012. That said, the four free agent forwards signed on July 5 have made the competition for ice time in Nashville increasingly difficult for players like Spaling, so it remains to be seen if the Preds still view him as a part of their future.
Working in Spaling's favor is his ability to play on the wing or at center, and fill a leading role on the penalty kill. Will his versatility allow him to hold onto his position in Nashville? That will be one of the stories to follow during training camp assuming he's still with the team...For some people, 2016 hasn’t ended. And no—I’m not talking about the liberal media. Donald Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton was one of the biggest (if not, the biggest) political upsets in history. For the most part, the rest of the country has moved on, though the cohorts on the Left continue to throw tantrums. Every now and then, when Trump decides to sign executive orders to roll back Obama-era regulations, it surely rehashes the stinging defeat Democrats suffered at the hands of Trump and the Republicans. Now, we potentially have their biggest tantrum since the election with a proposed scream fest in Boston on the anniversary of Trump’s win. Yes, I know the protests have probably garnered higher turnout, but this is a full-blown s**t fit. They're yelling at the sky (via Newsweek):
Over 4,000 Facebook users have RSVP'd—another 33,000 are interested in attending—to the Nov. 8 event being held in Boston that is literally titled "Scream helplessly at the sky on the anniversary of the election." […] "This administration has attacked everything about what it means to be American," Johanna Schulman, a local activist in Cambridge who is working on organizing the event, told Newsweek Friday. "Who wouldn't feel helpless every day? Coming together reminds us that we are not alone, that we are part of an enormous community of activists who are motivated and angry, whose actions can make a difference." Protests have erupted across the country since Trump took office, with the Women’s March, which took place the day after his January 20 inauguration, possibly marking the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. Nearly all the demonstrations came with a call to action: The Women’s March demanded gender equality and inclusion; protests at airports nationwide stood in opposition to Trump’s travel restrictions on Muslim-majority nations. Other events have been spearheaded by progressive organizations like Planned Parenthood as fundraising initiatives. […] The upcoming Boston scream party is a departure from taking action against the administration and its agenda. Instead, Americans will be provided the unique opportunity to vent their rage by shouting at the darkening skies above, all the while expecting nothing in return.
What a bunch of morons. Seriously—the election is over. Normal people have moved on and this won’t change anything. Conservatives never held ‘scream at the sky’ events when Obama was elected or re-elected. And from prior protests, it’ll mostly be filled with well-to-do white liberals who can afford to take some time off of work to throw a tantrum. In Washington, D.C., the mecca of anti-Trump activism, it’s just that.
So, have fun white Boston liberals screaming your hearts out. No one can hear you. Nobody cares; nothing will come of this.Climate change: Julie Bishop announces Australia's $200 million contribution to UN Green Climate Fund
Updated
The Federal Government has announced it will contribute $200 million to an international fund designed to help developing nations tackle climate change.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop announced the funding at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Lima, Peru.
The money, which will be paid over four years from Australia's aid program, will go to the UN's Green Climate Fund (GCF), which aims to fund projects in poorer countries.
"Our pledge to the Green Climate Fund will facilitate private sector-led economic growth in our region... with a particular focus on investment, infrastructure, energy, forestry and emissions reductions," Ms Bishop told the conference.
"I welcome the fact that participating countries have delivered on undertakings to capitalise the Green Climate fund and with Australia's contribution have reached a significant total in excess of $10 billion to date.
"It is now contingent on all of us to make sure the Green Climate Fund funds are distributed efficiently, transparently and to maximum effect."
Last month the United States announced a contribution of $US3 billion and Japan pledged $US1.5 billion ahead of a Berlin GFC conference that received commitments of up to $US9.3 billion from 21 countries, including four developing nations.
Canada also recently pledged about $US250 million.
However, Australia did not attend the conference in Berlin and had faced criticism from aid and climate change advocates for not committing to the fund.
The Government had previously indicated it would not contribute any money, but Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the situation had changed.
"We've seen things develop over the last few months," Mr Abbott said.
"I think it's now fair and reasonable for the Government to make a modest, prudent and proportionate commitment to this climate mitigation fund: I think that is something that a sensible government does."
Climate groups welcomed the announcement but said it was not enough.
The Climate Institute's Erwin Jackson said the total amount was "modest" given it "falls short of the $350 million per year [we] suggest is the minimum fair contribution to climate financing from Australia".
Aid and development organisation Oxfam said it could only be called a first step.
"Australia's pledge, just days after reports that they would not contribute to the fund, is an important message of support and a recognition of the country's responsibility to act," spokesman Ben Grossman-Cohen said.
Given the $200 million is coming out of Australia's aid funding, it is not clear whether other projects will have to be cut to pay the GCF.
Greens leader Christine Milne said that taking the money from the aid budget is "especially galling".
"This is robbing Peter to pay Paul," she said in a statement.
"The Green Climate Fund contribution should be on top of Australia's overseas aid contributions, not a substitute for it."
The Federal Government says it is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 5 per cent below 2000 levels by 2020 through its Direct Action policy.
The latest OECD Greenhouse Gas Emissions Index ranks Australia as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases per capita.
Topics: climate-change, government-and-politics, federal-government, environmental-policy, peru, australia
First postedby
Yesterday, a new messaging app called Zendo got some very favorable coverage from Tech Crunch. At the core of their sales pitch is the fact that they use one-time pads for encryption. With a few strong assumptions, namely that the pads are truly random and are only used once, it’s true that this scheme is “unbreakable” or more precisely that it offers information-theoretic guarantees that no eavesdropper can learn anything about the encrypted message. Zendo’s founder calls it a “crypto unicorn” and claims it is a game-changer in terms of security.
It isn’t. In this post I’ll explain why we don’t need (and shouldn’t want) to use one-time pads for a consumer secure-messaging app and why we should generally be wary of products like Zendo making grandiose claims about solving security problems through magic crypto.
The one-time pad is very old and is quite simple: the sender and receiver agree on a random key or “pad” K, which is as long as the message M to be sent, and then the sender transmits a ciphertext C = M ⊕ K. Because there is a possible value of K that would map C to every possible message M (of the given length, which is revealed), it’s easy to prove that no information about M can be obtained if an eavesdropper has no information about K. By contrast, with a stream cipher (one of two common types of symmetric cipher) the sender would transmit C = M ⊕ F(K) for some function F which takes a constant-sized key K and expands it to a “stream” of bytes as long as M. The function F is designed to produce output that appears completely random, but there’s always a chance that the function F will produce output with some statistical bias and this can leak information about the encrypted message M. This has happened with RC4 over the years to the point that it’s no longer recommended.
It’s important to keep in mind that there are hundreds of things that can go wrong in a secure messaging app, ranging from entropy failures to backdoored devices to malware. One risk, which is a relatively low-priority one, is that the ciphers or other symmetric primitives will be broken. Removing this reliance on secure symmetric primitives is all the one-time pad can get you in a perfect world. Professional cryptographers would mostly say this is not a risk worth worrying about: RC4 is almost 30 years old now, and despite it being “broken” practical attacks still require enormous amounts of ciphertext and would probably not affect security in a meaningful way if you deployed it in a messaging app.
Anyway, one might say that if Zendo have really figured out how to make one-time pads practical, it’s worth using them just to remove this remote risk of a symmetric primitive break. We don’t know exactly how Zendo works, as there is no source code or design documentation available. But there’s the critical thing: As apparently implemented by Zendo, and as would be likely to be implemented by any other mobile messaging app, the use of one-time pads does not remove the reliance on symmetric crypto primitives. There are three reasons for this:
Using one-time pads requires generating a lot of true random data and most mobile devices can’t do that. True randomness is very slow to generate for most devices without a special-purpose hardware RNG. As a result, in practice most personal computers and mobile devices have to “stretch” the limited amount of true randomness collected in an entropy pool like Linux’s /dev/urandom. This is done by by a cryptographic pseudorandom number generator, which is of course built using hash functions and is insecure if they’re broken. Zendo apparently uses Java SecureRandom. A reasonable choice, but not appropriate for generating one-time pads. In practice, most devices can’t afford to generate a truly-random one-time pad and use a pseudorandom one, which is equivalent security-wise and worse performance-wise than just having used a stream-cipher to begin with. We don’t have secure high-bandwidth channels for sharing one-time pads which don’t rely on symmetric cryptography. Before using the one-time pad, both users need to get a copy of it. With an app like Zendo, this requires an in-person meeting and taking a picture of a 2D barcode on the other person’s screen. The claim is that this “visual channel” cannot be eavesdropped on. This is a somewhat dubious claim-if anybody gets a picture of your screen during the exchange, they’ll be able to read all of your communication with that partner. It’s important to note that this is NOT a vulnerability for public-key verification using 2D barcodes as many other apps use, an attacker observing this process can’t break your security, so Zendo’s design seems to introduce a new vulnerability here. Anyway, even assuming this visual channel is secure, it’s not high-bandwidth enough to send a large amount of random data for one-time pads. What Zendo does under the hood is share an AES-256 key using the visual channel, then use this to encrypt the one-time pad data and send that electronically (not clear exactly which channel but this doesn’t really matter). So once again, this scheme depends inherently on a symmetric primitive (namely AES-256). If somebody can break AES, they can eavesdrop on the one-time pad exchange. One-time pads don’t assure integrity. It’s easy to flip bits in a transmitted ciphertext which was encrypted using a one-time pad (or stream cipher),which will result in the recipient decoding a message with the corresponding bits also flipped. Preventing this requires a MAC function, and the Zendo developers used the standard HMAC (they didn’t say which hash function but SHA-256 is a safe guess). Again a reasonable choice, only this is yet another symmetric primitive that can compromise security if broken. Unlike the first two issues, this is actually not a fundamental problem, just a classic design error often found in amateur-hour cryptography. One-time MACs exist and they are acceptably efficient, they’re just rarely used because eliminating reliance on symmetric primitives is usually not a design goal.
So, don’t believe the hype on Zendo and, in general, ignore any app claiming to use one-time pads. Problems 1 and 2 above are quite hard to address without relying on good symmetric crypto (as Zendo definitively does) at which point there’s no security advantage to using a one-time pad. There’s a reason why you rarely see one-time pads used or even mentioned-professional cryptographers know they aren’t actually adding any security value. They are cloak-and-dagger stuff for a reason, making sense if a spy needs to quickly dead drop a large amount of key material and then wants an encryption algorithm so simple it can be performed on pencil and paper.
In general, crypto primitives are not the first thing consumers should be worried about when choosing an encryption app. More important are a clear and properly-documented crypto design that has been subject to independent review, source code available for review, regular audits for implementation security, forward secrecy and a usable way to verify communication partner’s identities. These are the basic elements highlighted in the EFF’s Secure Messaging Scorecard. As Edward Snowden said “crypto works.” We don’t need crypto unicorns so much as we need diligent engineering to deploy the crypto we already have.
More broadly, there is an increasing amount of snake oil in the secure messaging space (some of which has been debunked here before). One-time pads are a classic warning sign, but I’d propose as an even more general rule of thumb:
If a new crypto tool is first announced in a press release or popular science magazine, don’t use it.
Security and crypto are hard to get right, as everybody in the field painfully knows. New projects which are designed by people with sufficient expertise and experience are almost always circulated on mailing lists, have design docs and code distributed, or have academic papers published for a long time to get sufficient review before they go to the press or encourage real users to sign up. Compare Zendo’s launch to that of Pond, which has been in development for years without any publicity outside of the security community and with active warnings that it isn’t advisable to use it yet because it hasn’t received enough security review. It’s possible a brilliant stealth-mode app could launch with marketing first and security details and review later, but this almost always is a sign that the developers don’t understand how reliable crypto tools come into existence.by Ginnie Seger
It’s a familiar setting: an office full of eager journalists editing video and reviewing drafts while a busy producer oversees the activities of the day. But what you might not expect is that many of these journalists are living in exile and their editor has been charged with terrorism in their homeland of Ethiopia. Abebe Gellaw, the producer of Ethiopian Satellite Television (ESAT), fled Ethiopia in 1998 to escape a tyrannical news environment. Gellaw continued to work as a journalist, exposing human rights violations and government practices.
“Terrorism is a very elastic term in Ethiopia, because the president wants to label everyone a terrorist. If you try to write something that is critical of the government policies, you are labeled as a terrorist,” Gellaw said.
This is one example of many Ethiopians living in the diaspora. While most of the population’s story is not as extreme, many Ethiopians have left their native land to escape tyrannical rule. According to the Ethiopian Embassy, Washington, D.C. is home to the largest Ethiopian population outside of Africa. They estimate the number is more than 200,000. This has led to the creation of news organizations catering to an Ethiopian audience. The news organization Ethiopian Satellite Television, uses broadcast, print, and online media to report not only what is happening within the diaspora, but also to counter state-owned media in Ethiopia.
“In Ethiopia we are not allowed to practice journalism freely, so we report on issues that are not normally covered by traditional media organizations, because of fear,” Gellaw said. “We give voice to the oppressed.”
Prime Minister Meles Zanawi, who has been in power since 1991, has enacted restrictive measures against freedom of speech and journalists, under an Anti-Terrorism Proclamation. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that the proclamation gave the government power “to imprison for as long as 20 years whosoever writes, edits, prints, publishes, publicizes, disseminates statements deemed encouraging, supporting, or advancing terrorists acts. It also grants the national security agency exclusive discretion to carry out warrantless interception of communications.” As a result, Ethiopia has the |
Dance technique. The resulting fusion lasts forever for Supreme Kais. However, the fusion only lasts one hour for mortals, even if the fused being removes the earrings. The determination of power levels is complex and more unpredictable than that of the Fusion Dance but in Vegito's case, the rise in power is inconceivably drastic. Vegito has the confidence and fighting smarts of Goku, along with the superior attitude and genius strategic mind of Vegeta.
Vegito is a fusion formed out of desperation by Goku and Vegeta in an effort to stop Super Buu, an ancient and powerful being whose only purpose is to destroy. Because Buu had absorbed Gotenks and Piccolo, Goku and Shin had come to a conclusion that the best chance they had of defeating Super Buu was through fusion, but there was no time to attempt the Fusion Technique. As a solution to this problem, the Potara Earrings were given to Goku to save the universe from Super Buu. Goku then proceeds to Earth just in time, before Super Buu launches his Destroy Everything! energy ball to destroy it. Goku threw the earring to Gohan so they could fuse, but Gohan failed to catch it. Super Buu then lost a large amount of power (over one third by Goku's observation)[4] as Gotenks separated inside Buu. He then proceeds to absorb Gohan, becoming even deadlier and stronger than when he was ever before. Goku is now left with no one to fuse with that would be of any help (with the latter being Mr. Satan and Dende because Tien Shinhan was knocked out), but miraculously he senses Vegeta's energy, and uses Instant Transmission to quickly transport himself to Vegeta's location since Vegeta has just returned from the Other World with Fortuneteller Baba. Super Buu shortly follows and, after Goku tries to convince him, Vegeta fuses with Goku. In the anime, Vegeta initially ignores Goku's plea by losing his pride to fuse with him and they both send ki blasts towards Super Buu. Super Buu easily reflects their attacks with his own ki blast. Super Buu then taunts them and Vegeta attacks Super Buu but both Saiyans were effortlessly beaten. After some quick persuasion, Vegeta finally agrees (after being told what fate had befallen his family). Then, Goku tells him right before they fuse that the fusion would be permanent and their bodies will be fused forever. Vegeta shouts at him, telling Goku that he should have told him that in the first place. The earrings merge them together and thus Vegito is born.
Once Vegito is formed, he tests out his new body. He then proves himself more than a match for Super Buu as he easily withstands an assault that would have almost killed the others separately. Vegito then overpowers Super Buu (with Gohan absorbed) in the ensuing battle, clearly showing that, even in his base form, the fused Saiyan is much more powerful than the mass-absorbed Super Buu. In the anime, after proving his superiority to Super Buu, Vegito then decides to turn things up a notch, by increasing his power by transforming into a Super Saiyan, and calling himself "Super Vegito". Super Buu is impressed, but not convinced that Vegito is stronger than him. In the manga, however, he turns Super Saiyan immediately upon fusion.
Vegito then begins to completely dominate Super Buu, rendering his attacks useless. Super Buu then liquefies himself and goes into Vegito's body through his mouth. Once Super Buu is inside, he makes Vegito's muscles bulge tremendously and tries to take control of his body. Vegito then uses his energy to isolate Super Buu inside his body and beats him out. Super Buu becomes enraged because Vegito is making fun of him. His anger at this causes him to start breaking through dimensions, which, if left unchecked, could destroy the universe. Eventually, Vegito forces his way through Super Buu's shield and punches him in the face, which stops his attack.
With little left to lose, Super Buu turns Super Vegito into a coffee flavored jawbreaker. All seems lost until Candy-Vegito reveals that he is able to fly around and still attack physically, beating Super Buu in comical fashion and slicing off his antenna. Super Buu turns Vegito back to normal when realizing that there is no way to hurt Vegito because of his small size (despite the fact he could not hit him before anyway). After another beating, even Super Buu's regeneration is starting to fail him. Vegito decides that it is time to end the battle once and for all. He then gives Super Buu ten seconds to prepare for death, and tells him to do whatever he feels like in that time period. Super Buu starts to worry, and when Vegito reaches nine, Super Buu manipulates the antenna that was recently cut off and engulfs Vegito with it. The battle is over with Super Buu coming out as the victor.
Unknown to Super Buu, however, Vegito could have effortlessly destroyed him at any given moment, yet he toyed around with him. Before being absorbed, he had set up a Saiyan Shield, so he would not be integrated into, as Vegito called it, "Buu Goo." This is because he wanted to be absorbed so as to free all his friends and family members. Thus the reason for cutting off the antenna and giving him the free time. Super Buu then goes on a rampage, and Vegito is left within him to free everyone. When he enters Super Buu's body, the magic of the earrings wear off, and Vegito splits into Goku and Vegeta again. Goku suggests that the fusion wore off because of Super Buu's unusual "atmosphere". Vegeta then crushes his earring so they would not have to fuse again. When facing Kid Buu, Goku and Vegeta are also given the option to become Vegito again, but Goku refuses, claiming that as a Saiyan, his pride keeps him from doing it, preferring to fight alone, and also citing that the fusion is permanent, and crushes the earring. Vegeta is impressed by this, saying it was "Spoken like a true Saiyan", and then crushes his earring as well.
Dragon Ball Super
"Future" Trunks Saga
Main article: "Future" Trunks Saga
During the intense battle with Fused Zamasu, Goku uses all his power in his God Kamehameha to stop the Holy Wrath. Afterwards, Zamasu is damaged and the left side of his face begins to mutate, which is a prelude to his corrupted state. Goku again attacks Zamasu but Zamasu grievously injures him and he falls down after exhausting the rest of his energy with the use of his Super Saiyan Blue Kaio-ken technique. They realize Goku's actions only made Fused Zamasu grow angry. Fused Zamasu angrily powers up, and his right arm begins to mutate in a similar fashion as his face. Gowasu points out Fused Zamasu's potential weakness: while Future Zamasu's body is immortal, Goku Black's body is not, and there is no synergy between Fused Zamasu's soul and body. This can cause his mortal and immortal halves to conflict, creating openings, but they will need large amounts of power to even deal any damage. Goku suggests using Potara so he and Vegeta can fuse, but Vegeta is completely against the idea. Goku asks Gowasu how come he and Vegeta split before when he was told the effects of Potara are permanent, and Gowasu explains that fusion not involving a Supreme Kai will remain for one hour. Vegeta reluctantly accepts the Potara earring after realizing they have no other options and he and Goku eat a Senzu Bean. Vegeta and Goku, with one hour left to finish things, put on the earrings, and they fuse, and Vegito emerges.
In the anime, after introducing himself briefly to Zamasu, Vegito transforms into Super Saiyan Blue, dubbing himself "Vegito Blue" (or "Blue Vegerot" in the manga). Fused Zamasu fires a Holy Wrath at Vegito, who easily dissipates it, much to the corrupt God's shock. Vegito punches Fused Zamasu as he begins to once again lecture about gods and mortals, and Vegito challenges Fused Zamasu to squash him. The two then proceed to fight an intense battle, creating havoc and destruction in the surrounding area. The two fight to a stalemate, but Vegito is caught by a surprise punch and sent crashing to the ground. As Fused Zamasu prepares to finish him off with his God Split Cut, Vegito stabs him with his Spirit Sword. Vegito points out to Fused Zamasu that he is no longer immortal as he is permanently fused with a mortal, a mortal named "Son Goku". Fused Zamasu crushes Vegito's Spirit Sword and begins to power up even further, bulking up and growing larger in size.
As Vegito continues to pummel around Fused Zamasu, he tries to finish him off with a Final Kamehameha. Fused Zamasu emerges from the attack, and Vegito teleports directly to him to hit him with a god aura-cloaked punch, but as he does so, he immediately defuses back to Goku and Vegeta. Shin notes that it hasn't been an hour yet, and Gowasu explains since Vegito used all of his power into the Final Kamehameha, there was not enough left to sustain the fusion. Fused Zamasu takes the opportunity to knock Goku and Vegeta down together with the same punch from his powered-up mutated arm, sending the two Saiyans crashing to the ground beaten.
In the manga, Vegito transforms into a Super Saiyan Blue, proclaiming that he is not a true god and is simply a mortal like him due to never officially having become a Supreme Kai - also boasting that Fused Zamasu's fusion will wear off in an hour too. Fused Zamasu angrily curses Gowasu for never telling him about the time limit of fusion. The two begin to fight but Vegito easily decimates Fused Zamasu, at one point slicing Fused Zamasu's hands off so fast that he does not notice. Fused Zamasu materializes many cubes of Katchin and throws them at Vegito, while at the same time Vegito prepares his Final Kamehameha in order to finish off Fused Zamasu, however before he can fire the fusion unexpectedly wears off and Fused Zamasu's Katchin hits Goku and Vegeta, knocking them to the ground.
Other Dragon Ball stories
Dragon Ball Heroes
Prison Planet Saga
Main articles: Super Dragon Ball Heroes (anime) and Prison Planet Saga
Prison Planet Gathering Saga
Goku and Vegeta find themselves struggling against the powerful Cunber. After Cunber powers up further and his restraining jacket is removed, Future Mai throws them the Potara, the two Saiyans fuse together. As he battles Cunber, the evil Saiyan comments on how amazed he is to find a worthy foe and after sending Vegito into a cliff side, the fused warrior uses the Super Saiyan Blue Kaio-ken to fight evenly against him. Cunber fired up an even more powerful energy blast than before and Vegito responds by using the Final Kamehameha to counter it. After a struggle on both sides, the blasts cancel each other out though a section of the chain breaks. Cunber launches a Power Ball into the sky which causes him to transform into a Golden Great Ape and fires another blast at Vegito though he immediately splits back into Goku and Vegito having used up all their power.
Power
Manga and Anime
Vegito is the strongest character within the original Dragon Ball manga, and one of the most powerful characters in the entire series overall. As a fused Saiyan, his power is a result of the combined power of Goku multiplied by Vegeta, amplified many times over. So the stronger each individual Saiyan is, the stronger the resulting fused warrior. This makes him one of the strongest fusions in the series alongside Fused Zamasu, Kefla, and Gogeta.
Super Vegito easily dominated Super Buu (who had absorbed Piccolo, Goten, Trunks and Ultimate Gohan), while Ultimate Gohan had previously struggled against Super Buu (who had absorbed Gotenks and Piccolo), with Vegito simply toying with the Majin and only using his feet to fight. In the anime, he was able to toy with Super Buu (Gohan Absorbed) even in his base form and then in his Super Vegito form, although when Buu tapped into his rage and let out a powerful Vice Shout, Vegito briefly needed to put in some effort. He has traits such as his power remaining the same even when his form changes,[5] as demonstrated when Super Buu turns him into a candy.
In Dragon Ball Super, Goku comments that fusing with Vegeta would get him stronger but not enough to defeat Beerus, after losing a battle to the God of Destruction.
When Goku and Vegeta fuse to battle Fused Zamasu, Vegito's power has increased by orders of magnitude from his first appearance, because of Goku and Vegeta's individual growths as fighters, and both possessing the physical might of Super Saiyan God. Once fully transformed into Super Saiyan Blue, Shin exclaims that his power already seems to be greater than Beerus'. In the anime, while they appeared evenly matched at first, Vegito managed to overwhelm the fused god, even after Zamasu had further increased his power.[6] In the manga, in his base form he is able to blast off half of Fused Zamasu, who mistakes him for a further transformation of Goku or Vegeta. Once using Super Saiyan Blue, Vegito showcased absolute dominance over Fused Zamasu, similar to his fight against Super Buu, cutting off both of Zamasu's arms without him even noticing it. However, Vegito's power at this point was so great that it severely shortened the duration of a non-Kai related Potara fusion.
Super Dragon Ball Heroes
In the game, Vegito as a Super Saiyan Blue is able to outmatch Super Saiyan Cunber.
In the manga, Super Saiyan Blue Vegito is able to battle Cunber's base and Super Saiyan forms, he then gets serious using the Kaio-ken to double his power to which Kanba responds by turning Golden Great Ape. Super Saiyan Blue Kaio-ken Vegito proves to be able to clash evenly with Golden Great Ape Cunber - the battle between the two causing the Prison Planet's sealing spell to begin coming undone - however the strain of both Super Saiyan Blue and Kaio-ken proves too much for Vegito - who defuses.
In the anime, Super Saiyan Blue Vegito struggles with base Cunber and has to utilize the Kaio-ken to double his power. However, even though he didn't appear to have an advantage, Cunber responds by turning into a Golden Great Ape. But, Vegito's power was too great to hold the fusion before the battle could finish.
Video Games
In the Extra Story Mission of Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, when a significantly stronger Dabura appears during the battle of Super Vegito and Super Buu, Dabura sides with Buu to try and kill Vegito, however Vegito opts to power up more and despite Dabura's significant power increase Vegito is still able to hold them both off quite easily and force Dabura to retreat, shocking a observing Elder Kai, who says Vegito is far more powerful than he actually imagined.
In Dragon Ball FighterZ, Vegito himself states that he is possibly stronger than Beerus when facing off against him.
Statements by authors and guidebooks
In his first appearance, his base form's strength measures greater than a Super Saiyan 3.[5]
The resulting warrior from Potara fusion is more powerful than the equivalent Fusion Dance result,[5] thus Vegito is stronger than his counterpart Gogeta.
If Vegito (from the Majin Buu Saga) were to fight Gogeta (from Fusion Reborn), Vegito would win if the fight was long, but would lose a short battle.[7]
In his original Dragon Ball Z appearance, Vegito's power is far greater than Goku as a Super Saiyan 3[8] and wonders if Vegito's strength is perhaps greater than a Super Saiyan 4 (超サイヤ人４以上の強さかも！？).[9]
Vegito and Gogeta are two equally-matched trump cards.[10]
Abilities
Video Game Appearances
In the What-if Saga of Dragon Ball: Raging Blast, Vegito gets to fight his Fusion Dance counterpart, Gogeta. In this What-if fight, the English dub voice of Vegito, has Vegeta's voice more pronounced than Goku's, whereas Gogeta's voice has Goku's voice being more pronounced than Vegeta's.
Voice Actors
Battles
Dragon Ball Z
Vegito (Base/Super Saiyan/Candy) vs. Super Buu (Gohan absorbed)
Dragon Ball Super
Vegito (Super Saiyan Blue) vs. Fused Zamasu (Half-Corrupted form/Huge Final Stage) ( Anime )
Vegito (Base/Super Saiyan Blue) vs. Fused Zamasu (Manga)
Super Dragon Ball Heroes
Vegito (Super Saiyan Blue/Super Saiyan Blue Kaio-ken) vs. Cunber
Trivia
The name Vegito ( ベジット, Bejītto ) is derived from a portmanteau of the Japanese kana spellings of the names Vegeta ( ベジータ, Bejīta ) and Kakarot ( カカロット, Kakarotto ). The most common romanization of the character's name in Japan is Vegetto, [14] a portmanteau of Vegeta and Kakarotto. Because the spelling Kakarot is used in Viz's English manga instead of Kakarotto, the name became Vegerot. The spelling Vegito is used in the English dub of the anime by Funimation, using the last two letters of "Kakarot" reversed, but inconsistent because of the presence of the "i". In the English dub of Dragon Ball Z Kai, however, the spelling that is used is "Vegetto".
is derived from a portmanteau of the Japanese kana spellings of the names Vegeta and Kakarot. The most common romanization of the character's name in Japan is Vegetto, a portmanteau of Vegeta and Kakarotto. Because the spelling Kakarot is used in Viz's English manga instead of Kakarotto, the name became Vegerot. The spelling Vegito is used in the English dub of the anime by Funimation, using the last two letters of "Kakarot" reversed, but inconsistent because of the presence of the "i". In the English dub of, however, the spelling that is used is "Vegetto". Old Kai states that a hypothetical potara fusion of Goku and Gohan would not need to turn Super Saiyan to defeat Super Buu. [15] In the manga, Vegito transforms into a Super Saiyan as soon as he appears. In the anime, he fights Buu for some time before he finally transforms. In his base form, Vegito still outclasses Super Buu and even manages to deflect a planet-shattering bomb, thus making it clear (in the anime) that he could have beaten Buu without even transforming into a Super Saiyan.
In the manga, Vegito transforms into a Super Saiyan as soon as he appears. In the anime, he fights Buu for some time before he finally transforms. In his base form, Vegito still outclasses Super Buu and even manages to deflect a planet-shattering bomb, thus making it clear (in the anime) that he could have beaten Buu without even transforming into a Super Saiyan. While the Japanese and Funimation dubs have Vegito talk with Vegeta and Goku's respective voices overlapping each other simultaneously, in the Ocean dub and the German dub, Vegito speaks with only one voice, sounding as medium pitch between Goku and Vegeta.
The fusion using the Potara Earrings was supposed to be permanent. Yet, when Vegito is inside Buu, Goku and Vegeta separate. Goku credits this to being a result of all the foul masses in the magical atmosphere of Buu's body. [16] Shin also confirms that the Namekian Dragon Balls can in fact undo the fusion as well if need be. [17] [18] It is revealed in Dragon Ball Super that fusions not involving a Supreme Kai will remain for an hour, [19] explaining Goku and Vegeta's sudden fission in Buu's body.
Shin also confirms that the Namekian Dragon Balls can in fact undo the fusion as well if need be. In the Funimation dub of Dragon Ball Z, Vegito's theme is "Vegeta vs. Goku" (composed by Bruce Faulconer). Additionally, Vegito's theme song ("Gleaming Potara") in Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout sounds more evil than Gogeta's theme ("The Strongest Challenger!!") in Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22 which sounds heroic. Both themes were composed by Kenji Yamamoto.
, Vegito's theme is "Vegeta vs. Goku" (composed by Bruce Faulconer). In the early FUNimation dub, Candy Vegito's voice was high pitched; this was changed to make him sound like his normal self in the remastered series.
In Dragon Ball Xenoverse, Vegito has three different Skill Set variations, one with Vegito's own moves in-game, the second one having some of Goku's moves, and the third having Vegeta's moves.
, Vegito has three different Skill Set variations, one with Vegito's own moves in-game, the second one having some of Goku's moves, and the third having Vegeta's moves. In Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, Vegito has the same 3 Goku, Vegeta, and Vegito themed movesets just like in the previous game of the Xenoverse series, but SSGSS Vegito only has one Skill Set variation of his own moves, some being completely unique to that character.
, Vegito has the same 3 Goku, Vegeta, and Vegito themed movesets just like in the previous game of the series, but SSGSS Vegito only has one Skill Set variation of his own moves, some being completely unique to that character. In the Future Trunks Saga of Dragon Ball Super, Vegito is still wearing the same outfit he wore during his debut in the Fusion Saga despite the two fusees wearing different outfits since the last time they fused.
, Vegito is still wearing the same outfit he wore during his debut in the Fusion Saga despite the two fusees wearing different outfits since the last time they fused. Despite the Potara earring fusion lasting only an hour, Vegito's fusion was significantly cut short in his battle against Fused Zamasu due to his immense power similar to Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta in his battle against Omega Shenron. Both are similar in that they were about to deal the final blow to the villain before defusing.
In Dragon Ball Z: Supersonic Warriors and Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit Goku's CPU's outfit resembles Vegito's outfit.
and Goku's CPU's outfit resembles Vegito's outfit. In Dragon Ball Super, Fused Zamasu addresses Vegito as Son Goku. At the same time, Vegito refers to Goku in third person when talking to Fused Zamasu.
, Fused Zamasu addresses Vegito as Son Goku. At the same time, Vegito refers to Goku in third person when talking to Fused Zamasu. A hidden audio file for Xenoverse 2 shows that Vegito can go Super Saiyan 2. In the hidden audio file, he says, "Guess I'm Super Vegito 2 now!" This indicates that it may have been planned for Vegito to be able to go Super Saiyan 2 in the game. There is also a hidden audio file in Xenoverse 2 that shows that Vegito can use the Kaio-ken.
Gallery
Main article: Vegito/Gallery
See also
References
Site NavigationRenowned personal-data-gatherer Facebook now has a new way of gathering more personal data of you and your friends. On Tuesday, the company secured a patent that would allow creditors to assess your creditworthiness based on the credit ratings of the people in your social network.
Facebook applied for the patent in 2012 as part of a bundle of patents it purchased from now-defunct social networking site Friendster. The patent was first noticed by SmartUpLegal. This is how the patent describes the invention:
When an individual applies for a loan, the lender examines the credit ratings of members of the individual’s social network who are connected to the individual through authorized nodes. If the average credit rating of these members is at least a minimum credit score, the lender continues to process the loan application. Otherwise, the loan application is rejected.
The Federal Trade Commission prohibits creditors from discriminating against borrowers’ age, sex, race, color, religion, nationality, marital status, and other personal information. Creditors are supposed to be assessing things like expenses, debts, and credit history. Does using your friends’ financial history count as discrimination? What if most or all of your friends are the same race or religion?
Before anyone cries foul, it’s quite likely that Facebook never actually makes use of this patent. Major tech companies (Facebook and Google, specifically) secure patents for weird ideas all the time—that doesn’t mean they’ll ever be implemented. Facebook could decide to use just part of the patent, while disregarding the lending portion. Or it could just be a superfluous part of the patent bundle Facebook bought from Friendster that was never intended to be used. Or the patent could be an asset to be sold on to someone else. Facebook declined to comment.
As Fortune noted, some new lending startups like Affirm already assess credit risk based on information gleaned from social media. In fact, social media could actually help people secure a loan who otherwise would be rejected based purely on financial information.
For now, the technology appears to be legal: Patrice Ficklin, head of the fair lending office at the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told the New York Times in January that while they encourage innovation, they are “monitoring the emerging market closely.”GOP Presidential Candidate Lying Over Transgender People's Use of Restrooms Hypocritically Admits They're Not Even the Problem
For weeks Senator Ted Cruz has increasingly been attacking transgender people in his presidential campaign stump speech, and using them as the butt of his "jokes" about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. He told an Indiana audience last weekend, "even if Donald Trump dresses up as Hillary Clinton, he shouldn't be using the girl's restroom," as if that somehow were funny.
On "Meet the Press" Sunday, Cruz continued his anti-trans assault, thoroughly enabled by his compliant NBC News host, Chuck Todd.
"If you pass a law, as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and Barack Obama want, that says any adult man can go into a girl's restroom if he feels like a woman at that minute..." Cruz said. That's a lie, and the Texas Tea Party Republican Senator knows it is - or should, since Politifact called him out on it a week ago.
For the record, two-thirds of Cruz's statements Politifact has scored are some degree of "false":
But then, after making his false "any adult man" can enter the girl's restroom claim, he all of a sudden switched gears - admitting, "listen, the real danger is not people who are transgendered. It's people who are predators." (He still hasn't learned to say "transgender.")
Here's Cruz on CNN again today, spout thing the same lie - and getting called out on it by Jake Tapper. Cruz lies again, insisting Tapper is wrong:
But both times, Senator Cruz fully admits that transgender people aren't the problem - cisgender people are the problem. And it's just like those conservatives who claim that America must ban same-sex marriage, not because there's any issue with two men or two women who love each other marrying, but because of the "slippery slope" that same-sex marriage would lead to - i.e. incest and polygamy - we must ban marriage equality for the sake of the children.
Ted Cruz wants to take away the rights of people who aren't causing any problems to protect Americans from the people who are the problem - when there are already plenty of laws that already protect Americans from the people who are the problem: sexual predators.
It's literally insane.
To prove the point of just how insane and hypocritical Ted Cruz's position - which is the same shared by many anti-LGBT conservatives, including North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, flip that logic around and apply it toward guns.
We can't enact gun control laws because the people who are criminals don't obey the laws anyway, is the claim Second Amendment activists love to make. Those Second Amendment activists more often than not, by the way, are also anti-LGBT activists.
So, again, we have to make laws banning transgender people from using the restrooms that best correspond to their gender identity so sexual predators won't use the restrooms they shouldn't be, even though no transgender person has ever been arrested for molesting anyone in a restroom. And even though there are plenty of existing laws that already ban men from accessing women's restrooms with the intent of engaging in criminal and nefarious deeds.
Yet, when it comes to gun control, we can't enact sensible, logical legislation supported by nine out of ten Americans, conservatives - including Ted Cruz - insist, because criminals don't follow the law and will find a way to get guns anyway.
Conservatives like Ted Cruz insist that government is the problem, then go out of their way to ensure that becomes true.
"Every day," Cruz promised in his "Meet the Press" interview Sunday, "my focus is going to be on reducing the burdens of Washington on small businesses, bringing manufacturing jobs back to this country, lowering taxes and then defending the Constitution and Bill of Rights."
How does banning transgender people from using the restroom that makes the most sense based on their gender identity fit into that?
Image: Screenshot via CNN/Twitter
Embedded graph via Politifact
See a mistake? Email corrections to: [email protected]Digitalization is a major trend in automotive industry, from last couple of decades the automotive industry have seen various technological advancement in digital field. The technological advancement in the form of automotive head-up display is one of such example. Automotive head up display are the optimal display technology for cars which generally projects an image that floats around a range of 2.5 – 3 meter or 7.5 – 8 feet, in front of motorist’s eyes. The introduction of automotive head-up display has provided the automakers to deliver remotely access details related to the vehicle including oil level, tire pressure, the distance between two vehicle, and advanced display technology. According to industrial experts, 2 percent of automobile sold in 2012 had head-up display technology, which is expected to rise over the forecast period.A sample of this report is available upon request @ www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/14149 Automotive Head-Up Display Market – Market Dynamics:One of the significant factors contributing towards the growth of the automotive head-up display market is the rampant growth of automotive industry across the world. Moreover, changing lifestyle coupled with increasing preference over digital technology are also amongst the major factor that are anticipated to drive the demand for automotive head-up display market during the forecast period. Furthermore, the characteristics such as navigation map, alert signals, advance driver assisted system (ADAS) has led the various car manufacturers to adopt the automotive head-up display with ease of functioning. However, storage space requirement for automotive head up display along with high installation cost may restrain the growth in mid segment cars.Automotive Head-Up Display Market- Market Segmentation:Global automotive head-up display market is segmented on the basis of automotive head up display type and Application. On the basis of automotive head up display type, the market can be segmented into wind shield projected and combiner projected. Wind shield projected segment accounts for the largest share of the overall automotive head-up display market. On the basis of application, automotive head-up display market can be segmented into premium cars, luxury cars and mid segment cars. Premium cars followed by luxury are expected to maintain the highest market share in global automotive head-up display market over the forecast period.Automotive Head-Up Display Market – Regional Outlook:Geographically, the global automotive head-up display market is segmented into North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC) and the Middle East & Africa (MEA). The global automotive head-up display market is expected to witness a significant CAGR over the forecast period of 2016-2024. Moreover, APAC dominates the global automotive head-up display market and the trend is expected follow the same over the forecast period due to rising disposable income in countries such as India and China coupled stringent rules and regulation relating to safety concern. Apart from this, the extensive evolution of the automotive industry in the growing economies is expected to boost further the sales of automotive head-up display market in Asia Pacific by the end of the forecast period of 2016-2024. North America is expected to follow APAC in global automotive head-up display market over the forecast period. Rest of the world is expected to show a steady growth during the forecast period.Automotive Head-Up Display Market – Major Players:Some of the major players identified across the globe in the automotive head-up display market are BMW AG, Continental AG, Denso Corporation, Delphi Automotive PLC, Microvision Inc., Nippon Seiki Co., Ltd, Panasonic Corporation, Robert Bosch GmbH, Visteon corporation and Yazaki Corporation.To view TOC of this report is available upon request @ www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/14149 The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geography, product type, material type and end-use.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA – Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com Web: www.persistencemarketresearch.comThe Buc’s handled business today on the road at Morehead State as they cruised to a 78-68 win. Many Buc fans, including myself, were worried they might overlook this game in anticipation for the vaunted matchup with Tennessee at Freedom Hall 5 days from now. However, they showed no signs of that as they got out to a 35-12 lead 10 minutes into the first half. The game was never really in doubt, although the Buc’s had two lapses during the game and allowed Morehead to get within 9 and 8 pts in the second half. Despite the Eagles record and the assault allegations against their now former coach, year in and year out Morehead is a consistently good mid-major program so I’ll definitely look at this game as a good win on the road.
TJ Cromer busted out of his recent shooting slump going for 23 pts, 7 assists on 6-9 shooting from 3 point land. He did have 6 turnovers which is uncharacteristic of him. Desonta Bradford and Hanner Mosquera-Perea finished with 13 pts a piece and David Burrell added 7 pts off the bench.
ETSU @ Morehead St. Boxscore
ETSU @ Morehead St. RecapOn Wednesday, Segerstrom Center for the Arts officially will start in on plans for a redesigned central plaza and new entrance to the Judy Morr Theater with a private groundbreaking.
The project aims to expand the center’s reach, attract new audiences and create a “town square” where people can gather for free events and relax in green spaces with food from a new outdoor cafe.
The idea is to make the center welcoming to a wider swath of the community, including people from younger and more diverse groups – both ethnically and economically – than the patrons who traditionally turn out for a symphony concert or ballet performance.
Segerstrom announced the project in 2015 and had planned to break ground last year, wrapping up construction by last fall. But design changes have delayed that. Now the goal is to finish construction by October or November, said Segerstrom Center President Terrence W. Dwyer.
Dwyer said revisions to the plaza design led to the delay.
“We saw an opportunity to do a little more design work … to better serve the patrons and the artists that will be using the plaza,” he said.
Some of the area that had been planned for trees instead will be taken up by more seating and tables. Working out the details with the architect for the project, Los Angeles-based Michael Maltzan Architecture, and getting approval for the revised plans from the city of Costa Mesa extended the timeline. But the result will be a more welcoming plaza with more places to gather, Dwyer said.
There will be two green spaces, an outdoor cafe, a circular grand staircase leading from the plaza to the mezzanine level of Segerstrom Hall, a new entrance to the Judy Morr Theater and an outdoor stage along the south side of Segerstrom Hall.
The plaza will be renamed the Julianne and George Argyros Plaza, after the patrons who have given the largest donation to the project, $13.5 million. There is a footprint reserved for the future home of the Orange County Museum of Art, now in Newport Beach, to the east of the concert hall and abutting the redesigned plaza.
To pay for the new initiatives plus existing debt on the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, which opened in 2006, the center launched the $68 million “Next Act Campaign” in 2015 along with its plans. With changes to the plaza design, the new goal is $70 million, Dwyer said, of which $16 million will pay for the new construction and new programs. The remaining $54 million is to pay for existing spaces, including the concert hall.
So |
by a metal version of this thing because a girl didn't want to give you her number?Also, it should be noted that it is a rarity to find artwork depicting Zhuge Liang that does not include him holding a duster like this.Another final fun note is that the artwork of Zhuge Liang is heavily based on the depiction of him in Dynasty Warrior.That's all for this week, folks. If you have any questions or corrections on this KYU, let me know!Also, I plan on going through and updating existing KYUs for units that have been given new cards as well as converting the KYUs that were only posted on Reddit to our beautiful BBCode. Be on the lookout for these changes in the coming weeks!Nov 1, 2014; Auburn Hills, MI, USA; Brooklyn Nets guard Alan Anderson (6) during the first quarter against the Detroit Pistons at The Palace of Auburn Hills. Mandatory Credit: Tim Fuller-USA TODAY Sports
It seems like the Washington Wizards are bit by the injury bug every summer.
A few years ago, Emeka Okafor was diagnosed with a herniated disc in his back and still hasn’t returned to the court. Last year, Bradley Beal missed the first nine games of the season with a non-displaced fracture in his left wrist. This summer, Jared Dudley underwent back surgery and will miss at least the first few games of the season.
Unfortunately, the Washington Wizards are going to deal with another minor setback this upcoming season.
Alan Anderson, whom the team acquired this summer by using most of their mid-level exception, has been dealing with an ankle injury and won’t be ready at the start of training camp later this month, per CSN Washington:
Alan Anderson won’t be fully ready when he joins his new team as the Wizards open training camp on Tuesday, CSNmidatlantic.com has confirmed with persons with knowledge of the situation, but it’s not the same as severe as Jared Dudley’s setback.
Even though Otto Porter is expected to start, Anderson is supposed to be a key part of the Randy Wittman‘s rotation.
The 6’6″ wing was targeted by Ernie Grunfeld this summer because he could fill the scoring void left by Paul Pierce‘s departure. While he’s been somewhat inconsistent throughout the course of his career, Anderson has the tools to become a valuable contributor in Washington.
During the playoffs last season, Anderson averaged 11 points and shot over 60 percent from three. Those percentages aren’t sustainable throughout an 82-game season, but it does show some promise, especially since the Washington Wizards play a lot more team-oriented ball than the Brooklyn Nets.
At this point, all we can do is hope that his setback isn’t too severe. The Washington Wizards have a number of available wing players — specifically Kelly Oubre and Martell Webster — but neither are projected to be a part of the regular rotation.
Webster had the worst season of his career last year and there’s some question marks surrounding him. If he does bounce back, then Washington could rely on him for minutes. Right now, though, it’s unclear if he’ll be able to contribute regularly. Training camp will determine how often we’ll see Webster on the court this upcoming season.
As for Oubre, well, Wittman just doesn’t depend on rookies very often. He’s more NBA ready than most people expect, but he’s not someone that I’d throw out there in front of a veteran player. He needs to be developed before he plays major minutes. After all, that’s why the Washington Wizards have a handful of veteran wings ahead of him.
I wouldn’t expect Anderson to miss much, if any, time this upcoming season but the ankle issue is kind of concerning. Let’s just hope it’s taken care of before the start of the season.Curiouser and curiouser: That seems to be the state of affairs on some Canadian campuses over issues of free speech.
Executives with the Canada-India Foundation were dismayed to have had an event cancelled by Ryerson University this week, with no explanation given.
The CIF Speaker Series had booked space at Ryerson to hear a speech from Tarek Fatah, the author and columnist controversial for his statements against Islamist extremism. Fatah, who writes for the Toronto Sun, is an award-winning author and activist who founded the Muslim Canadian Congress after the events of 9/11 — both to fight Islamism and to alleviate Islamophobia. He is the host of the Zee News TV talk show Fatah Ka Fatwa’ and is a sought-after speaker in Canada and India.
He is a champion of free speech. He is also a frequent recipient of death threats.
On Aug. 10 his talk, which will be held at a location to be announced, will address “Ghazwa-e-Hind vs. the Ethos of Hindustan.”
Fatah speculates that Ryerson cancelled the CIF event because of pressure from various groups who would protest his speech, such as AntiFa Toronto or the school’s Muslim Students’ Association.
Ryerson’s cancellation was last-minute; a permit to use Ryerson University Campus Premises and Facilities was revoked with no explanation.
When Vipul Jani, executive director of the CIF, asked why the permit was cancelled, he received a response from Voula Cocolakis, executive director of Ryerson University’s Business Services, as follows:
“We certainly understand your frustration, but as per our Rules and Regulations for Permit to Use Ryerson University Campus Premises and Facilities, Ryerson may revoke or cancel the Permit at any time with or without cause.”
Cocolakis did not respond to an e-mail from the Toronto Sun; another e-mail sent to Ryerson president Mohamed Lachemi was replied to by Johanna VanderMaas, Manger of Public Affairs, as follows:
“Thank you for your email; I am happy to respond on behalf of the university.
Unfortunately, Ryerson was unable to accommodate the Canada-India Foundation’s room booking request for August 10; we have expressed our apologies to Mr. Jani and CIF. The university is not aware of any concerns or plans to disrupt Mr. Fatah’s keynote address.”
Asked for the actual reason for cancellation, VanderMaas repeated the above, noting it was the university’s official comment.
One could be forgiven for thinking that Ryerson is ducking the question.
Or that the school is currently plagued by bizarre political goings-on — consider Toronto Sun columnist Sue-Ann Levy’s recent expose of the anti-Semitism a student faced in her dealings with Ryerson School of Social Work field coordinator Heather Bain — who is now on leave.
Freedom of speech issues are taking a drubbing on many North American campuses, with scheduled speakers getting cancelled more frequently, often due to threats of violence from groups who present themselves as occupying the high moral ground.Nicholas from the Participatory Culture Foundation sez,
Today our open subtitling platform Amara.org ("a wikipedia for subtitling video") is launching free crowd subtitling for every YouTube user. Want to make your videos accessible to people around the world who speak a different language? Want deaf and hard of hearing users to be able to watch? We hope you do! Just connect your YouTube account to Amara and invite your viewers to help.
Viewers from around the world are in the best position to help translate the video in their language and get you more viewers. Any moderately popular YouTube video will get lots of viewer subtitling help.
Amara's volunteer community is getting big-- some Khan Academy videos on Amara are translated into almost 100 languages! Want to watch Gangam Style in Esperanto? Amara has it. Twitter uses Amara to subtitle their product launch videos, Netflix uses Amara to subtitle movies and tv shows, and TED Talks has more than 11,000 volunteers in their Amara translation community.
If you post any videos to YouTube, Amara.org is how you can enable the world to watch!Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender older adults are pioneers who bravely pushed open the doors to coming out. It is unconscionable that many of these leaders of social justice are forced to retreat into the closet as they age. The troubling reality is that the U.S. lacks a complete understanding of the LGBT senior community and is particularly unprepared for the needs of LGBT older adults at the intersection of multiple disadvantaged populations, such as LGBT seniors who are people of color, disabled, living with HIV/AIDS, undocumented immigrants or socioeconomically marginalized.
Many LGBT seniors fear that the health-care system is judgmental and have experienced discriminatory care or lack access to culturally competent aging services. To address this crisis, the U.S. must adopt a new perspective that emphasizes health, rather than just health care. All sectors of society must come together with a renewed sense of social responsibility that focuses on social determinants of health -- a holistic view of everyday factors that impact the health, economic and social well-being of LGBT seniors.
Ending "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Health-Care Environment
Eliminating LGBT health disparities and providing more personal and equitable care to LGBT populations depends on overcoming a primary obstacle: Many LGBT patients are uncomfortable discussing sexual orientation or gender identity with health-care providers, and many providers need training on these discussions. Consequently, LGBT patients often forgo prevention screenings or seek care late in their illnesses or diseases, and clinicians lack information that helps in making a diagnosis and recommending treatment.
Research has found that more than one fifth of LGBT older adults have not disclosed sexual orientation or gender identity to their primary physician. Almost 20 percent of LGB seniors and more than 50 percent of transgender seniors fear that they will be treated differently, and almost 35 percent of LGB seniors and more than 60 percent of transgender seniors have encountered a health-care provider who was unaware of their health needs. These factors contribute to LGBT adults (24 percent) being more likely than heterosexuals (18 percent) to receive services in emergency rooms.
The Institute of Medicine's landmark report "The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People: Building a Foundation for Better Understanding" found that incorporating LGBT data into electronic health records and federally funded surveys is essential to addressing health disparities. The report also calls for more research in LGBT demographics, health-care inequities, interventions, transgender needs and social determinants.
Addressing Social Determinants of LGBT Senior Health
Medical care influences only about 10 percent of health status. The truly powerful determinants are genetics, behaviors and social circumstances. For many LGBT seniors, numerous factors complicate the path to health security, such as low likelihood of biological family assistance during health crises, lack of health insurance or same-sex partner retiree benefits, low incomes and high rates of poverty, geographic locations without LGBT-welcoming support systems, and social isolation for those who are single, live alone or do not have children. Addressing these determinants is critical to finding sustainable solutions for responding to LGBT older adults' health needs.
The difficult truth is that the U.S. spends more per capita on health care than other nations yet has worse outcomes. The U.S. needs to adopt the approaches of countries that spend less money and get better results because they spend money on the right things at the right time. U.S. health-care funds must be directed upstream on social services programs that promote wellness instead of downstream on high-cost disease after it develops. A national survey of Area Agencies on Aging and State Units on Aging revealed the challenge: Only 7.8 percent offer services targeting LGBT seniors, and more than half believe it is unnecessary to establish separate LGBT aging services.
Promising Solutions
Fortunately, innovative public-private partnerships are establishing models of progress, including: (1) 55 Laguna Street, San Francisco's first, and the nation's largest, low-income LGBT-welcoming senior housing community that also will provide expanded services to LGBT older adults from across the city; (2) New York City's SAGE Center, the nation's first LGBT senior center providing comprehensive programs relating to arts and culture, fitness, food and nutrition, health and wellness, and lifelong education; and (3) Triangle Square in Los Angeles, the nation's first affordable, LGBT-welcoming senior housing facility and community center that creates a hub of social services, classes and recreational activities supporting the needs of the city's LGBT older adults.INKLING
VERSION 2.0
スプラトゥーン フォント インクイング
— UPDATE —
Download the official Splatoon and Splatoon 2 fonts ripped from the SplatNet 2 app here:
Splatoon1.otf | Splatoon2.otf Download the officialandfonts ripped from the SplatNet 2 app here:
Inkling, a font created from characters that appear in the game Splatoon—seen on Sunken Scrolls, in Octo Valley, written on in-game gear, etc.
DOWNLOAD BELOW!
17 distinct alphabetical glyphs (excluding rotations/mirrored versions) of this writing system have been seen in-game so far. I've vectorized and mapped each character to its closest English (Latin alphabet) equivalent, when possible, so typing English words in this font will lead to somewhat readable text. Unfortunately, Inkling is essentially gibberish—in-game Inkling text cannot be translated and in most cases has no meaning (i.e. the choice of which glyph goes to which character in this font was completely arbitrary, but made to expedite being able to type the characters you want).
By no means does this font provide all the non-English characters seen in-game, as multiple multiple writing systems exist; the characters in this font are those that are the most predominant and widely used.
IMPORTANT NOTE about how this non-standard font works and how to type the 100+ (!) different characters:
a
A
aa
AA
aa
a,a
entEINT
Available characters:
Alphanumeric: abcdefghiíjklmnoópqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOÓPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789
Punctuation: -.!?¡¿/'"
Other: @#$%^&*[]{}\|=+_<>;©®
Version 2.0 changelog:
Added all missing letters and numbers, borrowing from Project Paintball (traced in-game font)
Added'and " characters
and characters Fixed y and c glyphs, which sometimes appeared broken in a certain orientation
Special characters worth noting:
The double-i character can be achieved by typing i twice (provided ligature) or í
The sans-bar 'o' character is mapped to ó ; its vertically-flipped counterpart is mapped to Ó
Letters listed under "Other" in the list of available characters above will not produce their designated character, but rather one of the various symbols from in-game such as brands and other logos. Image-based characters are listed below:
The main brands in alphabetical order are mapped to the keys @#$%^&*[]{}\|.
The dolphin logo is mapped to =.
The tentacle logo is mapped to +.
The Squid Systers logo is mapped to _.
The White Tee (いか t-shirt) logo is mapped to <.
The White Anchor Tee logo is mapped to >.
The Splatfest logo is mapped to ;.
The ヒ "copyright" symbol appearing in many logos is mapped to ©.
The wakaba logo found on the back of the Basic Tee is mapped to ®. Expand
Notes:
When installing the font via Font Book on macOS, a warning may appear that the 'name' table structure is incorrect. You may safely ignore this.
Acknowledgements:
The folks at SquidBoards in this thread, for helping figure out if the language was decipherable and discussing the language in-depth.
Vectorfriend from /ink/, many of whose vectorized brand logos can be found in this font.
JapanYoshi, for providing a few glyphs from Project Paintball (linked below) for use in this font.
Related font projects:
The official versions of the in-game fonts are available for download – see the note at the top of the page!
JapanYoshi's Project Paintball font (Latin characters), available here.
Aramugi's イカモドキ (Ikamodoki) font (Japanese characters), previously available here.
THIS FONT MAY NOT BE USED FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES.
PLEASE GIVE CREDIT IF USED.
This text should be in Inkling if you have the font installed!
By clicking the download link,
you agree to the terms (bold, caps) above.On the roads between Oxford and London in the U.K., a small group of autonomous cars will soon be chattering amongst themselves as they find their way between the cities. The hope is that sharing data in real time can make them better, safer drivers.
Oxbotica, a spinout company from the University of Oxford, has announced that it’s leading a new set of autonomous vehicle tests on the British roads. It will use six vehicles, each equipped with its Selenium software—a bolt-on system that enables most modern vehicles to be fitted with sensors and turned into an autonomous vehicle.
The company hopes that by 2019 the cars will be operating at level four autonomy—which the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration defines as a vehicle “designed to perform all safety-critical driving functions and monitor roadway conditions for an entire trip.” In other words: they will drive themselves, no human required.
For now, the vehicles will be occupied by safety drivers who can take over if anything goes wrong, much like the cars that Uber and Google spinout Waymo are currently testing. But it's an ambitious timeline for getting cars to handle a route that includes inner-city and highway driving without human assistance.
Perhaps even more interesting is that Oxbotica plans to have its vehicles communicate with each other during the tests.
Car-to-car communication, which was one of our 10 breakthrough technologies of 2015, is relatively easy to implement on autonomous cars that are already packed with sensors and computing hardware. Some manufacturers, like BMW and Audi, do plan for their cars to communicate with each other and even talk to street furniture, like traffic lights. But, as a recent Guardian article pointed out, others, like Waymo and Uber, rarely discuss the topic, instead preferring to suggest that their cars are genuinely independent.
To be sure, the cars being developed by Waymo do share their learning with each other to some extent, but not while they're on the road. Partly there's a security consideration: Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has said that its cars “communicate with the outside world only when they need to, so there isn’t a continuous line that’s able to be hacked, going into the car.” But Uber and Waymo are also nervous about the prospect of openly sharing data, for fear of giving away a competitive advantage.
While Oxbotica's cars can also navigate the roads by themselves, the company clearly sees a benefit in working out how best to share data between vehicles. Connected driverless cars could, for instance, alert other vehicles to sudden changes in road conditions, merge lanes intelligently, approach junctions at an appropriate speed, or even work together to dynamically adjust insurance prices. “What’s interesting," explained Paul Newman, a cofounder of Oxbotica, in a statement, “is what data the vehicles share with one another, when, and why.”
For now, of course, Oxbotica's experiments are self-contained—not least because there aren't many other autonomous cars on the roads in the U.K. But by putting the notion of car-to-car communication front-and-center during its testing, the results could be a landmark moment for demonstrating whether connected self-driving cars work better than those going it alone..
(Read more: “Oxbotica’s New Autonomous Vehicle Software Learns As It Goes,” “Why Some Autonomous Cars Are Going to Avoid the Internet,” “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2015: Car-to-Car Communication”)An evil Arab dictator has been in power for decades. He personally controls his country's vast oil wealth. A sponsor of terrorism, he has provoked the West to take military action against him in the past. Islamic fundamentalists despise him as much as the West does. When his people rise up against him, he murders them ruthlessly. The United Nations Security Council has passed resolutions condemning him. An American president, intent on promoting democracy in the Middle East, demands that the dictator abdicate. When the dictator fails to leave, the American president authorizes the use of military force. Our "allies," including Great Britain, are asked to help. The endgame for the use of force is unclear.
Sound familiar? No, we're not talking about Moammar Qaddafi and Barack Obama. We're talking about Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush. The difference is this: in almost the exact same set of circumstances, Bush was called "Hitler" by the Left. Leftists wrote plays and stories and movies about killing him. Democratic Party politicians, like Sen. Dick Durbin, likened our troops to "Nazis." Democratic Senators like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, who voted for the military action, accused the president of lying. Mass demonstrations and protests, sponsored by the communist and socialist Left, broke out in the U.S. and Great Britain. Antiwar groups like Code Pink staged demonstrations at military recruiting stations, and had to be dragged shrieking from the halls of Congress. Opponents of the war shouted that Saddam's Iraq never attacked us, and that our military action was a violation of international law. The Left cried for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney.
President Obama has just committed American forces to engage in acts of war against Moammar Qaddafi. Where are the protesters? Where are the accusations that Obama is a liar and a Nazi? Where are the groups of "artists" wishing death upon the "warmonger" Obama? Where are the cries for Obama's impeachment? There aren't any, and there won't be any, either. Obama - who made a fetish out of his opposition to the "surge" in Iraq, yet ordered a "surge" of his own in Afghanistan - has just committed American forces to combat action against a third Muslim country. No matter. He won the Nobel Peace Prize a priori. The Left regards him as a man of peace in its own mind; the facts are irrelevant.
The Left's hypocrisy on matters of war and peace is sickening. When the Democratic Party is in power, it routinely commits America to war. When Republicans are in power, Democrats engage in shameless demagoguery and paint the Republicans as bloodthirsty warmongers.
In the 1996 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Bob Dole raised some hackles when he said that the majority of American lives lost in combat in the 20th century had been lost in "Democrat wars." Well, Dole was right. Democrat Woodrow Wilson sent American forces to Europe in 1917 not for concrete American interests but for the hazy notion of making the world "safe for democracy." 100,000 were killed. Germany became democratic, all right, and in 1932 the Nazi Party won enough seats in the Reichstag to get Adolf Hitler appointed Chancellor.
When World War II broke out in Europe, Americans wanted neutrality. Democrat Franklin Roosevelt wanted involvement, but public opinion would not allow him to send troops when the British were being bombarded by the Luftwaffe in 1940. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Congress rightly declared war on them; but commander-in-chief Roosevelt committed American forces first to North Africa, then to Italy, then to Germany. Japan, the only Axis power to actually attack the U.S., was defeated last. 400,000 Americans were killed.
Democrat Harry Truman sent American forces to defend South Korea after communist North Korea invaded in 1950. The communists believed they had a green light to attack when Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson failed to include South Korea in America's defense "perimeter." Truman refused to use nuclear weapons to save American lives. End result: 50,000 American dead for a stalemate. Sixty years later, communist North Korea is still there, and now it has nuclear weapons.
Democrat John Kennedy began American involvement in Vietnam, and Democrat Lyndon Johnson escalated the war, sending 500,000 American troops. End result: 58,000 American dead, and a humiliating withdrawal. When Republican Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, he promised to end American involvement in Vietnam; yet he and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger are regarded as "war criminals" by the Left.
Democrat Bill Clinton sent American warplanes to bomb Serbia, which never attacked us; and on Dec. 16, 1998 (which just happened to be the night before he was to be impeached) Clinton ordered four days of bombing missions against Iraq. Did anyone call him "Hitler" or a "war criminal"?
By contrast, Republicans have been reticent to commit American forces to combat operations, and have acted decisively when they have. It was Eisenhower who produced a cease-fire in Korea, refused to commit troops to Vietnam, and warned us of the "military-industrial complex." It was Reagan who committed aid but not troops to anti-communists in Nicaragua, and acted decisively and quickly in Grenada. Partially as a result of Reagan's defense build-up, the USSR collapsed without a shot being fired by American forces. And it was George H.W. Bush who produced quick, decisive victories with almost no casualties in Kuwait and Panama.
Democrats and liberals commit American forces to war promiscuously because they are arrogant and cocksure that their gassy ideals about "democracy" and the "international community" are correct and everybody else is stupid. Woodrow Wilson, the college professor, vowed to "teach Mexico to elect good men." When he went to Versailles in 1919, he was accompanied by a group of professors nicknamed "The Inquiry" who were going to fix the world. FDR had his famous "Brain Trust," and Kennedy and Johnson had the "Best and Brightest." The world thought otherwise.
By contrast, Republicans have been concerned with concrete American interests. When Bush invaded Iraq, making sure that Saddam did not possess weapons of mass destruction that could be given to terrorists was indeed a concrete American interest. He went "off the reservation" when the mission morphed into creating an Iraqi democracy.
What are the concrete American interests in Libya? If promoting a "democratic" uprising in the Middle East is our goal, what do we do if Qaddafi is replaced by America-hating Muslim fundamentalists in a democratic election? And why didn't we call for a "no-fly zone" in Iran during the uprising of 2009? If promoting democracy in the Middle East is our goal, should we back the protesters trying to overthrow Saleh in Yemen? Should we back the Shi'ite uprising in Bahrain -- home of the U.S. 5th Fleet? If there is an uprising against the royal family in Saudi Arabia, should we commit American forces to help overthrow King Abdullah?About The Author Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a senior staff instructor at LinkedIn Learning and Lynda.com with 60+ courses published on WordPress, web standards, design and UX, … More about Morten…
Building Production-Ready CSS Grid Layouts Today
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Industries often experience evolution less as slow and steady progress than as revolutionary shifts in modality that change best practices and methodologies seemingly overnight. This is most definitely true for front-end web development. Our industry thrives on constant, aggressive development, and new technologies emerge on a regular basis that change the way we do things in fundamental ways.
Today, we are in the early stages of such a revolutionary shift, brought about by CSS Grid Layout. Much of what we know of the possibilities, limitations and best practices surrounding web layouts is effectively rendered obsolete by this new layout module, and in their place we find new possibilities, limitations and best practices that will take us into the next era of web design.
Progressively Enhancing CSS Layout Can we use CSS Grid already, and what about IE9? Good question! Here's how to progressively enhance your layout all the way up to CSS Grid, today. Read more →
Much has already been said about the technical aspects of CSS grid and its one-dimensional cousin flexbox by people smarter than me. In this article, I want to bring these concepts into practical use. What you’ll get is a starting point for exploring what new layout opportunities and challenges CSS grid brings, what old problems it solves and how to start using the module in production websites today.
My examples and focus will be on WordPress themes, but the practical approaches and code examples are agnostic and can be used in any web project, regardless of CMS, technology stack or tool.
Meet Smashing Book 6 — our brand new book focused on real challenges and real front-end solutions in the real world: from design systems and accessible single-page apps to CSS Custom Properties, CSS Grid, Service Workers, performance, AR/VR and responsive art direction. With Marcy Sutton, Yoav Weiss, Lyza D. Gardner, Laura Elizabeth and many others. Table of Contents →
Let’s get crackin’!
The Case For CSS Grid
Think of how you would create the layout below using CSS: a responsive two-column layout with a full-bleed header and footer, the main area center-aligned with a maximum width of 60 ems. The content takes up two-thirds of the available space, the sidebar one-third, and the two sections below half the space each.
To solve this layout challenge using traditional CSS layout methods, the content, sidebar and two equal-sized sections would be grouped together in a container, with max-width set to 60em ; that container would be centered, setting margin-right and margin-left to auto ; the different sections would be placed next to one another by setting the main container to display: flex ; and each element would be given a flex value or, in the days before flexbox, by floating them left and right.
Now, put away your web design hat for a moment and think of this as a layout you are asked to create in your favorite design application. What’s the first thing you do? You create a grid: four rows and eight columns.
In a print environment, you don’t use margins to center-align content or apply flex sections to match the height of sections — you just place them where they belong on the grid: The header, content and sidebar area, and footer each take up one row, the header and footer take up all eight columns, while the content occupies columns 2 to 5, and the sidebar columns 6 and 7.
With CSS grid, you can now do the same in the browser:
.site { display: grid; grid-template-columns: 1fr repeat(6, minmax(auto, 10em)) 1fr; grid-template-rows: minmax(1em, auto) 1fr auto minmax(1em, auto); }.masthead,.colophon { grid-column: span 8; }.main-content { grid-column: 2/6; }.sidebar { grid-column: 6/8; }.twin { grid-column: 2/5; grid-row: 3/4; }.twin:last-of-type { grid-column: 5/8; }
You can view the live version on Codepen:
CSS grid takes the best parts of print-based grid layouts and enhances them with the fluidity of the browser’s viewport: The six middle columns would have a maximum width, thanks to CSS’ minmax() function, and the first and last column would be set using the fr unit, to share a specified fraction of the remaining available space. What we’re left with is a center-aligned responsive grid layout, in the browser. And because this is all powered by CSS, we can use media queries to change the layout for different viewport widths.
Like flexbox, grid honors the text direction of the document, so if the dir attribute is set to rtl, the layout automatically mirrors, placing the sidebar on the left.
The New CSS Grid Mindset
As this example shows, to start working with CSS grid, you first need to set aside the habits, assumptions and practices that have enabled you to create advanced CSS-based layouts. In many cases, these established approaches are hacks developed to work around the limitations of CSS as a layout tool. CSS grid is, in my opinion, the first true layout module in CSS. It gives you two dimensions to work with and the ability to place any element in any cell or combination of cells. That requires a whole new mindset: Rather than asking, “How do I make this vertical stack of content behave as if it were laid out in a grid,” you simply define the grid and place each piece of content within it.
Let’s look at one more example to see just how different this is from how we used to do things.
Consider this single-column layout, containing both width-constrained, center-aligned content and full-bleed images and backgrounds:
The grid layout (right) has 8 rows and 4 columns. Using CSS grid, you should be able to position elements on that grid in any way you like. However, a grid container (one whose element is set to display: grid ) only treats the elements that are direct descendants as grid items. This means you can’t create a single layout grid here. Instead, you have to create grids at the component level, effectively creating multiple grids with the same properties.
Side note: The grid specification contained a proposal for subgrids, which allow a descendant element to inherit the parent grid and apply it to its children. The subgrid feature has been moved to level 2 of the specification, meaning it will not be available in browsers for the foreseeable future. Rachel Andrew is following this development closely and has published extensive information about where subgrid currently stands and what comes next for the feature. Until that time, the most practical workaround is to nest grids within grids, effectively defining grid descendants as their own grids.
To build the layout above in the browser, you would use CSS grid in cohort with other tools and practices, as we’ll see.
If you don’t do anything, each section will be full width out of the box. For each section with center-aligned content sections, you apply the.grid class and create CSS rules that set up a four-column grid and position the content in the two center columns. The layout of three buckets in the third section is achieved using flexbox. The last section, with two full halves, comprises two individual grid items, taking up two columns each. This is achieved using grid-column: span 2; (meaning the grid items span two columns) and allowing grid auto-placement to handle the rest.
/* Four-column layout. Two center columns have a total max-width of 50em: */.grid { display: grid; grid-template-columns: 1fr repeat(2, minmax(auto, 25em)) 1fr; } /* Center items by placing them in the two center columns: */.splash-content,.more-content,.buckets ul { grid-column: 2/4; } /* Use automatic grid placement + span to let each item span two columns: */.twin,.colophon aside { grid-column: span 2; }
You can view the live version on Codepen.
This example shows both how CSS grid can be used to solve common layout challenges like full-bleed sections, and how there are still limitations to what we can do with the module. As explained, ideally, you’d want to draw a single grid, and use subgrid to handle all of the sections and subsections. However, for now, only first-level descendants of the container whose display property set to grid can be positioned on the grid, and the subgrid property has not been implemented in browsers, so we are forced to come up with workarounds like what you’ve seen here. The good news is that this is still better than older methods, and it produces clean and readable CSS.
A Process For Using CSS Grid In Production
Now that you have an idea of why CSS grid is so important and how to adopt a CSS grid mindset, let’s look at how to use this module in production.
More than a layout module, CSS grid is an invitation to reaffirm our original intent with web design and development: to create accessible, extensible solutions that bring content to those interested in the best way possible.
At the core of any front-end web project is a simple principle: First make it accessible, then make it fancy, and make sure the fancy doesn’t break accessibility.
We also need to consider responsiveness, cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility, and progressive enhancement. Putting all this together, we end up with an outline for a practical process of development:
Create accessible HTML with a sound hierarchical and semantic structure. Create a responsive single-column layout for all screen widths. Apply advanced layouts and functionality (grid, flex, JavaScript, etc.).
This should result in an accessible solution that works in all browsers on all platforms, while taking advantage of the latest technologies.
Backwards Compatibility and Browser Support
Before we continue, let’s quickly address the giant neon-orange elephant in the room: CSS grid is bleeding-edge technology, and while it has support in modern browsers, it has zero backwards compatibility. This could be considered an automatic non-starter, but I would argue it’s an opportunity to reframe the way we think about backwards compatibility:
CSS grid is a layout module; it allows us to change the layout of a document without interfering with its source order. In other words, CSS grid is a purely visual tool, and used correctly, it should have no effect on the communication of the contents of the document. From this follows a simple but surprising truth: The lack of support for CSS grid in an old browser should not affect the experience of the visitor, but rather just make the experience different.
If you agree with this (and you should), there is no reason you can’t use CSS grid today!
Here’s how that approach could work in practice. Rather than using fallbacks and shims to ensure a design and layout look the same across all browsers, we’d provide the mobile vertical single-column layout to all browsers and then serve up advanced functionality to those browsers and viewport widths that can take advantage of them. It might sound like progressive enhancement, but it’s actually more of an accessibility-centric approach enabled by a mental shift.
Before applying any CSS, we start with a properly marked-up HTML document, laid out in a single column. The document is navigable with any input device and has a hierarchical structure that ensures that reading it from top to bottom conveys the message in the best possible way. This is what makes it accessible. Based on what we know about the web-using public, we can assume that a significant portion of the visiting audience will come to the website using a smartphone. Using mobile-first design, we use CSS to style the single column of the document to fit the smallest mobile screen. This gives us the baseline of the design.
Now comes the mental shift: If the message of the document comes across in a single column on a narrow screen, then that same layout will work on a wide screen as well! All we have to do is make it responsive to fit the given viewport. This gives us an accessible, cross-browser, backwards-compatible baseline on which we can build advanced layouts and functionality using modern web technologies like CSS grid and advanced JavaScript.
In short, we would use CSS grid for visual and layout enhancements, not for meaningful changes to the content. The former leads to better design, the latter to broken accessibility.
Example: Using CSS Grid In A WordPress Theme
CSS grid simplifies age-old approaches and opens |
Entertainment), and Spider-man belongs to Sony Pictures. However, certain characters in the comics, like Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, mutant children of Magneto, have appeared in multiple titles, straddling the line between the two partnerships — leading to a battle over rights, and for fans, a competition between who did it better.
And right now, it's no contest. Sorry, Fox. Even though this is just concept art, Avengers Quicksilver (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is already in a better place than X-Men Quicksilver (Evan Peters). As part of their television special last night, Marvel also released concept art (which looks like it was inspired by BioShock or Final Fantasy) of Scarlet Witch (played by Elizabeth Olsen) who will also be making an appearance in Avengers: Age of Ultron:
Marvel also released test footage of Ant-Man, another upcoming film franchise.
... and concept art from Guardians of The Galaxy:
It was great to get a sneak peak at all this Marvel art, but the worst part of all of this eye candy is that we have to wait a while longer until we actually get to see live-action Quicksilver and company. Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man will not be released until 2015, Guardians of the Galaxy isn't slated until in August, but to tide us over, X-Men: Days of Future Past (bless Quicksilver's heart) will be out in May.
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Watch as the Derpus Hoovius stares into the souls being drifted away by the winds of despair.A commission for Back in the game guys! Now that I'm done with the Nightmare Night pack, I can get back on track! Thanks to everyone who purchased the pack, which is 9 people! I didn't expect people to purchase it at all, so I'm happy people did! I will definitely consider doing more packs in the future! And you guys want a comic/Doujin from me, so I'll definitely do something like that in the future! In fact I'm making rough sketches for the Doujin. And it involves Fluttershy and Marble Pie.As of Monday, 183 presidents of colleges and universities across the country have signed onto a pledge to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, even though President Donald Trump has announced the U.S.’s withdrawal.
The school leaders have joined business and governmental leaders in a pledge to “fill a leadership void on a global issue,” reports the Chronicle of Higher Education. “These are institutions, by and large, that have already committed to reduce their carbon footprint.”
The coalition was organized by former New York City mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and is working with the U.N. on how to represent the United States as a member of the Paris Climate Agreement, reports the New York Times.
“By declaring that ‘we are still in,’ the signatories are putting the best interests of their constituents, customers, students and communities first while assuring the rest of the world that American leadership on climate change extends well beyond the federal government,” according to a press release coordinated by various supporters of environmental causes.
Though, as James Pinkerton observed at Breitbart News, the Paris climate deal “had been signed by President Obama in 2015 but never submitted to the Senate for ratification,” the business, government, and school leaders state in their pledge, “We are still in.”
The leaders assert the federal government’s role in the climate agreement is, essentially, unnecessary:
In the U.S., it is local and state governments, along with businesses, that are primarily responsible for the dramatic decrease in greenhouse gas emissions in recent years. Actions by each group will multiply and accelerate in the years ahead, no matter what policies Washington may adopt. In the absence of leadership from Washington, states, cities, colleges and universities and businesses representing a sizeable percentage of the U.S. economy will pursue ambitious climate goals, working together to take forceful action and to ensure that the U.S. remains a global leader in reducing emissions.
Robert C. Orr, dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, helped draft the Paris agreement.
“A lot of universities have been walking the walk,” Orr said, reports the Chronicle. “Many universities, like my own, are small cities. The idea that academic institutions have to live their values on something as fundamental as sustainability has led to major investments in sustainable practices.”
“Participating in things like this do bring the network of universities closer into the coordination of the efforts to advance climate action,” he added. “They’re at the table, to use the phrase of the day, even if the United States government is not.”
“To my knowledge we haven’t seen a shared statement of such strong alignment at the senior level,” said Timothy Carter, president of Second Nature, a nonprofit group that works with colleges and universities on climate-change efforts.
Second Nature’s corporate sponsors include Customer First Renewables, Greener U, NextEra Energy Resources, and Siemens.
Groups that helped to coordinate the press statement include the American Sustainable Business Council, B Team, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Center for American Progress, Ceres, CDP, Climate Mayors, Climate Nexus, C40, C2ES, Environmental Defense Fund, Environmental Entrepreneurs, Georgetown Climate Center, ICLEI, National League of Cities, Rocky Mountain Institute, Second Nature, Sierra Club, The Climate Group, We Mean Business, and World Wildlife Fund.
Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, dismisses the notion that the coalition’s intention to continue with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement is political in nature.
“I think it’s quite extraordinary that supporting a basic commitment to lessen a source of pollution in the world is seen as a particularly strong civic or political act,” Roth said, according to the Chronicle. “At a time when the White House is promoting an anti-scientific assault on public policy and research, it’s really important for universities and especially university leadership to defend the values that are necessary for us to be institutions of learning.”
“The university stands for the pursuit of knowledge and scientific inquiry,” said Brandeis President Ronald D. Liebowitz. “I see it as a responsibility. We recognize the science.”
Steven Knapp, president of George Washington University, even suggested public-private partnerships could be what keeps the climate agreement afloat in the absence of the federal government’s participation.
“Partnerships between businesses and institutions and governments can actually make a difference in combating climate change,” he said.
Meanwhile, Trump’s announcement also has supporters of the Paris agreement concerned about its effects on K-12 education.
Liana Loewus writes at Education Week that since “97 percent of climate scientists agree that global warming is due in large part to human activity,” Trump’s exit from the agreement will cause some difficulties for teachers in K-12 classrooms.
Loewus reports that Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, says Trump’s decision to withdraw from the climate agreement will not lead to changes for teachers who are already teaching that climate change is caused by humans.
“It will spur them to continue presenting climate change accurately, honestly, and constantly in the classroom,” Branch said, but added his concerns about other teachers.
“What I’m more worried about is teachers who reject the science and feel the need to share that with students—they may feel emboldened,” he explained. “And teachers in the middle who aren’t confident about the science, they’ll increasingly feel beleaguered and will feel pressure from the community, or will anticipate feeling pressure, and will water down their presentation of climate change.”1990 video game
Smash TV is a 1990 arcade game created by Eugene Jarvis and Mark Turmell for Williams.[1] It revolves around a futuristic, violent game show in which players move through a series of rooms collecting prizes and clearing out waves of enemies using guns and power-up abilities. It is a dual-stick shooter in the same vein as 1982's Robotron: 2084 (co-created by Jarvis).
The Super NES, Genesis, Master System, and Game Gear versions were titled Super Smash TV.
Gameplay [ edit ]
The play mechanic is similar to that of Eugene Jarvis' earlier Robotron: 2084, with dual-joystick controls and series of single-screen areas. The theme of the game, borrowed from The Running Man,[2][3] involves players competing in a violent game show, set in the then-future year of 1999. Moving from one room to the next within the studio/arena, players have to shoot down hordes of enemies who advance from all sides while at the same time collecting weapons, power-up items, and assorted bonus prizes, until a final showdown with the show's host where players are finally granted their prizes, life and freedom. Among the game's items are keys – if enough keys are collected, players can access a bonus level called the Pleasure Dome.[4]
Arcade screenshot
The game features verbal interjections from the gameshow host such as "Total Carnage! I love it!", "dude!" and "I'd buy that for a dollar!". The former quote gives itself to the title of the 1992 follow-up, Total Carnage, which, while not a direct sequel, features similar gameplay. The quote "I'd buy that for a dollar!" is a reference to the catchphrase of Bixby Snyder, a fictional television comic in the 1987 film RoboCop.
Development [ edit ]
Mark Turmell recounted, "When Hasbro pulled the plug on an interactive movie project I was working on, I went to Williams to design coin-op games. I moved to Chicago, hired John Tobias, and together we did our first coin-op, Smash T.V."[5]
The announcer in the game is voiced by sound designer Paul Heitsch. The script was created by the game's sole composer and sound designer Jon Hey.
Originally the arcade game shipped without the Pleasure Dome bonus level implemented, although there was text mentioning it in the game. The design team had not been sure that players would actually get to the end of the game. However, players did finish the game and after arcade operators informed Williams of player complaints of being unable to finish it, the company sent out a new revision that included the Pleasure Dome level.[4]
Ports [ edit ]
Smash TV was ported to consoles, including the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super NES, Game Gear, Master System, and Mega Drive/Genesis. On some home systems such as the NES, players have the option to use the directional pad on the second controller to control the direction the character will shoot on-screen. Using this option for both players requires a multitap.[6] The dual control aspect of the game works particularly well on the SNES, as its four main buttons, A, B, X and Y, are laid out like a D-pad, enabling the player to shoot in one direction while running in another.[7]
Home computer versions were produced by Ocean for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST and Amiga, all released in early 1992. The Amiga version scored 895 out of a possible 1000 in a UK magazine review,[8] and the Spectrum magazine CRASH awarded the ZX version 97%, making it a Crash Smash.[9]
Reception [ edit ]
Legacy [ edit ]
The 1992 Williams arcade game Total Carnage shares many elements with Smash TV and was also programmed by Turmell, but is not a sequel.
Smash TV is part of Arcade Party Pak released for the PlayStation in 1999.[19]
It is included in the Midway Arcade Treasures collection, which is available for the PC, Nintendo GameCube, Xbox and PlayStation 2 and was released in 2003. These versions give the player the option to save high scores.[20] Smash TV was also part of the 2012 compilation Midway Arcade Origins.[21]
Smash TV was made available for download through Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade service on the Xbox 360 and was the first version of the game to officially allow two players to play the game online.[22] It was delisted from the service in February 2010[23] after the dissolution of Midway Games.A philosophy that I believe in is one in which the swing is powered by the subconscious mind and reacts to the image that the conscious mind creates. I am not stating that a golfer’s physical technique is not important, because it is. I am simply stating that we should strive to attain a level where the physical technique becomes subconscious.
The target is and always will be the single most important piece of information that a golfer can think of prior to playing a shot. The target can be the hole, a spot on the green, a slope on the fairway, a tree, or any other distinguishable marking of the golf course. The important thing is to select a precise target and remain fully committed to it throughout the duration of the swing. Playing to one’s true potential requires the physical golf swing to be a subconscious reaction to a mental image of the target.
When people learn to type, they begin by visually scanning the keyboard and finger pecking each key. As they begin to remember the placement of the keys, their keystrokes become faster. Eventually, they will develop a mental map of the keyboard so that the physical keystrokes are no longer a function of the conscious mind, but that of the subconscious mind. As their mental map of the keyboard becomes more and more clear, their physical keystrokes become fast and effortless.
Similarly, people learning to play the guitar begin by learning the location of the strings and then the physical placement of the fingers. Eventually they will have memorized the strings, the placement of the fingers and enough notes to play an entire song. At this point, the physical movements are a function of the subconscious mind and do not require additional thought. People learning to play golf rarely take their golf swing to the point where it becomes a function of the subconscious mind. Instead, they consciously work on swing mechanics and remain forever frustrated with the game.
In most sports, athletes look at their target while performing their specific skill. For instance, baseball players look at their teammate while throwing the ball. Basketball players look at the hoop while shooting. Quarterbacks hypothesize and look at a spot where the receiver should be at the time that the football arrives at its destination. Field-goal kickers and soccer players are similar to golfers in that they look at the ball while maintaining a mental image of the target. In all of these scenarios, the physical motion is a subconscious action to the intention of sending the ball to the target.
Driving and full shots
Select a target in the fairway or on the green at which you plan to land your ball. If you are not able to identify with a spot on the ground, select a tree, edge of a bunker or any other identifiable target.
During my pre-shot routine, I determine a landing spot at which I intend to play my shot. Below, I am looking at my landing spot, creating an image that I will use during the swing. Simply looking at the target is enough for our mind and body to calibrate the desired motion of sending the ball there.
During the swing, I maintain the image of the target and in my mind’s eye. This allows my physical swing to be a subconscious reaction to the target.
Pitching
Either select the hole as your target or spot on the green where you intend to land your ball. If a landing spot has been selected, visualize the desired trajectory of the ball as it lands on the spot for sufficient roll-out to reach the hole. The ability to control trajectory is critical in controlling distance.
Below, I am selecting my desired landing spot by visualizing my intended shot trajectory and roll out so that the ball finished in or around the hole.
Next, I maintain an image of the landing spot and trajectory so that I play the shot with accuracy and confidence.
Putting
Putting should be the easiest shot to allow the swing to become a subconscious reaction to the target. Select a precise target inside the hole. On breaking putts, select a target outside of the hole, but equal distance to it. A blade of grass, an old pitch mark, or simply a discoloration are all great targets for putting. Create an image of your target and see if you can stay committed to it for the duration of the stroke. If you can do this successfully, take the same mindset to pitching.
It is one thing to select a target, but to remain fully committed to it for the duration of a golf swing is paramount. Challenge yourself by seeing how committed to the target you can remain during a given swing. Assess you commitment on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is not committed at all and 10 is fully committed. During the golf swing, losing the image of the target represents a mental gap where fear, anxiety and tension can enter and break down even the best golf swings.
Understanding and learning how to keep your conscious mind focused and occupied with where you wish to send your ball, enables your subconscious mind to perform the physical movement, effortlessly and free of distraction. If you are not asking yourself, “What is my target?” before each and every shot, you are not giving yourself the opportunity to play the caliber of golf that you are capable of playing.It’s the part you can’t look away from on The Night Of: As attorney John Stone, John Turturro’s feet are red, swollen, magnificently disgusting sausage packets. Just look at him scratch those things. Stone’s battle with eczema acts as a larger metaphor for the frustration with big, inefficient systems. Only way grosser! Peter Moffat, who wrote Criminal Justice, the British series that The Night Of is based on, had personal struggles with eczema, which is why what might have started as a minor character quirk has morphed into an absorbing plotline. Stone goes from doctor to doctor to try to find a cure for his eczema, so that one day he too might get to wear a pair of Oxfords like a close-toed Cinderella.
Well, your friends at Vulture are going to do some of the footwork for you, John. We’ve consulted with Upper East Side dermatologist Dr. Debra Jaliman, who’s also a contributor to WebMD, the website you use to diagnose the weird bumps on your stomach. (Fingers crossed they aren’t bed bug bites!) “I treat a lot of eczema,” Jaliman said to me on the phone. “Nothing is strange for me.” So let’s get to the burning, stinging questions you might have about John Stone’s eczema.
So he has eczema, right?
No question. “For a dermatologist, it’s something that’s very easy to diagnose,” said Jaliman. “I’ve seen people that can barely walk, their feet are so bad. Their feet are cracked, bleeding, red, peeling, itching, they can’t sleep at night. We’ve had to hospitalize people sometimes for eczema it’s so bad.”
As for John Stone, “it seems like he has chronic eczema where nobody really treated it well or properly,” says Jaliman. Moreover, she thinks that he likely has a secondary staph infection from all the scratching. “They have bacteria under their nails or these objects that he’s using, whether it’s the chopsticks or whatever, and they get skin infections,” she said. “So you have to treat the eczema, but you have to treat the secondary infection otherwise it makes it even itchier. It makes the skin worse.”
What about the Paco Rabanne he’s been spritzing?
“Ugh, bad, bad, bad,” said Jaliman. “Two things about the cologne: One is the fragrance, but the other: What is cologne? It’s an alcohol, so alcohol is so drying. So sometimes patients can be their worst enemies.” But at least the Paco Rabanne is a pretty good clue that he’s suffering from a staph infection. “When you have a smell, it’s usually an infection.” Noted!
Why is he putting Crisco on his feet? Does that work?
One of the zanier treatments Stone’s dermatologist prescribes is to butter his feet with Crisco before wrapping them up with plastic wrap. “I know in olden times — and I’ve been a dermatologist for a long time — people could do that,” said Jaliman. “One of the reasons is that Crisco is very moisturizing.” Its great advantage is that it’s “very bland” so there aren’t additives that would harm the skin. But, she says, “I wouldn’t use that treatment. We use higher-tech treatment than Crisco on the Upper East Side of New York, anyway.”
What about bathing in bleach?
“That’s a good suggestion. The bleach kills the staph,” said Jaliman. “That’s very good research on their part.” She notes that you should “dilute” the bleach according to the prescribed amount, otherwise you could further damage your skin. As for the UV-lamp prescribed by the same doctor, that can also be risky, because while it might help with the itching, it can cause skin cancer. “You can use it, but you have to use it sparingly,” said Jaliman. The same goes for the cortisol steroid.
So what should he do?
“The goal is twofold,” said Jaliman. “One is to stop the scratching, the other is to repair the barrier.” She recommends putting him on antibiotics to clear up the staph infection. “You could use an antibiotic that’s not a brand, clear up the infection from inside,” she said. “Maybe he has a deep infection and nobody’s really cleared it up.” She recommends a fragrance-free moisturizer that he could put on multiple times a day. There are also specifically engineered socks that he could wear instead of wrapping his feet in Saran wrap.
Her favorite go-to cream is called pimecrolimus, an “immune-stimulator cream” that prompts the body to heal itself, rather than a steroidal cream. “People come to me from all over, they go, I’ve been to 17 dermatologists, no one can get rid of my eczema,” said Jaliman. “Then we say, ‘Have you ever used this?’ They say, no, never heard of it. We put them on this and then they totally heal and clear up and they’re just amazed that nobody ever gave it to them.” Jaliman said that she even uses it herself, as she suffers from low-grade eczema. “It has no side effects, so you could use it for the rest of your life, ten times a day if you had to.”
So is that it?
No, silly! It’s about instituting good daily habits. “I would also spend a lot of time explaining to him how to bathe, because a lot of these people don’t understand how to bathe,” she said. She would recommend that he shower in the “coolest shower he could tolerate” and to use “super-fatted soaps” as a way to keep moisture in his skin. Oh, and get a humidifier in your room!Indy Eleven 0 – 1 Atlanta Silverbacks
Goals:
15′ – Pedro Ferreira Mendes (ATL)
Major Themes
– Atlanta played a 3-5-2 and controlled the speed of the game by asserting their physicality and maintaining strong defensive shape. After scoring the early goal, Atlanta bunkered down to disrupt Indy’s attack more than trying to move forward. The slow pace disrupted Indy’s efforts to build momentum.
– Indy were still able to make a very respectable showing in terms of moving forward. Out of 24 total shots, Indy had 18. The second half produced many “almost” moments for the boys in Blue. Besides being unable to build momentum, the Eleven also lacked a sense of cohesion.
In Form:
– Steward Ceus (ATL) – The massive goalkeeper from Haiti showed once again that he’s one of the NASL’s better keepers. He made crucial saves showing both athleticism and quick reaction times.
– Jaime Chavez (ATL) – The second year Silverbacks forward had a great game. The only goal in the game came when Chavez brought the ball down just outside the box, evaded Indy’s entire back line and made a stylish pass to Pedro Mendes who was making a run at goal. Chavez’s ability to find a threatening pass showed several more times in the game.
– Zach Steinberger (IND) – Playing his first game just days after coming on loan from the Houton Dynamo, the midfielder showed why he was the 8th overall pick in the 2015 MLS Superdraft. Steinberger made fast, potent attacking runs and looked steady on the ball. Definitely one to watch for in the coming games.
– Dane Richards (IND) – Another MLS loanee, Richards played his third game for Indy. Pace was also his weapon of choice and he displayed some great ball control. He had a phenomenal chance in the 53rd minute after a great run. Unfortunately he his final touch was the weakest and the opportunity was squandered.
Liabilities:
– Lady Luck (IND) – On another day, one of the multiple Indy attacks would find their way into the back of the net. The Eleven kept pushing through late in the game, weathering physical play to get a shot or two. Somehow nothing stuck and the one goal deficit lasted through the end of the game.
– Red Cards and Injuries (IND) – Indy was missing Dylan Mares after a recent miniscus surgery. Erich Norales was also missing, serving the first of a 2 game suspension following a red card. The exclusions of two stalwarts showed in the more disjointed nature of Indy’s game. Defenders Cory Miller and Greg Janicki had only played one previous game together this year. While they played respectively for the most part, their one joint lapse of concentration let a great pass from Jaime Chavez get to Pedro Mendes who slotted it home. In attack, there was good individual play from Richards, Steinberger and Smart but they didn’t seem to know each other’s style of play well. Unsurprising given how little they’ve played together.
– Fotis Bazakos (Referee) – The man in yellow had a mostly good game but showed himself quite stingy in awarding cards. On one occasion late in the game, Shaka Bengura came at a loose ball with a high boot and smashed into Cory Miller. While a foul was called, Bengura wasn’t cautioned for the dangerous play.
You Won’t See On The Highlights
– Atlanta’s time wasting on subs – The Silverbacks waited late into game to make changes. On all three occasions, the player leaving the pitch managed to kill a bit of time while finding their way to the back line.
Lessons Learned
– Atlanta now sit 2nd in the Fall table. Their mid-season personnel changes have worked fantastically with Pedro scoring and both Burgos and Kimura playing well. They have their work cut out for them to make the Championship, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility entirely.
– Indy have the pieces to be a much stronger side than they’re proving to be. Some better chemistry and more discipline in the attack would do them well.We speak to the head of IP at Ubisoft Massive, Martin Hultberg, about the sharing of The Division’s technological advancements with other studios within the company.
The Division is a spectacularly beautiful game, with a spectacular cool new multiplayer experience in the Dark Zone. It’s all driven by the Snowdrop Engine, which was built from the ground-up for The Division. The aim was to capture the team’s impression of an eerie, desolate New York where a pandemic has driven a societal collapse leaving the few survivors to battle the elements and each other. The chilling atmosphere sees dynamic snowstorms blow through a landscape that changes with the time of day, but it’s the studio’s sleight-of-hand around the Dark Zone that has us most impressed.
The Dark Zone is a player-versus-player competitive multiplayer zone in the middle of a grander map of Midtown New York that also includes a much larger player-versus-environment campaign zone. When you move from the campaign area into the competitive multiplayer, it happens seamlessly. There is no menu to go through or matchmaking to worry about. You can go from single player, to multiplayer, and back again at will and with ease. It’s a perfect fit for the setting and tone of the game, but we can also instantly imagine this technology unfolding in other Ubisoft titles.
“Internally we try to share as much technology as possible between the studios,” head of IP at Ubisoft Massive, Martin Hultberg, explained to finder.com.au during a recent press event for the game in Times Square, New York.
“It’s just more efficient that way. In our case we developed the Snowdrop Engine from the ground-up because we needed middleware that could run on the new consoles and PC, while doing everything we wanted to do with the open world, the weather, time of day and such features. Now we’ve made that engine available to other studios, and not just the Clancy teams. Any Ubisoft team can use Snowdrop now.”
The idea of dynamic weather, day/night cycles, gang-mentality AI and destructible environments filtering into other Ubisoft games is certainly exciting. Especially given they are used to drive emergent gameplay sequences where the sandbox AI ecosystem reacts unpredictably as the features are randomised or player-driven.
But what about the concept of having future Ubisoft titles ditch the divide between multiplayer and campaign and allow the two to co-exist in the same play state. Imagine moving into an area of the next Assassin’s Creed, where suddenly other human players lurk amongst the crowd with their own motivations and agendas? Imagine a game that, regardless of genre, can transition between being an MMO or a single player campaign on demand.
“The Dark Zone experience in itself isn’t technology specific to the rest of the game,” Hulkberg continues, “but the transitions that we do between the [campaign and Dark Zone] game modes – the fact that we do not use lobbies or menus – is the key part of the Snowdrop Engine. I think that feature could definitely be incorporated into other Ubisoft games like Assassin’s Creed. It’s a really immersive feature that I think fits with pretty much all Ubisoft’s IPs.”
More The Division content on VG finder
25 internally developed Ubisoft IPs that can now use the Snowdrop EngineImage copyright Border Archaeology Image caption A buckle and part of a strap were found with the metal pieces
A strap for a medieval false leg has been uncovered by archaeologists digging at Gloucester Cathedral.
Metal pieces from a prosthesis band were found with a skeleton in the old lay cemetery.
Experts say traces of bone and possibly wood, found with the band, suggest it supported a prosthetic leg.
Helen Jeffrey from the cathedral said: "We are astonished they found it, it was clogged in mud and looked like little pieces of stones."
The excavation is part of the ongoing Project Pilgrim scheme to redevelop parts of the cathedral.
The pieces, including a metal buckle and a fragment of the strap, were unearthed in the dig south-east of the building's South Porch.
Ms Jeffrey added: "We expected to find some burial sites and skeletons as it used to be a lay cemetery and these little pieces of iron were found in a grave with a skeleton.
"It was just a real puzzler and we had it taken away to be analysed - something similar is on display in London."
The object is expected to go on display at the cathedral in the future.Image caption Peter Sellers, pictured with Sterling Hayden, played three roles in Dr Strangelove
Steven Spielberg told production designer Sir Ken Adam his work for Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove included the best movie-set ever built. Kubrick's dark comedy is now regarded as a Cold War classic. Fifty years on, Sir Ken remembers his time working for Kubrick as a magnificent adventure - if you could take the stress.
Sir Ken Adam sits in his house in central London and summons up memories of Stanley Kubrick. His affection for the director is obvious and at times there's real emotion in his voice.
"I was incredibly close with him. It was almost like an unhealthy love affair between us. And I had a breakdown eventually."
Sir Ken was born Klaus Adam in 1921. The prosperous Jewish family fled Germany as he entered his teens but his Berlin accent remains. Even in retirement he is British cinema's doyen of production design, whose credits include most of the Bond films up to Moonraker (1979).
When summoned in 1963 to a London hotel to meet Kubrick he was aware the American director could be a demanding taskmaster. But the encounter proved unexpectedly easy.
"We were sitting across a table in the living room and all the time we were discussing Strangelove I was doodling. Immediately Stanley was fascinated by my doodles so we got on like a house on fire. Most days during production I drove him to the studio in my E-type Jaguar.
So now I was in hospital in England with a breakdown and Stanley rang the hospital every day to see how I was doing and if I was still alive Sir Ken Adam on the traumatic effect of working wtih Stanley Kubrick
"I recommend this as a way to get to know your director.
"You know, in some ways Stanley was naive and we were both young and full of enthusiasm. At first I thought well this is amazing: here is a man who is supposed to be one of the most difficult directors ever and he accepts everything I've designed. All I have to do is hand it to the art department and they will get cracking. Well, little did I know."
The set everyone remembers from Dr Strangelove is the enormous war room. It is like something out of a dream - or perhaps a nightmare.
"It came as a big shock when two or three weeks into filming I realised Stanley wasn't so easy-going after all. I'd designed the war room as a split-level set with actors on each level but he came to me and said Ken what the hell am I supposed to do with 60 people on the upper level?
"They're standing around with egg on their faces doing nothing - get rid of the upper level. I said: 'Stanley, now you tell me. But of course he was right'.
"We had big rows because on other films I'd been used to telling the director where to do his establishing shot from. But Stanley said the hell with you I'm not putting my camera there - and you'll thank me in the end."
The war room is an acknowledged classic of movie design and Sir Ken can't resist quoting the biggest compliment he ever received.
"I was in the States giving a lecture to the Directors Guild when Steven Spielberg came up to me. He said 'Ken, that War Room set for Strangelove is the best set you ever designed'. Five minutes later he came back and said 'no it's the best set that's ever been designed'."
Image caption Sir Ken Adam designed the sets for seven James Bond films
But by the end of the Strangelove shoot Sir Ken had resolved never to do another Kubrick film: the process had been too exhausting. "We agreed to part as friends and I was so relieved."
But there was to be a second and more difficult chapter in the men's relationship.
"In 1972 he approached me about designing Barry Lyndon but I think he decided I was too expensive and he employed someone else. Three weeks later I was in the south of France doing a film and the phone went.
"It was Stanley sounding like a little New York boy: he said the designer hadn't worked out and he needed me. He schmoozed me into doing the film and I was never happy about it."
Barry Lyndon was an ambitious historical epic to be shot on location. But there was a problem: Kubrick wanted to find locations while barely leaving his family home in Elstree, north of London.
"So we set up in his garage a little war room, with Ordnance Survey maps on the walls and pins everywhere. We had an army of young photographers to go looking at buildings and possible locations and every evening we looked at what they'd done.
"He would be enthusiastic about a particular bed or whatever in a slightly voyeuristic way.
"But we'd have big arguments because I would say: 'No that's Victorian but the film is set in Georgian times'. Well Stanley was so competitive that he bought almost every book available on Georgian architecture so he could argue with me. But none of this was getting the movie made because the buildings and peaceful locations he wanted just don't exist anymore near London.
"It was nerve-destroying. But after five months I got Stanley to switch production to the Republic of Ireland - which I thought was my masterstroke."
Image caption Stanley Kubrick had a reputation as a demanding director
As Sir Ken recalls it, once in Ireland Kubrick changed totally. "He saw himself as General Rommel, who he admired greatly. He equipped all of us with Volkswagens so we became a complete mobile unit driving around Ireland finding locations.
"I spent weeks being chased through fields by bloody bulls. I was going crazy but this was Stanley's character - with all his fears and anxieties he was relentless. "
When Letizia, Sir Ken's Italian-born wife, came out to Ireland she was shocked at his state of mind. She persuaded him to return to England and see a doctor for the sake of his health.
"So now I was in hospital in England with a breakdown. Stanley rang the hospital every day to see how I was doing and if I was still alive. The day I left he phoned me at home.
"He said: 'Ken you were right: we're going to change the way we're making the film and you'll love it. I'm sending a second unit to Potsdam in Germany to pick up extra material and I want you to direct it."
Sir Ken laughs. "Well I found that idea such a huge shock I had to go straight back to the clinic and check in again."
After Barry Lyndon, Sir Ken decided this time, whatever his admiration for Kubrick, the two would never work together again. It was a vow he adhered to with one brief and slightly bizarre exception.
In 1977, designing the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, Sir Ken had built a vast set at Pinewood studios. It included a supertanker which was proving hard to light.
"So I called Stanley up and asked him down to Pinewood to give me ideas. At first he said I was out of my mind but eventually he agreed to come on a Sunday when only security were around.
"He spent three or four hours with me telling me how he would light the stage. And of course the whole thing being in secret appealed to Stanley's |
IDN prevents a huge number of spoofing attacks. All conformant users of [IDNA2003] are required to process domain names to convert what are called compatibility-equivalent characters into a unique form using a process called compatibility normalization (NFKC)—for more information on this, see [UAX15]. This processing eliminates most possibilities for visual spoofing by mapping away a large number of visually confusable characters and sequences. For example, characters like the halfwidth Japanese katakana character ｶ are converted to the regular character カ, and single ligature characters like "fi" to the sequence of regular characters "fi". Unicode contains the "ä" (a-umlaut) character, but also contains a free-standing umlaut (" ̈") which can be used in combination with any character, including an "a". The compatibility normalization will convert any sequence of "a" plus " ̈" into the regular "ä". ([IDNA2008] disallows these compatibility characters as output, but allows them to be mapped on input.)
Thus someone cannot spoof an a-umlaut with a + umlaut; it simply results in the same domain name. See the example in Table 1, Safe Domain Names. The String column shows the actual characters; the UTF-16 column shows the underlying encoding and the Punycode column shows the internal format of the domain name. This is the result of applying the ToASCII() operation [RFC3490] to the original IDN, which is the way this IDN is stored and queried in the DNS (Domain Name System).
Table 1. Safe Domain Names String UTF-16 Punycode Comments 1a ät.com 0061 0308 0074 002E 0063 006F 006D xn--t-zfa.com Uses the decomposed form, a plus umlaut 1b ät.com 00E4 0074 002E 0063 006F 006D xn--t-zfa.com The decomposed form ends up being identical to the composed form, in IDNA
Similarly, for most scripts, two accents that do not interact typographically are put into a determinate order when the text is normalized. Thus the sequence <x, dot_above, dot_below> is reordered as <x, dot_below, dot_above>. This ensures that the two sequences that look identical (ẋ̣ and ẋ̣̇) have the same representation.
Note: The demo at [IDN-Demo] can be used to demonstrate the results of processing different domain names. That demo was also used to get the Punycode values shown in Table 1, Safe Domain Names.
The [IDNA2003] and [UTS46] processing also removes case distinctions by performing a casefolding to reduce characters to a lowercase form. This is helps avoid spoofing problems, because characters are generally more distinctive in their lowercase forms. That means that implementers can focus on just dealing with the lowercase characters. There are some cases where people will want to see certain special differences preserved in display. For more information, and information about characters allowed in IDN, see UTS #46: Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing [UTS46].
Note: Users expect diacritical marks to distinguish domain names. For example, the domain names "resume.com" and "résumé.com" are (and should be) distinguished. In languages where the spelling may allow certain words with and without diacritics, registrants would have to register two or more domain names to cover user expectations (just as one may register both "analyze.com" and "analyse.com" to cover variant spellings). The registry can support this automatically by using a technique known as "bundling".
Although normalization and casefolding prevent many possible spoofing attacks, visual spoofing can still occur with many IDNs. This poses the question of which parts of the infrastructure using and supporting domain names are best suited to minimize possible spoofing attacks.
Some of the problems of visual spoofing can be best handled on the registry side, while others can be best handled on the side of the user agent: browsers, emailers, and other programs that display and process URLs. The registry has the most data available about alternative registered names, and can process that information the most efficiently at the time of registration, using policies to reduce visual spoofing. For example, given the method described in Section 4, Confusable Detection in UTS #39: Unicode Security Mechanisms [UTS39], the registry can easily determine if a proposed registration could be visually confused with an existing one; that determination is much more difficult for user agents because of the sheer number of combinations that they would have to check.
However, there are certain issues much more easily addressed by the user agent:
the user agent has more control over the display of characters, which is crucial to spoofing
there are legitimate cases of visually confusable characters that one may want to allow after alerting the user, such as single-script confusables discussed below
alerting the user, such as single-script confusables discussed below one cannot depend on all registries being responsive to security issues
due to the decentralized nature of DNS, a registry for a domain does not control subdomains: thus the registry for a top-level domain (TLD) like ".com" may not control the labels accepted by a subdomain like "blogspot.com".
Thus the problem of visual spoofing is most effectively addressed by a combination of strategies involving user agents and registries.
Visually confusable characters are not usually unified across scripts. Thus a Greek omicron is encoded as a different character from the Latin "o", even though it is usually identical or nearly identical in appearance. There are good reasons for this: often the characters were separate in legacy encodings, and preservation of those distinctions was necessary for data to be converted to Unicode and back without loss. Moreover, the characters generally have very different behavior: two visually confusable characters may be different in casing behavior, in category (letter versus number), or in numeric value. After all, ASCII does not unify lowercase letter l and digit 1, even though those are visually confusable. (Many fonts always distinguish them, but many others do not.) Encoding the Cyrillic character б (corresponding to the letter "b") by using the numeral 6, would clearly have been a mistake, even though they are visually confusable.
However, the existence of visually confusable characters across scripts offers numerous opportunities for spoofing. For example, a domain name can be spoofed by using a Greek omicron instead of an 'o', as in example 1a in Table 2, Mixed-Script Spoofing.
Table 2. Mixed-Script Spoofing String UTF-16 Punycode Comments 1a tοp.com 0074 03BF 0070 002E 0063 006F 006D xn--tp-jbc.com Uses a Greek omicron in place of the o 1b tοp.com 0074 006F 0070 002E 0063 006F 006D top.com
There are many legitimate uses of mixed scripts. For example, it is quite common to mix English words (with Latin characters) in other languages, including languages using non-Latin scripts. For example, one could have XML-документы.com (which would be a site for "XML documents" in Russian). Even in English, legitimate product or organization names may contain non-Latin characters, such as Ωmega, Teχ, Toys-Я-Us, or HλLF-LIFE. The lack of IDNs in the past has also led to the usage in some registries (such as the.ru top-level domain) where Latin characters have been used to create pseudo-Cyrillic names in the.ru (Russian) top-level domain. For example, see http://caxap.ru/ (сахар means sugar in Russian).
For information on detecting mixed scripts, see Section 5, Mixed Script Detection of UTS #39: Unicode Security Mechanisms [UTS39].
Cyrillic, Latin, and Greek represent special challenges, because the number of common glyphs shared between them is so high, as can be seen from Section 4, Confusable Detection in UTS #39: Unicode Security Mechanisms [UTS39]. It may be possible to compose an entire domain name (except the top-level domain) in Cyrillic using letters that will be essentially always identical in form to Latin letters, such as "scope.com": with "scope" in Cyrillic looking just like "scope" in Latin. Such spoofs are called whole-script spoofs, and the strings that cause the problem are correspondingly called whole-script confusables.
Spoofing with characters entirely within one script, or using characters that are common across scripts (such as numbers), is called single-script spoofing, and the strings that cause it are correspondingly called single-script confusables. While compatibility normalization and mixed-script detection can handle the majority of spoofing cases, they do not handle single-script confusables. Especially at the smaller font sizes in the context of an address bar, any visual confusables within a single script can be used in spoofing. Importantly, these problems can be illustrated with common, widely available fonts on widely available operating systems—the problems are not specific to any single vendor.
Consider the examples in Table 3, Single-Script Spoofing, all in the same script. In each numbered case, the strings will look identical or nearly identical in most browsers.
Table 3. Single-Script Spoofing String UTF-16 Punycode Comments 1a a‐b.com 0061 2010 0062 002E 0063 006F 006D xn--ab-v1t.com Uses a real hyphen, instead of the ASCII hyphen-minus 1b a-b.com 0061 002D 0062 002E 0063 006F 006D a-b.com 2a so̷s.com 0073 006F 0337 0073 002E 0063 006F 006D xn--sos-rjc.com Uses o + combining slash 2b søs.com 0073 00F8 0073 002E 0063 006F 006D xn--ss-lka.com 3a z̵o.com 007A 0335 006F 002E 0063 006F 006D xn--zo-pyb.com Uses z + combining bar 3b ƶo.com 01B6 006F 002E 0063 006F 006D xn--o-zra.com 4a an͂o.com 0061 006E 0342 006F 002E 0063 006F 006D xn--ano-0kc.com Uses n + greek perispomeni 4b año.com 0061 00F1 006F 002E 0063 006F 006D xn--ao-zja.com 5a ʣe.org 02A3 0065 002E 006F 0072 0067 xn--e-j5a.org Uses d-z digraph 5b dze.org 0064 007A 0065 002E 006F 0072 0067 dze.org
Examples exist in various scripts. For instance, 'rn' was already mentioned above, and the sequence अ + ा typically looks identical to आ.
In most cases two sequences of accents that have the same visual appearance are put into a canonical order. This does not happen, however, for certain scripts used in Southeast Asia, so reordering characters may be used for spoofs in those cases. See Table 4, Combining Mark Order Spoofing.
Table 4. Combining Mark Order Spoofing String UTF-16 Punycode Comments 1a လို.com 101C 102D 102F xn--gjd8ag.com Reorders two combining marks 1b လုိ.com 101C 102F 102D xn--gjd8af.com
An additional problem arises when a font or rendering engine has inadequate support for characters or sequences of characters that should be visually distinguishable, but do not appear that way. In Table 5, Inadequate Rendering Support, examples 1a and 1b show the cases of lowercase L and digit one, mentioned above. While this depends on the font, on the computer used to write this document, roughly 30% of the fonts display glyphs that are essentially identical. In example 2a, the a-umlaut is followed by another umlaut. The Unicode Standard guidelines indicate that the second umlaut should be'stacked' above the first, producing a distinct visual difference. However, as example 2a shows, common fonts will simply superimpose the second umlaut; and if the positioning is close enough, the user will not see a difference between 2a and 2b. Examples 3 a, b, and c show an even worse case. The underdot character in 3a should appear under the 'l', but as rendered with many fonts, it appears under the 'e'. It is thus visually confusable with 3b (where the underdot is under the e) or the equivalent normalized form 3c.
Table 5. Inadequate Rendering Support String UTF-16 Punycode Comments 1a al.com 0061 006C 002E 0063 006F 006D al.com 1 and l may appear alike, depending on font. 1b a1.com 0061 0031 002E 0063 006F 006D a1.com 2a ä ̈ t.com 00E4 0308 0074 002E 0063 006F 006D xn--t-zfa85n.com a-umlaut + umlaut 2b ät.com 00E4 0074 002E 0063 006F 006D xn--t-zfa.com 3a eḷ.com 0065 006C 0323 002E 0063 006F 006D xn--e-zom.com Has a dot under the l; may appear under the e 3b ẹl.com 0065 0323 006C 002E 0063 006F 006D xn--l-ewm.com 3c ẹl.com 1EB9 006C 002E 0063 006F 006D xn--l-ewm.com
Certain Unicode characters are invisible, although they may affect the rendering of the characters around them. An example is the joiner character, used to request a cursive connection such as in Arabic. Such characters may often be in positions where they have no visual distinction, and are thus discouraged for use in identifiers except in specific contexts. For more information, see UTS #46: Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing [UTS46].
A sequence of ideographic description characters may be displayed as if it were a CJK character; thus they are also discouraged.
Font technologies such as TrueType/OpenType are extremely powerful. A glyph in such a font actually may use a small programs to transform the shape radically according to resolution, platform, or language. This is used to chose an optimal shape for the character under different conditions. However, it can also be used in a security attack, because it is powerful enough to change the appearance of, say "$100.00" on the screen to "$200.00" when printed.
In addition Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can change to a different font for printing versus screen display, which can open up the use of more confusable fonts.
These problems are not specific to Unicode. To reduce the risk of this kind of exploit, programmers and users should only allow trusted fonts in such circumstances.
Some characters, such as those used in the Arabic and Hebrew script, have an inherent right-to-left writing direction. When these characters are mixed with characters of other scripts or symbol sets which are displayed left-to-right, the resulting text is called bidirectional (abbreviated as bidi). The relationship between the memory representation of the text (logical order) and the display appearance (visual order) of bidi text is governed by UAX #9: Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm [UAX9].
Because some characters have weak or neutral directionalities, as opposed to strong left-to-right or right-to-left, the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm uses a precise set of rules to determine the final visual rendering. However, presented with arbitrary sequences of text, this may lead to text sequences which may be impossible to read intelligibly, or which may be visually confusable. To mitigate these issues, the [IDNA2003] specification requires that:
each label of a host name must not use both right-to-left and left-to-right characters,
a label using right-to-left character must start and end with right-to-left characters.
The [IDNA2008] specification improves these rules, allowing some sequences that are incorrectly forbidden by the above rules, and disallowing others that can cause visual confusion.
In addition, the IRI specification [RFC3987] extends those requirements to other components of an URL, not just the host name labels. Not respecting them would result in insurmountable visual confusion. A large part of the confusability in reading an URL containing bidi characters is created by the weak or neutral directionality property of many URL delimiters such as '/', '.', '?' which makes them change directionality depending on their surrounding characters. This is shown with the dots in Table 6, Bidi Examples, where they are colored the same as the preceding label. Notice that the placement of that following punctuation may vary.
Table 6. Bidi Examples Samples 1 http:// سلام. دائم. com 2 http:// سلام. a. دائم. com
Adding the left-to-right label " a " between the two Arabic labels splits them up and reverses their display order, as seen in example #2 in Table 6, Bidi Examples. The IRI specification [RFC3987] provides more examples of valid and invalid IRIs using various mixes of bidi text.
To minimize the opportunities for confusion, it is imperative that the [IDNA2008] and IRI requirements concerning bidi processing be fully implemented in the processing of host names containing bidi characters. Nevertheless, even when these requirements are met, reading IRIs correctly is not trivial. Because of this, mixing right-to-left and left-to-right characters should be done with great care when creating bidi IRIs.
Recommendations:
Never allow bidi override characters.
As much as possible, avoid mixing right-to-left and left-to-right characters in a single name.
When right-to-left characters are used, limit the usage of left-to-right characters to well-known cases such as TLD names and URL scheme names (such as http, ftp, mailto, and so on).
Minimize the use of digits in host names and other components of IRIs containing right-to-left characters.
Keep IRIs containing bidi content simple to read.
Use reverse-bidi (visual order -> storage order) to detect possible bidi spoofs. That is, one can apply bidi, then reverse bidi: if the result does not match the original storage order, then the visual reading is ambiguous and the string can be rejected. This is, however, subject to false positives, so this should probably be presented to users for confirmation.
In complex scripts such as Arabic and South Asian scripts, characters may change shape according to the surrounding characters, as shown in Table 7, Glyphs in Complex Scripts. Note that this also occurs in higher-end typography in English, as illustrated by the "fi" ligature. Two characters might be visually distinct in a stand-alone form, but not be distinct in a particular context.
Table 7. Glyphs in Complex Scripts 1. Glyphs may change shape depending on their surroundings: ه ه ه → ههه 2. Multiple characters may produce a single glyph: f i → fi ل ا → لا → 3. A single character may produce multiple glyphs: க ொ → ெ க ா
Some complex scripts are encoded with a so-called font-encoding, where non-private-use characters are misused as other characters or parts of characters. These present special risks, because the encodings are not identified, and the visual interpretation of the characters depends entirely on the font, and is completely disconnected from the underlying characters. Luckily such font-encodings are seldom used, and their use is decreasing rapidly with the growth of Unicode.
Spoofing syntax characters can be even worse than regular characters, as illustrated in Table 8, Syntax Spoofing. For example, U+2044 ( ⁄ ) FRACTION SLASH can look like a regular ASCII '/' in many fonts—ideally the spacing and angle are sufficiently different to distinguish these characters. However, this is not always the case. When this character is allowed, the URL in line 1 may appear to be in the domain macchiato.com, but is actually in a particular subzone of the domain bad.com.
Table 8. Syntax Spoofing URL Subzone Domain 1 http://macchiato.com/x.bad.com macchiato.com/x bad.com 2 http://macchiato.com?x.bad.com macchiato.com?x bad.com 3 http://macchiato.com.x.bad.com macchiato.com.x bad.com 4 http://macchiato.com#x.bad.com macchiato.com#x bad.com
Where there are visual confusables other syntax characters can be similarly spoofed, as in lines 2 through 4. Nameprep [RFC3491] and [UTS46] disallow many such cases, such as such as U+2024 (·) ONE DOT LEADER. However, not all syntax spoofs are disallowed.
Of course, these types of spoofs do not require IDNs. For example, in the following the real domain name, bad.com, is also obscured for the casual user, who may not realize that "--" does not terminate the domain name.
http://macchiato.com--long-and-obscure-list-of-characters.bad.com?findid=12
In retrospect, it would have been much better if domain names were customarily written with the most significant label first. The following hypothetical display would be harder to spoof: it is easy to see that the top level is "com.bad".
http://com.bad.org/x.example?findid=12
http://com.bad.org--long-and-obscure-list-of-characters.example?findid=12
However, that would be an impossible change at this point. However, much the same effect can be produced by always visually distinguishing the domain, for example:
http:// macchiato.com
http:// bad.com
http://macchiato.com/ x.bad.com
http:// macchiato.com--long-and-obscure-list-of-characters.bad.com?findid=12
http:// 220.135.25.171 /amazon/index.html
Such visual distinction could be in different ways, such as highlighting in an address box as above, or extracting and displaying the domain name in a noticeable place.
User agents already have to deal with syntax issues. For example, Firefox gives something like the following alert when given the URL http://something@macchiato.com :
You are about to go to the site "macchiato.com" with the username "something", but the web site does not require authentication. This may be an attempt to trick you. Is "macchiato.com" the site you want to visit?
Such a mechanism can be used to alert the user to cases of syntax spoofing.
It is very important not to show a missing glyph or character with a simple "?", because every such character is visually confusable with a real question mark. Instead, follow the Unicode guidelines for displaying missing glyphs using a rounded-rectangle, as listed in Appendix A Script Icons and described in Section 5.3, Unknown and Missing Characters of [Unicode].
Private use characters must be avoided in identifiers, except in closed environments. There is no predicting what either the visual display or the programmatic interpretation will be on any given machine, so this can obviously lead to security problems. This is not a problem for IDNs, because private use characters are excluded in all specifications: [IDNA2003], [IDNA2008], and [UTS46].
What is true for private use characters is doubly true of unassigned code points. Secure systems will not use them: any future Unicode Standard could assign those codepoints to any new character. This is especially important in the case of certification.
Turning away from the focus on domain names for a moment, there is another area where visual spoofs can be used. Many scripts have sets of decimal digits that are different in shape from the typical European digits. For example, Bengali has {০ ১ ২ ৩ ৪ ৫ ৬ ৭ ৮ ৯}, while Oriya has {୦ ୧ ୨ ୩ ୪ ୫ ୬ ୭ ୮ ୯}. Individual digits may have the same shapes as digits from other scripts, even digits of different values. For example, the Bengali string " ৪ ୨" is visually confusable with the European digits "89", but actually has the numeric value 42! If software interprets the numeric value of a string of digits without detecting that the digits are from different or inappropriate scripts, such spoofs can be used.
IDNA2008, just approved in 2010, opens up new opportunities for spoofing. In the 2003 version of international domain names, a correctly processed URL containing Unicode characters always resolved to the same Punycode URL for lookup. IDNA2008, in certain cases, will resolve to a different Punycode URL. Thus the same URL, whether typed in by the user or present in data (such as in an href) will resolve to two different locations, depending on whether the user is using a browser on the pre-2010 international domain name specification or the post-2010 specification. For more information on this topic, see UTS #46: Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing [UTS46] and [IDN_FAQ].
The Punycode transformation is relatively dense. That means that it is fairly likely that arbitrary words after the "xn--" will result in valid labels. For example, see Table 8a. Punycode Spoofing.
Table 8a. Punycode Spoofing URL Punycode URL 1 http://䕮䕵䕶䕱.com http://xn--google.com 2 http://䁾.com http://xn--cnn.com 3 http://岍岊岊岅岉岎.com http://xn--citibank.com
These examples demonstrate that the common tactic of displaying Punycode for suspicious URLs or for URLs with languages or scripts not in the user's settings can actually backfire, producing display results that are more likely to mislead the user. For example, if a user is unfamiliar with Chinese but knows Latin characters, she is more likely to be mislead by the Punycode URL “http://xn--cnn.com” than by the corresponding Unicode URL “http://䁾.com”. More examples can be created with the demo at [IDN-Demo].
This section lists techniques for reducing the risks of visual spoofing. These techniques are referenced by Section 2.10, Recommendations.
Many opportunities for spoofing can be removed by using a casefolded format. This format, defined by the Unicode Standard, produces a string that only contains lowercase characters where possible.
However, four characters that require special handling in casefolding, where the pure casefolded format of a string as defined by the Unicode Standard is not desired. For example, the character U+03A3 "Σ" capital sigma lowercases to U+03C3 "σ" small sigma if it is followed by another letter, but lowercases to U+03C2 "ς" small final sigma if it is not. Because both σ and ς have a case-insensitive match to Σ, and the casefolding algorithm needs to map both of them together (so that transitivity is maintained), only one of them appears in the casefolded form.
When σ comes after a cased letter, and not before a cased letter (where certain ignorable characters can come in between), it should be transformed into ς. For more details, see the test for Final_Sigma as provided in Table 3-15 of [Unicode].
For more information, see UTS #46: Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing [UTS46]. For more information on case mapping and folding, see the following: Section 3.13, Default Case Operations, Section 4.2; Case Normative; and Section 5.18, Case Mappings of [Unicode].
Mapping and prohibition are two useful techniques to reduce the risk of spoofing that can be applied to identifiers. A number of characters are included in Unicode for compatibility. Compatibility Normalization (NFKC) can be used to map these characters to the regular variants. For example, a halfwidth Japanese katakana character ｶ is mapped to the regular character カ. Additional mappings can be added beyond compatibility mappings, for example, [IDNA2003] adds the following:
200D; ZERO WIDTH JOINER maps to nothing (that is, is removed)
0041; 0061; Case maps 'A' to 'a'
20A8; 0072 0073; Additional folding, mapping ₨ to "rs"
In addition, characters may be prohibited. For example, IDNA2003 prohibits space and no-break space (U+00A0). Instead of removing a ZERO WIDTH JOINER, or mapping ₨ to "rs", one could prohibit these characters. There are pluses and minuses to both approaches. If compatibility characters are widely used in practice in entering text, it is much more user-friendly to remap them. This also extends to deletion; for example, the ZERO WIDTH JOINER is commonly used to affect the presentation of characters in languages such as Hindi or Arabic. In this case, text copied into the address box may often contain the character.
Where this is not the case, however, it may be advisable to simply prohibit the character. It is unlikely, for example, that ㋕ would be typed by a Japanese user, nor that it would need to work in copied text.
Where both mapping and prohibition are used, the mapping should be done before the prohibition, to ensure that characters do not "sneak past". For example, the Greek character TONOS (΄) ends up being prohibited in [IDNA2003], because it normalizes to space + acute, and space itself is prohibited.
Many languages have words whose correct spelling requires the use of certain invisible characters, especially the Join_Control characters:
200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER
200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER
For that reason, as of Version 5.1 of the Unicode Standard the recommendations for identifiers were modified to allow these characters in certain circumstances. (For more information, see UAX #31: Unicode Identifier and Pattern Syntax [UAX31].) There are very stringent constraints on the use of these characters, so that they are only allowed with certain scripts, and in certain circumscribed contexts. In particular, in Indic scripts the ZWJ and ZWNJ may only be used in combination with a virama character. This approach is adopted in [IDNA2008] and [UTS46].
Even when the join controls are constrained to being next to a virama, in some contexts they may not result in a different visual appearance. For example, in roughly half of the possible pairs of Malayalam consonants linked by a virama, the ZWNJ makes a visual difference; in the remaining cases, the appearance is the same as if only the virama were present, without a ZWNJ. Implementations or standards may thus place further restrictions on invisible characters. For join controls in Indic scripts, such restrictions would typically consist of providing a table per script, containing pairs of consonants which allow intervening joiners.
The Unicode property [NFKC_Casefold] can be used to get a combined casefolding, normalization, and removal of default-ignorable code points. It is the basis for the mapping of international domain names in UTS #46: Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing [UTS46]. For more information, also see UTS #39: Unicode Security Mechanisms [UTS39].
To help avoid problems with mixtures of scripts, UTS #39: Unicode Security Mechanisms [UTS39] defines Restriction Levels. An appropriate alert should be generated if an identifier fails to satisfy the Restriction Level chosen by the user or set in the browser. Depending on the circumstances and the level difference, the form of such alerts could be minimal, such as special coloring or icons (perhaps with a tool-tip for more information); or more obvious, such as an alert dialog describing the issue and requiring user confirmation before continuing; or even more stringent, such as disallowing the use of the identifier. Where icons are used to indicate the presence of characters from scripts, the glyphs in Appendix A Script Icons can be used.
The UI for giving users choice among restriction levels may vary considerably. In the case of domain names, only the middle three levels are interesting. Level 1 turns IDNs completely off, while Level 5 is not recommended for IDNs.
Note that the examples in Level 4 are chosen for their familiarity to English speakers. For most languages that customarily use the Latin script, there is probably little need to mix in other scripts. That is not necessarily the case for languages that customarily use a non-Latin script. Because of the widespread commercial use of English and other Latin-based languages, it is quite common to have Latin-script characters (especially ASCII) in text that principally consists of other scripts, such as "خدمة RSS".
Section 3, Identifier Characters in UTS #39: Unicode Security Mechanisms [UTS39] provides for two profiles of identifiers that could be used in Restriction Levels 1 through 4. The strict profile is recommended. If the lenient profile is used, the user should have some way to choose the strict profile.
At all Restriction Levels, an appropriate alert should be generated if the domain name contains a syntax character that might be used in a spoof, as described in Section 2.6, Syntax Spoofing.
For example, an alert might be presented for a syntax character spoof:
You are about to go to the site "bad.com", but part of the address contains a character which may have led you to think you were going to "macchiato.com". This may be an attempt to trick you. Is "bad.com" the site you want to visit? Remember my answer for future addresses with "bad.com"
As another example, an alert might be presented for a mixed-script spoof:
You are about to go to the site "goоgle.com", but the underlined character is a Cyrillic о. This may be an attempt to trick you. Is "goоgle.com" the site you want to visit? Remember my answer for future addresses with "google.com"
This alert does not need to be presented in a dialog window; there are a variety of ways to alert users, such as in an information bar.
User agents should remember when the user has accepted an alert, for say Ωmega.com, and permit future access without bothering the user again. This essentially builds up a whitelist of allowed values. This whitelist should contain the "nameprepped" form of each string. When used for visually confusable detection, each element in the whitelist should also have an associated transformed string as described in Section 4, Confusable Detection [UTS39]. If a system allows uppercase and lowercase forms, then both transforms should be available. The program should allow access to editing this whitelist directly, in case the user wants to correct the values. The whitelist may also include items known by the user agent to be'safe'.
The set of characters in the identifier profile and the results of the confusable mappings may be refined over time, so implementations should recognize and allow for that. Characters suitable for identifiers are periodically added to the Unicode Standard, and thus the data for Section 4, Confusable Detection [UTS39] is also periodically updated.
There may also be cases where characters are no longer recommended for inclusion in identifiers as more information becomes available about them. Thus some characters may be removed from the identifier profile in the future. Of course, once identifiers are registered they cannot be withdrawn, but new proposed identifiers that contain such characters can be denied.
The Unicode Consortium recommends a somewhat conservative approach at this point, because is always easier to widen restrictions than narrow them.
Some have proposed restricting domain names according to language, to prevent spoofing. In practice, that is very problematic: it is very difficult to determine the intended language of many terms, especially product or company names, which are often constructed to be neutral regarding language. Moreover, languages tend to be quite fluid; foreign words are continually being adopted. Except for registries with very special policies (such as the blocking used by some East Asian registries as described in [RFC3743]), the language association does not make too much sense. For more information, see Appendix B, Language-Based Security.
Instead, the Consortium recommends processing strings to remove basic equivalences, promoting adequate rendering support, and putting restrictions in place according to script, and restricting by confusable characters. While the ICANN guidelines say "top-level domain registries will [...] associate each registered internationalized domain name with one language or set of languages" [ICANN], that guidance is better interpreted as limiting to script rather than language.
Also see the security discussions in IRI [RFC3987], URI [RFC3986], and Nameprep [RFC3491].
Use browsers, mail clients, and other software that have put user-agent guidelines into place to detect spoofing. If registering domain names, verify that the registry follows appropriate guidelines for preventing spoofing. If the desired domain name can have any whole-script or single-script confusables (such as "scope" in Latin and Cyrillic), register those as well, if "bundling" is not automatically provided by the registry. Where there are alternative domain names, choose those that are less spoofable. When using bidi IRIs, follow the recommendations in Section 2.5, Bidirectional Text Spoofing. Be aware that fonts can be used in spoofing, as discussed in Section 2.4.1, Malicious Rendering. With documents having embedded fonts (web fonts), be aware that the content on a printed form can be different than is on the screen.
When parsing numbers, detect digits of mixed scripts and unexpected scripts and alert the user. When defining identifiers in programming |
about 20%, while for the South the same share was only about 8%. A major part of the reason why tax revenue did not play as large a role for the Confederacy was the individual states' opposition to a strong central government and the belief in states' rights, which precluded giving too much taxing power to the government in Richmond. Historically the states had invested little money in infrastructure or public goods. Another factor for not extending the tax system more broadly was the belief, present in both the North and the South, that the war would be of limited duration, and hence there was no compelling reason to increase the tax burden.[1][4]
However, the realities of the prolonged war, the necessity of paying interest on existing debt, and the drop in revenues from other sources, forced both the central Confederate government and the individual states to agree by the middle of 1861 to an imposition of a "War Tax". The law was passed on August 15, 1861 and covered property of more than $500 (Confederate) in value and several luxury items. The tax was also levied on ownership of slaves. However, the tax proved very difficult to collect—in 1862, only 5% of total revenue came from these direct taxes, and it was not until 1864 that this amount reached the still-low level of 10%.[1]
Taking account of difficulty of collection, the Confederate Congress passed a "Tax in Kind" in April 1863, which was set at one tenth of all agricultural product by state. This tax was directly tied to the provisioning of the Confederate Army and, despite the fact that it also ran into some collection problems, it was mostly successful. After its implementation it accounted for about half of total revenue, if converted into currency equivalent.[1]
Monetary finance and inflation [ edit ]
Monthly price index in the Confederacy during the war rose from 100 in January 1861 to over 9200 in April 1865. In addition to being fueled by dramatic increases in amount of money in circulation, prices also increased in response to negative news from the battlefield.
The financing of war expenditures by the means of currency issues (printing money) was by far the major avenue resorted to by the Confederate government. Between 1862 and 1865, more than 60% of total revenue was created in this way.[4] While the North doubled its money supply during the war, the money supply in the South increased twenty times over.[5]
The extensive reliance on the money-printing press to finance the war contributed significantly to the high inflation the South experienced over the course of the war, although fiscal matters and negative war news also played a role. Estimates of the extent of inflation vary by source, method used, estimation technique, and definition of the aggregate price level. According to a classic study by Eugene Lerner in 1956, a standard price index of commodities rose from 100 at the beginning of the war to more than 9200 by the war's de facto end in April 1865.[5] By October 1864, the price index was at 2800, which implies that a very large portion of the rise in prices occurred in the last six months of the war.[3] This drop in the demand for money, the corresponding increase in "velocity of money" (see next paragraph) and the resulting rapid increase in the price level has been attributed to the loss of confidence in Southern military victory or the success of the South's bid for independence.[3]
Lerner used the quantity theory of money to decompose the inflation in the Confederacy during the war into that resulting from increases in money supply, changes in the velocity of money, and the change in real output of the Southern economy. According to the equation of exchange:
M V = P Y {\displaystyle MV=PY}
where M is the money supply, V is the velocity of money (related to people's demand for money), P is the price level and Y is real output. If it is assumed that real incomes remained constant in the South during the war (Lerner actually concluded that they fell by about 40%[3]) then the equation implies that for the price level to increase 92 times in the presence of a 20 times increase in money supply, the velocity of money must have increased 4.6 times over (92/20=4.6), reflecting a very significant drop in the demand for money.[5][6]
The problems of money-caused inflation were exacerbated by the influx of counterfeit bills from the North. These were plentiful because Southern "Greybacks" were fairly crude and easy to copy, as the Confederacy lacked modern printing equipment. One of the most prolific and most famous of the Northern counterfeiters was Samuel C. Upham from Philadelphia. By one calculation Upham's notes made up between 1 and 2.5 percent of all of the Confederate money supply between June 1862 and August 1863.[7] Jefferson Davis placed a $10,000 bounty on Upham, though the "Yankee Scoundrel", as he was known in the South, evaded capture by Southern agents.[3] Counterfeiting was a problem for the North as well, and the United States Secret Service was formed to deal with this problem.
The Confederate " Greyback ". Note the stamp which indicates interest paid. Interest-paying money was one of the unique aspects of Confederate public finance
On April 1, 1864, the Currency Reform Act of 1864 went into effect. This decreased the Southern money supply by one-third. However, because of Union control of the Mississippi River, until January 1865 the law was effective only east of the Mississippi.[3]
A fairly peculiar economic phenomenon occurred during the war in that the Confederate government issued both regular money notes and interest-bearing money.[3] The United States also issued Interest Bearing Notes during the war that were legal tender for most financial transactions. The circulation of the interest-bearing money and the convertibility of one kind of money into the other was enforced by fiat and Southern banks were threatened with a return to the gold standard if they did not cooperate.[3] Because of the amount of Southern debt held by foreigners, to ease currency convertibility, in 1863 the Confederate Congress decided to adopt the gold standard. But convertibility was not implemented until 1879 (the 1863 law was never implemented, as it was superseded by the Coinage Act of 1873[2] and the end of the Confederacy).
Debt finance [ edit ]
[1] Quarterly growth rate of the Confederate primary deficit in real terms. The negative values after third quarter 1862 reflect mostly the inability to find willing purchasers for Confederate debt, as the military situation of the South deteriorated.
Issued loans accounted for roughly 21% of the finance of Confederate war expenditure.[4] Initially the South was more successful in selling debt than the North,[2] partially because New Orleans was a major financial center. Its financiers bought up two-fifths of a 15 million dollar loan in early 1861.[8]
The two main types of loans issued by the South during the war were "Cotton Bonds", denominated in pounds sterling and sold in London, and high risk unbacked loans sold in the Netherlands.[3] The Cotton Bonds were convertible directly into bales of cotton, with a caveat, included as a means of political pressure on European countries to recognize the Confederacy, that any such shipments needed to be picked up by the bondholder in one of the blockaded Southern ports (mostly New Orleans).[3] Cotton Bonds initially were very popular and in high demand among the British; William Ewart Gladstone, who at the time was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was supposedly one of the buyers. The Confederate government managed to honor the Cotton Bonds throughout the war, and in fact their price rose steeply until the fall of Atlanta to Sherman. This rise reflected both the increase in the underlying cotton prices and perhaps the possibility that George B. McClellan might get elected as US President on a peace platform. In contrast, the price of the Dutch-issued high risk loans fell throughout the war, and the South selectively defaulted on servicing these obligations.[3]
Revenue from international trade [ edit ]
Monitor in action with CSS Virginia, March 9, 1862. The Union blockade seriously hampered the Confederacy's ability to raise revenue through import tariffs. USSin action with CSS, March 9, 1862. The Union blockade seriously hampered the Confederacy's ability to raise revenue through import tariffs.
In the beginning of the war, the majority of finance for the Southern government came via duties on international trade. The import tariff, enacted in May 1861, was set at 12.5% and it roughly matched in coverage the previously existing Federal tariff, the Tariff of 1857.[9] Between February 17 and May 1 of 1861, 65% of all government revenue was raised from the import tariff. However, revenue from the tariffs all but disappeared after the Union imposed its blockade of Southern coasts. By November 1861 the proportion of government revenue coming from custom duties had dropped to one-half of one percent.[1] Secretary of Treasure Memminger had expected that the tariff would bring in about 25 million dollars in revenue in the first year alone. But the total revenue raised in this way during the entire war was only about $3.4 million.[1][9]
A similar source of funds was to be the tax on exports of cotton. However, in addition to the difficulties associated with the blockade, the self-imposed embargo on cotton meant that for all practical purposes the tax was completely ineffective as a fund raiser.[1] Initial optimistic estimates of revenue to be collected through this tax ran as high as 20 million dollars, but in the end only $30 thousand was collected.[9]
Other sources of revenue [ edit ]
Confederate half dollar coin
The Confederate government also tried to raise revenue through unorthodox means. In the first half of 1861, when the support for secession and the military effort was running strong, the donation of coins and gold to the government accounted for about 35% of all sources of government funds. This source, however, dried up over time as individuals and institutions in the South both ran down their personal holdings of bullion and became less willing to make donations as war-weariness set in. As a consequence, by the summer of 1862, the share of government revenue coming from these donations fell to less than 1%. Over the course of the entire war, this source of revenue contributed only 0.2% of total wartime expenditure.[1]
Another potential source of finance could be found in the property and physical capital owned by Northerners in the South, and the debts owed by individuals in a parallel manner. The Sequestration Act of 1861 provided for confiscation of all Union "lands, tenements, goods and chattels, right and credits" and the transfer of debt obligation on the part of Confederate citizens from Northern creditors directly to the Confederate government. However, many Southerners proved unwilling to transfer their debt obligations. Furthermore, what exactly constituted "Northern property" proved hard to define in practice. As a result, the share of this source of revenue in government funding never exceeded 0.34% and ultimately contributed only 0.25% to the overall financial war effort.[1]
Expenditures [ edit ]
Shares of expenditures by category, 1861 to 1864.
While, unsurprisingly, military spending constituted the largest part of the national government's budget over the course of the war, over time the payment of interest and principal on acquired debt grew as a share of the Confederate government's expenditure. While initially, in early 1861, war expenditure was 95% of the budget, by October 1864 that share fell to 40%, with the majority of the rest (56% overall) being accounted for by debt service. Civilian expenditures and spending on the Navy (recorded separately from general war expenditures in Confederate records) never exceeded 10% of the budget.[1]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
a b c d e f g h i j k l m Burdekin and Langdana, pp. 352–362 a b c Neal, p. xxiii a b c d e f g h i j k Weidenmier a b c Godfrey, p. 14 a b c Tregarthen, Rittenberg, p. 240 ^ Lerner, Journal of Political Economy ^ Weidenmier, Business and Economic History ^ Weigley, p. 69 a b c Todd, p. 123Published: Friday 13 July 2012
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Evolving face of Kings Cross, St Pancras, Farringdon, London Bridge and more revealed.
NETWORK RAIL has today released new photographs from the air of many of its biggest projects in London which have undergone or are undergoing major redevelopments.
They include views rarely seen by the general public of the stunning new concourse roof at King's Cross, the development of Farringdon where Thameslink and Crossrail services will meet the tube, and the changes at Stratford in the shadow of the Olympic stadium. The newly completed Shard also looms large over London Bridge and Borough viaduct which is being redeveloped as part of the Thameslink project.
Images taken last month were captured by the Network Rail helicopter which flies daily to monitor the network checking for faults or potential issues before they arise. Here it also enabled engineering and architectural teams on the London stations see project development from a unique perspective.
Simon Kirby, managing director for infrastructure projects for Network Rail said: “London’s stations are changing massively both on the ground and from the sky, and there’s more to come. King’s Cross is a great example of retaining the grandeur of original Victorian architecture but bringing new and modern facilities for the 21st century passenger and Stratford has changed remarkably ahead of the Games. As well as providing some spectacular images which we are happy to share, aerial photography is extremely useful to us to see these complex developments from a bird’s eye view.”
What’s new?:
- Blackfriars: Half of the photovoltaic roof panels have now been installed on the first station to span The Thames
- Stratford: Massive redevelopment by Olympic Delivery Authority, Transport for London, Westfield and Network Rail including new station entrance at Westfield shopping centre and platforms lengthened
- Farringdon: A new ticket hall for Thameslink passengers, future proofed for Crossrail passengers is nearly complete. From the air you can see its brown roof which provides a new habitat for the redstart bird
- King’s Cross: The new concourse is the size of three Olympic swimming pools. From the air you can see some of the 1,200 triangular panels which make up this new structure.
- Borough viaduct: A new viaduct, over Borough Market has been built providing an extra two tracks to unlock the bottleneck at London Bridge. This section of track will link into London Bridge station once it is complete.
- London Bridge: Is the country’s fourth busiest station and it is full. Today 50m passengers use the station a year. When completed, the redeveloped station will see more than 90m passengers travel through each year.
More:
View the new Network Rail photographs from the airWASHINGTON (Reuters) - A code associated with a broad Russian hacking campaign dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected on a laptop associated with a Vermont electric utility but not connected to the grid, the utility said on Friday.
“We took immediate action to isolate the laptop and alerted federal officials of this finding,” the Burlington Electric Department said in a statement.
“Our team is working with federal officials to trace this malware and prevent any other attempts to infiltrate utility systems. We have briefed state officials and will support the investigation fully.”
The Department of Homeland Security alerted utilities on Thursday night about a malware code used in Grizzly Steppe, the Burlington Electric Department said.
“We acted quickly to scan all computers in our system for the malware signature. We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop not connected to our organization’s grid systems,” it said.
The matched malware code on the laptop may have resulted from a relatively benign episode, such as visiting a questionable website, a source familiar with the matter said, suggesting Russian hackers may not have been directly involved.
It was not clear when the incident occurred.
On Thursday, President Barack Obama ordered the expulsion of 35 Russian suspected spies and imposed sanctions on two Russian intelligence agencies over their involvement in hacking U.S. political groups in the 2016 presidential election.
The statement came after a Washington Post report that Russian hackers penetrated a Vermont utility. Government and utility industry officials regularly monitor the nation’s electrical grid because it is highly computerized and any disruptions can have disastrous implications for the functioning of medical and emergency services, the Post said.
A senior Obama administration official said the administration had sought in its sanctions announcement on Thursday to alert “all network defenders” in the United States so they could “defend against Russian malicious cyber activity.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“This intrusion by itself was a minor incident that caused no damage,” a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the incident and critical of Russian actions said on Friday night.
“However, we are taking it seriously because it has been tracked to familiar entities involved in a much broader and government-directed campaign in cyberspace and because the electric grid is a vulnerable and interconnected part of the nation’s critical infrastructure,” the official said.
Russia is widely considered responsible by U.S. officials and private-sector security experts for a December 2015 hack of Ukraine’s power grid that knocked out the lights for about 250,000 people. That hack prompted National Security Agency chief Mike Rogers to say at a conference in March that it was a “matter of when, not if” a cyber adversary carried out a similar attack against the United States.princess Luna isvia my "plushies in progress - own projects plushies" wich is ponies im making thats isnt comissioned that im planning on selling anyways. Thus, these are for sale as is (some finished, some is in progress), for more info check further down my "Price info & FAQ" journal (linked on my journal). more info of this feature will come during the nearest daysLuna is a "small plush" alicorn, measuring approx 14 inch tall (35cm). she is made from minky and her purple hairline is made with organza. Swarowski crystals in her mane.Body is fully poseable (all 4 legs and her wings aswell).tags; Pony plush, mlp plushie, princess luna plush, Luna, mlp handmade plush, pony plushie, princess luna, handmade plush mlpSocialized Healthcare: Up Close and Personal
Since I have relocated to the United Kingdom (via my current employer), I have had an opportunity to witness the effects of Socialized Healthcare. England’s National Health Service (NHS) was born July 5, 1948. The intent of the NHS was to provide good free health care services to all. These health services were to be financed entirely from taxation (citizens pay according to their means). From what I have learned from the English citizens concerning the NHS (I am eligible for the free service simply by being a current resident), the beginning implementation appeared to be accomplishing what it was intended to do (i.e., good free healthcare for all). However, the British Government did not foresee a healthcare service where the non-tax payers (people on government benefits i.e., welfare) outnumber the taxpayers. More non-tax payers utilizing the free health service appeared as an unintended consequence. Another unforeseen consequence of the free for all healthcare was the influx of immigrants coming into the United Kingdom for the benefit of free healthcare (some visit long enough to get the free service and then go back to their country of origin).
Due to a chronic lack of funding, the NHS is about to reach its breaking point. The current state of the NHS is rife with reports of poor service and incompetent staff (including doctors and nurses). Some of my British associates have recounted their recent encounters with the NHS. An Archeologist in my History and Art social group was schedule for much-needed back surgery for the last week of April of this year. He was to be bedridden for at least a couple of weeks following the surgery. I was surprised to see him at our monthly gathering the first Saturday in May. I asked him how his surgery had gone. He told me that a couple of days before he was scheduled to go in for his surgery, he received a call saying that his surgery had to been canceled because the bed was needed for someone else. The hospital informed him that he had been rescheduled for the last week of May. He was not given a definite date. There is a limited supply of hospital beds in the NHS. If an individual is scheduled for a surgery and someone else comes into the hospital with a more serious injury or condition, the bed is given to that other individual and the first person's surgery will be pushed back to another date. Some people have been waiting for months for much-needed surgeries. My British neighbor (whom I have grown quite fond of) is a retired nurse that worked for the NHS for over forty years. The state of NHS became personal for me when she developed a throat condition. After she saw her general practitioner concerning her condition, he referred her to an ear, nose and throat specialist. She was not given a definite date to when she would be able to be seen by a specialist; she had to wait until she was contacted to go in and be seen. An ear, nose and throat specialist did not see my neighbor until about two weeks later. The only reason she was seen then was that someone else had canceled an appointment. In the meantime, she was in a lot of pain, she could not talk for significant lengths of time without losing her voice, and she suffered with bouts of chronic fatigue. I was quite concerned for my neighbor and friend, so every day after work I would run over to visit her or call her on the phone to see if she had been contacted and given an appointment. One day she sensed my frustration with the way the NHS was handling her situation and said to me, “it’s not like in America.” She admitted that quality healthcare is more accessible in America. She often recounts how a dear friend of hers had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The doctors in the NHS had told her friend that her prognosis was grim. Her friend, whom she described as not one to give up, began searching the internet and read about the amazing results in America using a new (at that time) chemotherapy called TAXOL. Her friend (whom she describes as wealthy) immediately contacted the company and offered to pay for the treatment if they would just give her a chance. It so happened that the company (TAXOL) was just beginning to start trials here in Britain and told her that if she were willing to be a guinea pig, they would provide the chemotherapy treatments for free. She underwent treatments at her local hospital. After a number of sessions of chemo, she was scanned and the gynecologist was amazed at the results. My neighbor’s dear friend lived an additional fifteen years (she later died from an illness unrelated to cancer). She (my neighbor) said that without TAXOL, her friend would not have had the best 15 years of her life. Many have noted that the current VA scandal that is taking place right before our very eyes is an example of Government-run healthcare. I often wonder what possesses our President and the Democratic Party to want to mess up a good healthcare system. Liberals and the media (I repeat myself) often tout how well socialized healthcare is working over here in the UK and Europe. Very few, if any, have actually witnessed first-hand the effects of it. The liberals’ claim of wanting to ensure that everyone has access to free healthcare is not what they really want. Along with single payer, I personally believe that the intent of President Obama and liberals is to punish the evil rich doctors. On August 11, 2009, President Obama slightly let the cat out of the bag at a town hall meeting while promoting Obamacare, when he alluded that doctors are reimbursed more for amputating a foot rather than working with a diabetic patient to ensure he/she is exercising and eating a proper diet. Liberals are so blind with jealousy that they can only see the amount of money one makes rather than the positive contributions resulting from the service or product that one supplies. Patricia L. Dickson blogs at Christian Commentary (http://patriciascornerblog.com). You can contact her at dicksonpat@sky.comAn Israeli pro-settlement group is campaigning for Britain to leave the EU to punish it for what it says is its pro-Palestinian stance, one of its officials said on Sunday.
Regavim supports Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Its campaign includes a mock video of a masked Palestinian militant purportedly from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip urging UK citizens to remain in the European Union because it supports the Palestinians.
It also highlights EU financing of Palestinian structures in the West Bank.
Meir Deutsch, director of policy and government relations for Regavim, said the NGO wanted to harm the EU over its “intervention in the internal conflict here between Israel and the Palestinians.”
Some 60 percent of the West Bank is under Israeli control and Palestinians face extremely difficult odds in receiving building permits in those areas.
The EU has helped finance various projects in the West Bank and Israel has regularly demolished those it considers illegal.
The cash-strapped Palestinian Authority also receives finance assistance from the EU.
The mock video posted by Regavim on its campaign website shows masked militants with the logo of Hamas’ armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, and in the background a line in English that reads: “Hamas wants UK to stay in the EU”.
A male voiceover is then heard delivering a statement in British English in which he praises the EU for carrying out construction projects in the West Bank.
“If you truly hate Isra-Hell and the Jews and want to support our struggle, help Britain to stay in the EU,” it says.
The voiceover also praised a recent European directive to label produce from Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory.
Deutsch called the EU’s actions “one-sided and anti-Israel, in the marking of products as well and paying salaries of terrorists,” he said.
“We think they should be acting in a more balanced way. As long as that is not happening, we want the EU to be damaged.”
Deutsch said their campaign was aimed at dual Israeli-British nationals living in Israel, and “anyone who cares for Israel” in the UK.
Britain’s EU referendum will be held on Thursday.Author Note: Hi all!
I've been wanting to do a story like this for a long time. I'll be continuing to write Hunter as I write this, and will probably prioritise that over Wildcards. Consider this a collection of tall tales about Vacuo after the war, and a less than plausible search for powerful weapons known only as "The Cards". I hope you enjoy, and again, I'm truly open to criticism, so leave a review if you want! So without further ado... Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, Humans and Faunus! I give you...
Wildcards
Stories of luck and gunpowder in Old Vacuo
The Storyteller's Bar, outside Vacuo
Thanks for th' drink kid… Been a hell of a long time since I got given one… Makes me wonder why you'd do such a charitable thing?
You want a story? Heh heh… I got plenty o' those, but none worth telling. Besides, I gotta be a lot drunker to tell the good ones… Ok, Ok! Stop nagging me and I'll tell ya about Tombstone…
So you know the 4 kingdoms? Atlas, Vale, Mistral and good old Vacuo? Well they weren't always there… Vacuo was once a small minin' town. But that all changed when they struck Dust. It caused a rush of tourists and businessmen to come and claim a bit o' that rainbow gold… This was good fer the upstart kingdom. Tourism caused towns and homesteads to spring up outta the sand… One such town was Tombstone…
The Last Stand at Tombstone
Tombstone wouldn't have been special. It could've been just another town left to the sands when the Dust rush ended, had it not been fer the shootout t' end all shootouts. Tombstone got met by war. War that ended at the O.K. Corral.
It was between 4 lawmen who'd chased the gang known as 'The Cowboys' across the Kingdom and back. These lawmen, the Earp brothers; Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan, with their friend Duane 'Doc' Holliday, had hunted this Cowboys for over a year. This final, legendary gunfight would be told for years to come, and brought more than enough tourism to the town steads and Vacuo itself.
Back in those days, Huntsmen were thin and few between. And in a place like Vacuo, they practically didn't exist. So instead, we got Gunners. These singular soldiers used six-shooters, slug-throwers and rifles to protect their homes, or hunted criminals who escaped the clutches o' the law. They were respected an' feared in equal measure.
The lawmen were not Gunners, but were pissed at the fact Gunners got all the glory. The Cowboys; Ike and Billy Clanton, Tom and Frank McLaury and Billy Claiborne, were killers and thieves, an' had dodged jail countless times. The lawmen had enough of th' chase, and went after the bastards in th' name o' justice.
The gunfight was over in seconds. The Lawmen caught the Cowboys unaware and fired round after round into their hideout at the O.K. Corral. Tom Mclaury died first, wit' a round blasting through the poor kid's skull. The others drew their sluggers and fired back, Frank takin' 2 shots shot to the chest, and dropping dead. Realisin' they weren't gonna win, the Cowboys cut tail and ran. As they ran, Billy Clanton was shot three times and died of blood loss.
The Cowboys never resurfaced, and th' Lawmen went down in history as the greatest gunfighters from b'fore the great war. When the Dust rush ended and left Vacuo a desert in return, Tombstone might 'ave been left to the sands. Funny how life works in strange ways, huh?
The monolith appeared outta nowhere. Nobody saw it placed, and nobody saw the O.K. Corral disappear. The black stone pillar that was left in its wake would spark a whole new rush to Vacuo. Not fer Dust, but something far more powerful… The pillar had 4 sides, facing north, south, east and west. On each side was a symbol of th' suits. Nobody's quite sure if th' suits first appeared on card packs first or if that pillar was the inspiration.
To th' north pointed Diamonds: To riches and splendour now lost. East pointed Hearts: In search of peace and prosperity. South pointed Clubs: To th' cold and barbaric ocean. Finally, to th' west pointed Spades: To hard travels and harder lives.
Nobody knew what the hell the pillar meant. Some took it as a sign from the gods, while others believed it were just some silly prank played by the locals. The smart knew it was something far, far worse. Still, nobody knew what it really meant. Not until about 2 weeks later, when the first tale of the 4 Aces was told, and the Dealer first appeared.
The Dealer's a great story, but I need more beers in me before I tell that… But if you're willing to provide, I can tell a few more tales until then…There are 2 main types of exercise: cardio and resistance training.
Cardio, or aerobic exercise, revolves around strengthening your heart and lungs, whereas resistance training, or anaerobic exercise, revolves around strengthening your skeletal muscle.
Consistently performing resistance training and lifting weights is of the utmost importance for everyone, but especially for men. However, cardio also has a place in every guy’s workout regimen.
When it comes to cardio, there are A LOT of myths and misinformation out there. Some ‘gurus’ preach that you MUST do lots of cardio to burn fat. Others swear that you NEVER really need to do any cardio (my previous position). The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between…
Bonus: and get a proven step-by-step routine to quickly pack on mass and complement your cardio workouts.
#1: It’s Good for Your Heart and Lungs
This should be your main motivation for doing cardio. And yes, I realize you probably just want to burn fat, but keep reading, we’ll get to that later.
Cardio exercise, by definition, is about getting your heart rate up – and keeping it there. This requires a lot of work by both your heart and your lungs. Your heart must work to pump more blood and your lungs to oxygenate this additional blood that’s circulating through your body. This is an oversimplified description of the process, but you get the idea.
By improving this process, you improve your VO2max: the maximum amount of oxygen your body can consume. The reason you should give a fuck about this is because, by maintaining a high VO2max, you can do more work. You can exert yourself harder and for longer.
This will improve your performance in all physical activity, not to mention your general health and well-being. If you’re younger, it will make you a bigger beast. If you’re older, it will ensure a higher quality of life.
#2: It Does NOT Burn Fat
The act of doing cardio does not burn fat… at least not directly.
Fat is burned when (a) weight is lost and (b) muscle mass is preserved. You lose weight by burning more calories than you consume. And you maintain muscle mass by lifting weights.
So where does cardio play a role in this fat loss equation? Simple. When you do cardio, you burn more calories than if your body were at rest. And by burning more calories you’re more likely to be in a caloric deficit at the end of the day… and therefore lose weight.
That being said, it’s far easier to lose weight by restricting your diet than doing cardio. Think about it this way: running for 30 minutes burns roughly only 300 calories. That’s about the same effect on your weight loss as not eating a Snickers bar (or 300 calories of any other food).
I cover exactly how to setup your diet (and workout routine) to burn fat as fast as possible in my Shredded Beast 2.0 program.
#3: There Are Many Ways to Do Cardio
As we covered above, cardio just means getting your heart rate up. This does NOT mean that it needs to be done on a treadmill, elliptical, or spinning bike.
Everything from martial arts to pickup basketball will effectively get your heart rate up. And chances are it will be even more effective than sitting on a boring cardio machine because you will actually enjoy it – and therefore you’re more likely to further exert yourself and exercise for longer.
Even lifting weights can be effective cardio, but it depends on how you lift weights. If you’re doing really low reps and resting a lot in between sets, then no, that’s not really cardio. But if you’re doing a circuit of exercises with short rest intervals then your heart is going to be beating through your chest and you’re also going to be gasping for air – an effective workout for your heart and lungs.
Note: This does not make circuit style training ‘better’ than heavy lifting, they just accomplish different goals.
#4: It’s Better Done AFTER Lifting
While I personally prefer not to do cardio and lifting on the same day, I know some guys that like it. Plus, sometimes I happen to have a basketball game or Muay Thai session on the same day I’m scheduled to lift.
So should you do cardio before or after lifting?
The answer to that question is that cardio always comes AFTER lifting weights. This is because, as a man, you should be lifting relatively heavy weights (or in the process of working up to it). On one hand, you want to be completely fresh when you lift so that you can focus fully and perform your exercises with precise form (lowering the risk of injury). On the other hand, you want to be completely fresh so you can push yourself past your previous limits in the gym (to get stronger and build muscle mass).
The obvious exception to this rule is if your ‘cardio’ happens to be very important. Maybe you’re a college athlete and it’s gameday. Then definitely don’t lift before the game or it will surely hurt your performance.
#5: How Much You Need Depends on Your Goals
“How much cardio should I do?” is a question I get asked all the time. And there’s no right answer.
Are you trying to lose weight? Then you should probably do a little more to burn some extra calories. Are you trying to bulk up and gain weight? Then you shouldn’t do too much. Are you an athlete who competes (even it’s just recreationally)? Then you should do a bit more to make sure your VO2max (explained above) can handle the extra exertion and you can stay in the game longer.
But alright… I won’t cop out completely. If I had to offer a rough guideline, I’d recommend doing cardio anywhere from 1-4 days per week depending on your goals.
#6: It Does NOT Build Muscle…
…At least not efficiently.
Ok, most of you probably already know this, but I still had to mention it because I see so many dudes at the gym who only hit the cardio machines. It’s like they’re allergic to the weight room. Seriously bro?
If this is you – I get it: you don’t want to be ‘big and bulky’. You just want some ‘lean muscle’… or something like that. But take a moment and realize that by lifting weights, you’re not accidentally going to pop out 20 inch arms and turn into Ronnie Coleman. Not unless you accidently start injecting anabolic steroids, eating 4-5000 calories a day, and lifting like a madman.
Yes, I am going to end this article with a rant. I had to. As I covered above, cardio definitely has it’s place in every man’s workout regimen, but it should NEVER replace resistance training and lifting weights. They are 2 different tools used to accomplish 2 different goals.Nobody wants to have scabies, but when you do, all hope is not lost. Just most hope. For those of you unsure about what scabies is, it’s caused by a little bug, called an “itch mite,” that burrows into your skin, kind of like that bug that goes into Chekov’s ear in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.” A little while after the critters get into your skin, little itchy bumps start appearing all over your body. That’s why it’s called an itch m |
to wonder in the world of boxing what goes on inside the head of a professional judge when they produce a card that shows no relevance to the fight they are scoring.
Last night in Kiel, Germany WBO 168lb champion Arthur Abraham and Liverpool’s Paul Smith battled for 12 close rounds. There is no doubt in many rational minds that the fight could have gone either way, but when the ring announcer came up with two tallies of 117-111 and an even worse 119-109 scoreline for the champion, most pundits and fans simply shook their head in disgust. Something stinks here, let’s not mess around. A 9-3 score for Abraham is bad enough, Abraham did not throw enough punches in this fight to win nine rounds. To have him winning 11 rounds, though, illustrates total incompetence.
The three judges for this fight were from the USA, Spain and Hungary. The WBO President Paco Valcarcel tweeted this on Friday “What really improves boxing is more qualified officials and executives.” I’m sorry but 11-1 in rounds in a close fight makes a mockery of that statement. Fernando Laguna of Spain is the offending party here with that awful score. The other two are not much better Mr Waleska for USA and Mr Zoltan Enyedi from Hungary. What is apparent is that the WBO President should be investigating these rotten scores. Eddie Hearn will no doubt appeal and ask for a rematch. He is correct in doing this as his fighter put up the fight of his life; Paul Smith deserved better.
Mr Abraham is a proud champion and let’s be clear here, he didn’t score the fight but should fight Smith again. The 51 media scores attached to this article show that 58 per cent had Arthur Abraham winning. I honestly do not think many people have a problem with the result – it’s the wideness of the final scores. Out of the 51 scores below the average media score was 115-114 Abraham. That’s 51 people scoring a fight from mostly the UK and America, this shows there is no bias when the vast majority had the home fighter winning. Even Smith’s head trainer Joe Gallagher had the fight a draw.
The WBO must consider striking off Mr Laguna from their approved championship official list. That score is just wrong. Personally I am surprised with Mr Enyedi’s score as in the past his scores have been very good. An investigation into the scores is what is being asked here. Let’s hope that happens along with a rematch for Paul Smith. Those scores inflicted boxing with another black eye – we don’t need it as casual fans think boxing is corrupt. What are the new fans to think after seeing THAT in Germany last night?
As usual my full scorecard is below along with the media scores and what percentage of media scored for each fighter.
Bobby Hunter’s Scorecard
Round 1…. 10-9 Smith
Round 2…. 9-10 Abraham
Round 3…. 10-9 Smith
Round 4…. 9-10 Abraham
Round 5…. 9-10 Abraham
Round 6…. 10-9 Smith
Round 7…. 10-9 Smith
Round 8…. 9-10 Abraham
Round 9…. 10-9 Smith
Round 10.. 10-9 Smith
Round 11.. 9-10 Abraham
Round 12.. 9-10 Abraham
TOTAL : 114-114
Average Boxing Media Score (51 in Total):
(115-114 ABRAHAM)
Abraham: 30 Media Scores, (59 per cent)
Smith: 9 Media Scores, (18 per cent)
Draw: 12 Media Scores, (23 per cent)
Boxing Media Scores from Ringside and TV:
Boxing Guru: 115-113 ABRAHAM
Steve Adams Jnr (RingNews24): 116-113 SMITH
Scott Christ (BadLeftHook): 114-114 DRAW
Tom Gray (Ring Magazine): 115-113 SMITH
Daniel Vano (CheckHookBoxing): 115-113 ABRAHAM
Kurt Ward (BoxingAsylum): 115-113 ABRAHAM
FirstClassBoxing: 114-114 DRAW
Shaun Brown (Boxing Monthly): 115-113 ABRAHAM
Jim Watt (Sky TV): 115-113 SMITH (Ringside)
Andy Paterson (BoxingAsylum): 115-113 ABRAHAM
Iconic Boxing: 115-113 SMITH
Corey Quincy (Freelance): 114-114 DRAW
Martin Murray (Sky TV): 114-114 DRAW
Alex Morris (BoxingAsylum): 114-114 DRAW
Nathan Cleverly (Sky TV): 114-114 DRAW
I Edit Boxing: 115-113 SMITH
Fight Ghost: 115-113 ABRAHAM
Ron Lewis (The Times): 115-113 ABRAHAM (Ringside)
Tommy Allan (BoxingAsylum): 114-114 ABRAHAM
Phil D Jay (WorldBoxingNews): 115-113 SMITH
Ciaran Shanks (Irvine Times): 114-114 DRAW
Alex Steedman (BoxNation TV): 115-113 ABRAHAM
Johnny Nelson (Sky TV): 117-116 SMITH (Ringside)
Andy Clarke (BoxNation TV): 115-114 ABRAHAM
Boxingscene: 115-113 ABRAHAM
V2 Boxing: 115-113 SMITH
Graham Houston (Boxing Monthly): 116-112 ABRAHAM
John Hoolan (Freelance): 115-113 ABRAHAM
Andrew McKart (FirstClassBoxing): 115-113 ABRAHAM
KO Radio Online: 114-114 DRAW
Victor M Salazar (Tha Boxing Voice): 114-114 DRAW
Graeme Young (Daily Record): 115-113 ABRAHAM
Paul Daley (TopClassBoxing): 114-114 DRAW
Mark Butcher (BoxingMonthly): 116-113 ABRAHAM
Asian Boxing: 116-112 ABRAHAM
Matt Mojica (The Fight Source): 115-113 ABRAHAM
Nathan Orr (BoxingScene): 115-113 ABRAHAM
Instant Boxing: 115-113 ABRAHAM
Marius Vibe (Freelance): 116-112 ABRAHAM
Irish Boxing: 115-113 ABRAHAM
WildPunchBoxing: 115-113 ABRAHAM
ATR Boxing Tipster: 115-113 ABRAHAM
he Boxing Tribune: 114-114 DRAW
Robert Palmer (CheckHookBoxing): 115-113 ABRAHAM
Rachel Aylett (RingNews24): 116-112 ABRAHAM
John Wharton (Freelance): 115-114 SMITH
Livefight: 116-113 ABRAHAM
Sam Sheppard (The Queensberry Rules): 115-113 ABRAHAM
Kasim Aslam (Global Boxing): 115-113 ABRAHAM
John Evans (Livefight): 115-114 ABRAHAM"According to initial results, this is not a case of infection caused by the Ebola virus," the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health said in a statement.
The office said that the man had arrived at an asylum centre in the western town of Vallorbe on September 17th, and had told officials that he had left Guinea for France two days earlier.
Officials at the centre acted fast because the man said he had lost a family member to Ebola, placing him in quarantine under watch from physicians.
After he began showing feverish symptoms on Tuesday, the authorities decided to transfer him immediately to Lausanne amid tight security.
The office stressed that the disease does not spread until the symptoms appear, and that there was no risk to the local population, saying the swift handling of the case showed the effectiveness of Ebola monitoring in the country.
Treatment of the Guinean came a day after a Geneva-based international aid organization flew one of its doctors to Geneva from Sierra Leone, after he was bitten by a child with the virus.
Initial checks showed the doctor is not infected, although he remains under observation at the Geneva university hospital (HUG).
The Geneva-based World Health Organization warned in a study released on Tuesday that the number of Ebola infections will triple to 20,000 by November, soaring by thousands every week if efforts to stop the outbreak are not stepped up radically.
"If we don't stop the epidemic very soon, this is going to turn from a disaster into a catastrophe," said Christopher Dye, the head of strategy at the WHO and a co-author of the study.
A day earlier the WHO said that the recent outbreak of Ebola in west Africa — the deadliest in history — has already killed 2,811 people.A project helping homeless people in a Sydney suburb is claiming impressive results, by challenging the notion that people living on the streets need to find the help themselves.
Are we helpless when it comes to the homeless?
It seems that many countries and societies don't know how to solve this enduring problem.
But now, in Australia, which has 100,000 homeless people, an attempt to confront the issue with direct, quantifiable action appears to be yielding impressive results, for both the individuals and the state.
It all began in 2007, when a philanthropist approached Mission Australia with an idea.
Mission Australia is a 150-year-old Christian community organisation that assists those on the lower rungs of life, such as the poor and homeless and has the staff and expertise to take on big projects.
The philanthropist, who prefers anonymity to publicity, explained that her own parents had been homeless and that, with the considerable personal resources at her disposal, she wanted to give something back.
Michael Project A three-year project in Sydney, 2008-2010, for men only
It provided one-to-one carers
And it aimed to address issues as fast as possible
Thousands of men passed through it, and 106 were revisited a year later
These men were found to have improved circumstances in relation to health, housing and employment
Michael ended but there are hopes to roll it out
A follow-on initiative, Michael's Intensive Supported Housing Accord, operates in Sydney's western suburbs Read more about the Michael Project
After discussions, the scheme came to be called the Michael Project, named in memory of her dead husband.
At her request, the aim was to design a brand new service and to change the lives of thousands of homeless men, permanently.
She would put up the money for what would become an expensive experiment in social readjustment.
These were, after all, people who had often given up on themselves and were largely being ignored by society.
Of the thousands of men who passed through the Michael Project, 253 entered the research study and 106 made it to 12 months.
One of those was Gordon. He is 68 and has the kind of friendly, white-bearded, Santa Claus-type face that charms everyone who meets him.
But behind the jocular, engaging demeanour, Gordon's story reads like it's been lifted from the pages of the homeless person's stock-in-trade manual.
Gordon was an accountant with two practices and a beautiful home.
But 12 years ago, he lost everything, including his girlfriend, when mental health problems began to dog him.
Image caption Gordon has turned his life around
It left him devastated and homeless.
For the first two years "home" became a shipping container.
The adjacent river was his bathroom. He shared a field with a goat and a cow.
Gordon sank further into depression and was admitted to a series of psychiatric hospitals for a succession of well-meaning, but ultimately futile, therapies.
Then, four years ago, Gordon was introduced to Mission Australia and the Michael Project. It changed everything.
He now has a clean, one-bedroom apartment in Parramatta, west of Sydney, that he calls home.
There's a television, an audio system, a bookshelf that includes Shakespeare and pictures that he painted, including one of a 19th Century Mexican cowboy.
"That picture got me into art college when I was a young man," explains Gordon, with a nostalgic glint in his eye.
The apartment and all that's in it have been paid for by Gordon himself out of the disability allowance that's been organised for him.
"The project changed my life," he says. "It gave me back my confidence."
The Michael Project is about more than putting a roof over someone's head.
It is a wrap-around support service tailored to an individual's needs.
It's more expensive to have a person homeless than not to have a person homeless James Toomey, Mission Australia
At its heart lies the one-to-one relationship between the homeless person and their mentor, or care worker.
In Gordon's case that's Claudia, a care worker with the kind of patient, understanding disposition usually associated with the most dedicated of hospice nurses.
Each case manager like Claudia has up to 20 clients but together, they systematically worked through each of Gordon's problems.
If he needed a dentist, Claudia would get him an appointment the same afternoon.
If he required a doctor's visit, one would be arranged for the following morning.
Job interviews, CVs, contact numbers, access to phones, advice on pensions, everything needed to help Gordon re-enter normal society was provided and, crucially, it would be provided immediately.
There would be no drift, no inertia, no "I'll do it tomorrow" attitude, which would only rack up the costs of fixing it later.
This would be a full-on, bespoke, intensive approach to break the cycle of aimlessness and hopelessness associated with long term homelessness.
The results of the whole scheme, since verified by outside auditors, have been remarkable.
Before Michael, there was practically nobody in long-term housing. After Michael, 50% were in permanent homes.
Image caption Sydney has thousands of homeless
Before, homeless people were four times more likely to need hospital care than the general public. After, that dropped to 1.7 times. Before, 6% were employed. Afterwards, that tripled to 18%.
Overall, the cost to taxpayers went down from $24,399 (£15,567) per homeless person, a year (in costs to the health, justice and other systems) to $20,798 (£13,270). That's a saving to the state of $3,601 (£2,298) for every homeless person.
"It's more expensive to have a person homeless than not to have a person homeless," says James Toomey from Mission Australia.
"It doesn't make sense for the state to ignore homeless people, as that's more expensive to taxpayers."
Mission Australia accepts that the Michael Project was relatively small in size and that more than half of those who entered the scheme dropped out.
View from the UK "At Crisis we've long known that tackling homelessness is about more than a roof and so this kind of innovative holistic approach is to be welcomed," says Katharine Sacks-Jones, head of policy at Crisis, a UK homeless charity. "Not only can services help individuals transform their lives but, in tackling homelessness, they also deliver savings to the public purse."
But it says that's only to be expected with people who are, by definition, rootless and unsettled.
But Mission Australia still believes the programme could be scaled up nationally and serve as a template for similar operations in other countries.
"Every where has homeless people", says Toomey. "But we've shown that you can do something about it and save money.
"These are forgotten people at the margins of society and it's not right they are ignored, when our project is proof that they can re-engage and become full citizens again, not just burdens."
Gordon no longer feels like a burden. Every Monday you can now catch him at his local theatre rehearsing a play.
"We do a new piece every six weeks," he says. "I really enjoy getting stuck into the text and love performing."
"Would you ever be homeless again?" I ask.
"No, I will never be homeless again. Never. I might even take up painting, once more. Another cowboy, perhaps?"A California court has found that trolls are protected by the first amendment and are entitled to anonymity. The ruling comes despite previous cases where trolls have been arrested (be it once they have been disclosed) and hearings in other courts.
The court reversed a previous decision that would have allowed Lisa Krinsky, COO of a Florida based drug service SFBC, to subpoena 10 anonymous Yahoo message board trolls, according to Ars Technica.
The 10 trolls posted on Yahoo message boards in 2005 with “scathing verbal attacks” including referring to the management team of SFBC as “a management consisting of boobs, losers and crooks,” and responding to Krinsky with comments such as “I will reciprocate felatoin with Lisa even though she has fat thighs, a fake medical degree, ‘queefs’ and has poor feminine hygiene.”
The court found that although the Internet is still bound by rules about libel, what was posted were not assertions of “actual fact” and not actionable under defamation law, therefore protected under the First Amendment, in sort of the same way parody is.
(photo credit: Richard Dawkins)Hundreds of additional Israeli troops entered the occupied West Bank today, and it was announced that the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip are to be fully sealed through Monday. The Palestinian town of Yatta, near Hebron, has been totally surrounded and declared a “military zone,” with no one allowed in or out.
This was just the start of a harsh crackdown on all Palestinians that is being imposed in the wake of yesterday’s Tel Aviv shooting, which also saw the Ramadan travel permits of 83,000 Palestinians immediately and irreversibly revoked.
All Gaza residents who had permission to visit the al-Aqsa Mosque for Ramadan had that permission cancelled, and every Palestinian who had a permit to visit family in Israel lost it. Israeli officials have suggested Friday worshiping at al-Aqsa won’t be interrupted, though food deliveries for the Ramadan fast have been stopped.
With the two attackers already arrested at the scene of the shooting, Israel’s options for actually retaliating against the perpetrators seem limited, and with MPs already openly complaining that police arrested the two rather than summarily executing them on the spot, the far-right government’s thirst for revenge is far from sated.
The crackdowns seen today are probably not the “real” retaliation so much as the prelude to it, as a full closure of the West Bank and mass revocation of permits is likely to fuel public protests, which will immediately be re-branded as “Arab riots,” and then used as a pretext for a more bloody crackdown on dissent that can make everyone in the far-right government feel they’ve taken “strong measures.”
Last 5 posts by Jason DitzWASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has little doubt the Syrian government used chemical weapons against civilians last week, and any decision to open the site to U.N. inspectors was “too late to be credible,” a senior official in the U.S. administration said on Sunday.
“Based on the reported number of victims, reported symptoms of those who were killed or injured, witness accounts, and other facts gathered by open sources, the U.S. intelligence community, and international partners, there is very little doubt at this point that a chemical weapon was used by the Syrian regime against civilians in this incident,” the official told Reuters.
The official made clear the Syrian government’s agreement to let United Nations inspectors visit the site of an alleged chemical weapons attack was inadequate.
“At this juncture, any belated decision by the regime to grant access to the U.N. team would be considered too late to be credible, including because the evidence available has been significantly corrupted as a result of the regime’s persistent shelling and other intentional actions over the last five days,” the official said.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry said on Sunday it has agreed to allow U.N. inspectors access to sites in suburbs of Damascus where alleged chemical attacks occurred last week.
The U.S. official said the administration had seen reports that Syria would provide access on Monday, but said that if the government had nothing to hide, it would have allowed investigators to visit the site five days ago.
President Barack Obama is evaluating how to respond to the incident, the official said.
“We are continuing to assess the facts so the president can make an informed decision about how to respond to this indiscriminate use of chemical weapons.”
Senior U.S. lawmakers called on Sunday for limited U.S. military action in response to the alleged chemical weapons attack.
“I certainly would do cruise missile strikes,” said Eliot Engel, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Senator Bob Corker, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Fox News he thought Obama would “respond in a surgical way.”
“I hope the president as soon as we get back to Washington will ask for authorization from Congress to do something in a very surgical and proportional way,” he said.
Two other Republican senators, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, issued a statement calling for “stand-off” strikes, such as by cruise missiles, to degrade the government’s air power and help establish “safe areas” on the ground.The SEC had a drastically different look last season. With a bevy of talented passers and a few new head coaches, the league started to move to a much higher tempo of play. Sure, you still had slobber knockers like LSU Tigers-Florida Gators but there were also 101 points scored when Auburn and Missouri played and 91 between Texas A&M and Alabama.
Florida may be a year behind the trend but they have installed their own fast paced offense and it’s something that the offensive players are enjoying. The offensive players are adjusting to a new playbook but the terminology and schemes are much easier with Kurt Roper than they have been with the previous two coordinators.
“Really man just trust your eyes and play football,” Kelvin Taylor said when asked what Roper is asking of the players. “Just play your game, play fast and that’s pretty much it, that’s all he tells us.”
The key to Roper’s offense is going fast and getting the ball into playmakers hands with space around them to be able to make plays. The offense will feature the skill position players heavily. Demarcus Robinson continues to stand out to his teammates — who refer to him as a freak athlete.
“He’s super fast. He just makes all types of spectacular catches,” Taylor said of Robinson, his roommate. “The guy, he reminds me a lot of is [Michael] Crabtree, he’s real good. Anytime the ball’s in the air he’s coming down with it.”
Florida is loaded with talent at these skill positions. It hasn’t shown on the field the past two seasons but newcomer Jake McGee can see it around him in practice and in the locker room. “There’s a lot of good players in the locker room,” McGee said. “I’m excited for the work to continue with pads coming on tonight and guys getting as good as they can.”
The SEC is, however, a line of scrimmage league. Will Muschamp has recruited linemen to run a physical, pro-style offense. The bigger linemen are not used to running at the high frequency that Kurt Roper will call plays this season and the strength and conditioning team has had to overhaul their program to get the big hogs up front ready.
“We’ll all be able to handle it,” 6-6, 355-pound offensive lineman Trenton Brown said. “We’re all in better shape than we were last year. I feel good right now. Everybody feels good right now.”
It’s early in camp so the enthusiasm is high. On Monday, Muschamp said he liked the enthusiasm level his team brought to the first practice but that he wanted to see where they were in practice 12 and if they can keep that same level throughout camp.
The confidence is high, especially for a team coming off of the year that Florida had last season but it needs to be. The Gators are playing with a chip on their shoulder, energized by a newfound confidence and a scheme that fits the talent on the roster.
“I’m excited for our whole team and just everybody that’s going to be a part of Gator Nation because we’re going to have a good year,” Taylor said. “It starts, like today, today in practice we were working hard today, taking one play at a time and it’s gonna pay off.”
Join Gator Country for all the latest on University of Florida Gators football.The burial caps months of rumors about where he would be laid to rest. One report had his body stored in a crypt owned by Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr., and there was widespread speculation that an elaborate grave -- and ultimately, a Graceland-style museum -- would be constructed at the entertainer's Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbara County.
Jackson will be interred in the expansive cemetery's Great Mausoleum. The pop singer's remains will be placed in a crypt in the Holly Terrace section of the mausoleum, a massive building that is the final resting place for stars from film's golden age, such as Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard and Clark Gable.
Authorities will be out in force for the funeral, though they don't expect huge crowds of spectators. The funeral begins at 7 p.m.
But Jackson's family, led by his 79-year-old mother, Katherine, selected Forest Lawn, a 20-minute trip across the San Fernando Valley from their Encino home.
On Wednesday, it was decided that Jackson's estate will pay the undisclosed expenses for the singer's funeral today -- a sum one attorney called "extraordinary."
Probate Judge Mitchell Beckloff approved the payment at a hearing Wednesday in downtown Los Angeles after an attorney for the estate's administrators assured him that the estate had the financial resources to pay for the funeral and that it would not affect its solvency."The expenses are extraordinary; however, Michael Jackson is extraordinary," said attorney Jeryll S. Cohen, who told the judge that the administrators did not object to the expenses. "They may not be appropriate for an ordinary person, but Michael Jackson was not ordinary."Attorneys for the singer's mother filed papers under seal late Tuesday asking that the estate foot the bill for the funeral she has planned. Burt Levitch, Katherine Jackson's attorney, said outside of court that he did not find the expenses extraordinary.The bulk of the cost was going to the fee for Jackson to be interred at the cemetery, Levitch said. There, Jackson will be laid to rest amid lavish decorations, including statues and stained glass windows.Margaret G. Lodise, an attorney representing Jackson's children, said she had no concerns that the funeral costs would overburden the estate. The sum is "not going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back," Lodise said.Glendale city officials have said the public costs associated with the burial, including traffic control and other police services, would be passed on to the family.Police spokesman Tom Lorenz said the cost of police services for Jackson's funeral would be $150,000 at most. Under a contract with Forest Lawn, police will provide "elaborate" security, including dogs and air support, he said.
He declined to specify how many officers would be deployed for the funeral, but said it would not affect the department's ongoing fire efforts, which he said were now down a handful of officers dealing with street closures.
--Victoria Kim
Photo: Michael Jackson will be interred today in Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in Glendale, where stars such as Clark Gable have also been laid to rest.
Credit: Francine Orr / Los Angeles TimesI made mention that our installer is part of something called YaST. Yet another Setup Tool (YaST) is in my opinion the heart of what makes openSUSE unique. Mandriva and Mageia have a similar tool, but it wasn't built with an Enterprise distribution in mind. And though YaST was built with the enterprise user in mind, it still manages to be excellent even for a naïve home user. Part of that is simply the help button. If you go clicking through the modules in YaST, you'll always see a help button. And lo and behold it is in fact actually helpful! It clearly explains what each module and each page of a module does. YaST is ideal for the new user learning about Linux due largely to this. YaST is immensely powerful despite being user friendly, and once again I recommend reading the documentation so that you can truly grasp the GUI goodness and power that is YaST. What more, is that YaST gives you a graphical tool to help you manage and fix issues that Ubuntu would always require you fiddle on a command line terminal, which is something even I am not very comfortable with.Get the biggest Manchester United FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Wayne Rooney has not travelled with the Manchester United squad to Brussels for their Europa League quarter-final first leg with Anderlecht but David de Gea and Antonio Valencia could return to the squad.
Rooney trained with United on Wednesday morning after overcoming an ankle injury which sidelined him for last week's games against Everton and Sunderland but the 31-year-old has remained in Manchester.
The United captain has suffered three injuries in as many months and managed just one Premier League start since the turn of the year.
Rooney is contracted to United until 2019 but it is increasingly likely he will leave in the summer after his agent explored the possibility of a mid-season transfer to the Chinese Super League.
Valencia is in contention to figure after missing the last two games with an ankle problem but De Gea is expected to start on the bench.
Ashley Young, another player who returned from injury to train on Wednesday, is not 100 per cent ready to return to the squad.
(Image: Eamonn and James Clarke)
United arrived at a private terminal for the short flight to Belgium, where they will continue their campaign to win the competition formerly known as the Uefa Cup for the first time in their history.
Sergio Romero, who kept a clean sheet in Sunday's victory at Sunderland, will start his sixth consecutive Europa League match.
"De Gea's injury is not serious and Romero every time he plays he plays so well," Mourinho added. "The fans are used to having Romero in goal in the competition [the Europa League] - that becomes the most important competition for us after winning the League Cup.
"The Europa League is the competition we can still win, so when Sergio plays in the Europa League and when we are giving him this confidence to play, it’s because we know that his answer is positive and today he looked like he was really comfortable."
(Image: Eamonn and James Clarke)
Romero has kept six clean sheets in his seven Europa League outings this season and has conceded just three times in his 12 appearances under Mourinho.
The United manager will address the media at his pre-match press conference at 5.30pm.
United last played Anderlecht in the first Champions League group stage in 2000, when they thrashed the Belgian champions 5-1 at Old Trafford but lost 2-1 at the Constant Vanden Stock Stadium.
Anderlecht were the first side Matt Busby's United ever faced in European competition in 1956.
Confirmed United squad members
David de Gea
Sergio Romero
Joel Pereira
Antonio Valencia
Matteo Darmian
Timothy Fosu-Mensah
Axel Tuanzebe
Marcos Rojo
Eric Bailly
Daley Blind
Luke Shaw
Michael Carrick
Ander Herrera
Paul Pogba
Marouane Fellaini
Henrikh Mkhitaryan
Jesse Lingard
Zlatan Ibrahimovic
Anthony Martial
Marcus Rashford
Get all the latest Manchester United news first with our new app. Download it here now.? A private company tied to a lobby group that represents automobile dealers recently took over another portion of vehicle title processing that used to be handled by the Kansas Department of Revenue.
Starting May 1, the agency said recently, Kansas Vehicle Title Services Company LLC took charge of processing same-day vehicle titles for the relatively small number of people who need titles immediately.
KVTSC is a company founded by Don McNeely, who is also president of the Kansas Automobile Dealers Association, a group that lobbies on behalf of dealerships.
Since 2015, KVTSC has been handling bulk title processing for automobile dealers, title and insurance companies and other entities that handle large volumes of vehicle business.
But the latest contract is the company’s first step in handling business for individual buyers, prompting concern about the company’s access to personal data collected by the Division of Vehicles when people title their vehicles.
“Sounds like a classic fox-guarding-the-henhouse scenario,” Carmen Balber, executive director of the California-based Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit organization that focuses on consumer privacy. “Why outsource to the one company that is most likely to exploit drivers’ private data for their own gain? That’s like asking an alcoholic to tend bar. He’s not supposed to sample the wares, but what’s going to stop him? And who will ever know if he does? Bottom line, there must be more appropriate vendors if the state can’t conduct the service on its own.”
Department of Revenue officials say they published a public notice that they were seeking proposals for the work. Although KVTSC was the only firm that responded, they said the contract is not exclusive and any other firm can still submit proposals to do similar work.
In order to title a vehicle in Kansas, people must show an original title signed by the seller, a bill of sale indicating how much was paid, and proof of insurance — information which, collected over time, could be a valuable resource for marketing purposes by automobile dealers.
All of that information is stored in Division of Vehicles databases, and KVTSC’s contract with the state gives it the same level of access to that data that county treasurer’s offices have.
McNeely, however, said the contract also specifically prohibits the company from sharing that data with any third party, such as the dealers association or its members, or using it for any purpose other than to process transactions.
“This is small, small, small,” McNeely said of the same-day title contract during a phone interview. “Very few consumers need titles the same day because they can go to the county and get a title processed and get the title within two or three days. We’re talking less than 40 transactions a day.”
Department of Revenue spokeswoman Rachel Whitten said the agency audits KVTSC’s use of the information.
The contract was authorized through a 2013 state law that gives the Department of Revenue the authority to privatize additional aspects of the state’s vehicle registration and title system. It is unclear whether residents should expect additional parts of the vehicle registration system to be turned over to private companies at some point in the future. That potentially could cause much larger amounts of personal data related to vehicle purchases to end up in the hands of private companies.
Prior to handing over that business to KVTSC, same-day processing was handled out of a small Department of Revenue office in the Docking State Office Building, a building that the administration has been emptying out, although there still are no plans for what to do with the building in the future.
Department officials said no state employees lost their jobs as a result of the transfer. All of the employees who worked in that office either accepted jobs with KVTSC or were transferred elsewhere within the agency, Whitten said in an email.
McNeely said the idea of forming the company grew out of a task force Gov. Sam Brownback appointed in 2012 that was aimed at modernizing the Division of Vehicles. At that time, the division was plagued with computer problems that were causing long waits at vehicle registration offices throughout the state.
The following year, Kansas lawmakers passed a bill giving the Secretary of Revenue authority to privatize all or part of its vehicle registration and title operations. That law came in response to massive problems the agency encountered when it switched to a new computer system for processing those transactions.
That law also allows contractors to charge additional fees, on top of the state’s standard fee for vehicle titles, to cover their administrative costs.
“Customers can choose to pay a higher fee in order to walk out of the building with the title in their hand,” Whitten said.
McNeely said KVTSC does charge additional fees that vary by the type of transaction.
“The law was designed to allow private-sector innovation to serve Kansans who want a same-day title,” Whitten said.
She said the innovations that KVTSC provides are the same-day service, with shorter wait times.
KVTSC currently is small-scale. It operates one location in a shopping center at 37th Street and Burlingame Road in Topeka. McNeely said KVTSC has its own management that is separate from the dealers association, and that it is led by a longtime former employee of the Division of Vehicles.
“People have been very happy with the level of customer service we provide,” he said.The Xbox 360 may have blazed a trail in connecting console players via online gaming, but with that service came an unpopular side effect: banner ads, designed to be downloaded and updated on a regular basis by all of those online players. As the 360 tiptoes toward its tenth anniversary, Allen Murray, a former Xbox programmer, used his own 10-year mark in the games industry to get something off his chest. Banner ads are his fault, he said, and they came after he argued with coworkers who actually didn't want them on Xbox 360.
In a Gamasutra post on Monday, Murray described his start with Microsoft in 2004 as a Web services layer programmer, where he became intimately acquainted with the Xbox Live Arcade initiative—and realized how hard its games were to find for players unaware of a console-specific game-download shop. "It was several clicks down in the UI, hidden from the player," Murray complained, so he asked for a meeting with an unnamed boss to discuss adding promotional content to the in-development dashboard.
According to Murray, he was met with immediate resistance—"Banner ads? Like on websites?"—and was told that "gamers would hate ads." Murray used the post to recall why his sales pitch failed at first: "My choice of language, using terms like ‘advertising’ and 'banner ads,’ conveyed a tone of corporate soullessness. This was games! We were supposed to be cool and 'fuck the man' and all that shit."
He eventually worked with Xbox Live Programming Director Larry Hryb to make his case; once they got the corporate go-ahead, they created a team responsible for the dashboard's "banner of the day" system that employed a simple, Flash-like tool to schedule and display ads.
While it's hard to believe only one person in a company as big as Microsoft could take so much responsibility for advertising, the first Xbox 360 dashboard certainly didn't feel like it was built to cleanly display alerts, news, and advertisements, and the story sounds like a reasonable stop-gap fix for the early dashboard's discoverability woes. As we all know, future dashboard updates made it easier for players to find downloadable games—and also |
a mere down payment on problems down the road.
If you are thinking, you will not let this bill pass.
your name
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The Odds Of Success Improve With Every Fax!
Pass this email to 10 others and have them do the same.It's like de-ja-vu.
Two years ago there was a similar tragedy, similar grief, pain and similar popular outrage in Patna. A stampede had killed 18 persons, mostly women and children during Chatt Puja.
This year the toll has only risen. Thirty three dead - 20 women and 10 children.
A most ridiculous excuse was immediately forwarded, an eye witness who blamed it all on a rumour that a live electricity wire had fallen on the ground. This became almost an official account of what had happened. The government conveniently announced a “high level inquiry” like it had done the last time. By the time the inquiry report comes, the issue would have died down, while the blame would lie with an unidentified'mischief monger' who spread a rumour.
Common sense suggest that a rumour that a live wire had fallen on the ground would make people more careful while walking, rather than prompting them to run helter-skelter causing a stampede. But then it's always easier to blame the mindlessness of a mob, rather than go into the reasoned specifics of a slumbering administration.
The state administration clearly has not learnt any lessons from the last tragedy.
The scene outside the Patna Medical College Hospital (PMCH) was as chaotic as it was in November 2012, or when 22 children died after eating a poisonous mid-day meal in July last year or when victims of a bomb blast during Narendra Modi's Hunkar rally were rushed there in October last year.
The situation has actually become worse since these incidents.
Since then Nitish Kumar has willfully resigned as chief minister and chosen a nominee to rule the state. With a completely ineffective, fly weight puppet chief minister, Jitan Ram Manjhi, there is not even a semblance of governance in the state. Manjhi knows that he is chief minister of Bihar not because he a good administrator or a great leader but because he is a harmless non-descript persona who enjoys the benevolence of his boss, Nitish Kumar.
He obviously, could not care less about concentrating on administration.
Manjhi was in celebratory mode at Gandhi Maidan, where the tragedy struck. He had happily left the venue, with the might of the state administration, making it all very comfortable for him as he left for his home constituency in Gaya. His luck had incidentally, smiled at him after he lost parliamentary elections in May this year from Gaya with a huge margin.
He naturally owed something to Gaya, even if it was lack of popular support. The stampede happened minutes after he left but he continued with his onward journey. The Chief Minister was forced to return only later when there was a huge media outcry or perhaps because of the prompting of his political boss in Patna.
the only fault of the women and children who died was that they had all dressed up and had traveled miles to watch Ravan Dahan. It’s associated with both faith and entertainment. Vijayadashmi was an occasion of joy, showcasing good over evil. But in the end a callous evil administration turned on them to create a man made tragedy.
The state administration knew very well knew that a sea of humanity would be converging at Patna's Gandhi Maidan on Vijyadashmi. The Chief Minister was to be the chief guest.
While good care was taken for the entry of the Chief Minister and other VIPs, only two other gates, both at a great distance were opened to allow in an estimated five lakh people. Eye witnesses claimed that gate for the general public was only half opened. Right ahead of that gate the road was partly closed because a flyover was being constructed on Exhibition Road, one of the prime commercial areas of the city.
By the time the Ravan’s effigy was burnt, it was dark. There was neither any street light nor was there any special lighting at the spot where lakhs were to come out.
The men, adventurous ones, could climb on the iron grills of the Maidan’s boundary walls and get out on the street, womenfolk didn’t have that liberty. They fell with children, never to rise again. The official figure claims 33 died but many more are missing. Their loved ones still making desperate rounds to find a clue.
Like it happens all the time -- a “high level” inquiry has been ordered by the state authorities. The political class has placed its sorrow on record, only to go through the same ritual when a tragedy of this nature strikes again.
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.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
March 26, 2017, 8:48 PM GMT / Updated March 27, 2017, 4:22 PM GMT By Avalon Zoppo
United Airlines faced backlash from customers Sunday after two girls wearing leggings were denied entry onto a flight because a gate agent deemed their attire improper.
The incident, documented on Twitter by Colorado resident and anti-gun activist Shannon Watts, took place in the waiting area outside a gate for a flight to Minneapolis at Denver International Airport.
Watts said she was waiting to board a plane to Mexico for a vacation when she overheard a female gate agent denying entry to a young girl wearing gray leggings and saying: "I don't make the rules. I just enforce them."
The girl, who Watts said was about 10 or 11 years old, had a dress in her backpack to put over leggings and was eventually allowed onto the flight. Two other female passengers who didn't have changes of clothes were also denied entry, she said.
A spokesman for United Airlines, Jonathan Guerin, told NBC News that the women included two teens. The two women denied entry were flying as "pass travelers," meaning they were relatives or friends of a United Airlines employee.
All three remained in Denver to make other travel arrangements because they didn't want to split up, Guerin said.
NBC News wasn't immediately able to locate the passengers at the center of the controversy.
Defending the decision on Twitter, United Airlines initially cited a rule in the company's Contract of Carriage, which states that the company can refuse transportation to "passengers who are barefoot or not properly clothed" and that it is "left to the discretion of the agents." In its contract, however, the airline doesn't define "proper clothing."
"United shall have the right to refuse passengers who are not properly clothed via our Contract of Carriage," the company said in a tweet.
Guerin called the gate agent's actions appropriate and said that because the women were flying as "pass riders," their attire didn't meet the airline's stricter requirements for such travelers. Had the women been regular passengers, he said, they would have been permitted to wear yoga pants and leggings.
"When traveling as a United pass traveler, we always remind our family and friends there are rules we all need to follow. We remind them that they are representing United Airlines," he said.
Social media users were quick to condemn the company, calling the policy everything from sexist to a promotion of body shaming. Some said they would boycott the airline.
The episode was personal for Watts, a mother of four daughters and founder of the gun safety advocacy group Moms Demand Action.
"I have five kids: four of them are women," Watts said in an email to NBC News. "They wear yoga pants all of the time when flying. As a Premiere United flier, I think this policy is arbitrary and sexist. It singles out women for their clothing and sexualizes little girls."— Community leaders in the city of Compton Thursday were expected to demand officials rescind a policy that would arm school police officers with AR-15 assault rifles.
The Compton Unified Board of Education approved the Urban Police Rifle (UPR) policy (PDF) in June to improve security on campus by allowing specially-trained officers to purchase and possess the semiautomatic rifles while on duty, according to The Los Angeles Times.
According to the Board, the policy “will provide a more effective means to protect the students, staff, community, and police personnel in high risk and/or dangerous situations.”
Under the plan, officers who will take part in the UPR program will receive at least 16 hours of introductory training in the use of an AR-15. After that, participating officers are required to train and qualify at least every three months, according to officials.
But Compton NAACP President Paulette Simpson-Gipson and other civil rights leaders have complained to Compton School Police Chief William Wu that no amount of training can guarantee the safety of students.
“Compton schools are not located in Beirut, Gaza, or Kabul. They are located in the heart of a hard working, proud community in Los Angeles County,” Gipson said in a statement. “My question to Chief Wu is “Have you really thought this decision out? What gives you the right to endanger the children, the parents, and residents of the City of Compton?”
A statement attributed to Wu quoted by The Times said, “Our objective is quite simple — we want to save lives. The safety of Compton school students, faculty and staff is our prime concern.
“These rifles give us greater flexibility in dealing with a person with bad intent who comes onto any of our campuses.”
The UPR policy calls for AR-15s to be used only in “those situations where the circumstances at hand are beyond the capabilities of the standard patrol sidearms”, including scenarios in which suspects utilize body armor or high-powered, high-capacity weapons.
Los Angeles Unified, San Diego Unified, and Fontana Unified school districts all have various policies in place for the use of police assault rifles, according to nonprofit group EdSource.org.As Liberal, NDP, Green, and Bloc MPs hold town halls on electoral reform across the country this summer and into the fall, their Conservative colleagues have found themselves in a tricky spot: do they boycott a process they’ve labelled illegitimate or engage in it, thereby conferring legitimacy?
In addition to creating the special committee on electoral reform, a motion passed by the House of Commons on June 7 urged MPs to hold a town hall in their constituencies and file a report on the outcomes with the clerk of the electoral reform committee by October 14.
Those reports, along with the committee’s report, are supposed to guide cabinet in deciding how to reform the way Canadians vote. The Conservative Party has demanded a referendum on electoral reform, an option the Liberals have all but ruled out.
Conservative MPs are free to hold town halls if they wish, according to a spokesperson from the office of official opposition leader Rona Ambrose, but that comes with a caveat.
“It’s for individual members of Parliament to decide whether they want to hold town halls on electoral reform. But it’s not up to the Liberal government to dictate to MPs how to engage with their constituents. Nor are town halls a substitute for a referendum,” spokesperson Saro Khatchadourian told iPolitics.
To date, only a handful of Tory MPs have exercised that option. And though they still have months to do so, some have already made it clear they don’t plan on it.
On Tuesday, B.C. Conservative MP Bob Zimmer told a local news website he wouldn’t be holding an electoral reform town hall.
“No, I hadn’t planned to,” he said. “Frankly the issue hasn’t really come up. I’ve heard a few people talk about referendums and if it is going to be changed, that’s what I’d like to see. But for me I just think it’s real simple, go to the people for the decision.”
Some others, including Alberta MP Chris Warkentin, have recently been circulating an op-ed that appeared in the Vancouver Sun about Liberal MP John Aldag’s town hall. The author, a Surrey, B.C. resident, dismissed it as a farce.
“The most effective way to consult Canadians on their preferred way of electing their representatives is through a referendum. Any other way will not cut it,” Warkentin weighed in on the piece on his Facebook page.
There is quite a bit more along those lines — in editorials and blog posts.
There are, however, some exceptions.
The government has a website that keeps track of electoral reform events across the country and allows anyone hosting an event to submit it.
An analysis of the website’s calendar and MPs’ online activity (their websites, social media, et cetera), which certainly might miss some events that have taken place or are going to take place, shows only three of the 98 Conservative MPs have held or have scheduled town halls: Bruce Stanton, Alex Nuttall, and Marilyn Gladu.
Stanton has already held one of two events and Nuttall is holding one in the fall — Gladu, the MP for Sarnia-Lambton — is hosting five events on five different days.
Reminder to constituents of Orillia, Severn, Oro-Medonte, Ramara; Town Hall Wed. Aug 17 – Electoral System Reform https://t.co/z4J5Yip3eI — Bruce Stanton, MP (@bruce_stanton) August 14, 2016
B.C. Tory MP Cathy McLeod could be counted as a fourth. She’s done a “riding-wide survey” and said she’d be speaking with her constituents at roundtables, forums and community events in late August, which would include the subject of electoral reform. But there doesn’t appear to be a town hall specifically for that purpose.
For Gladu, who like her fellow Conservatives is insistent on a referendum and has serious objections to the Liberals’ electoral reform process, the decision was simple: her constituents wanted them.
“I heard from a lot of my constituents. I have a lot of them requesting town halls, which got me thinking about trying to get a venue together. And because there was a lot of interest, and we don’t have a lot venues in Sarnia-Lambton that will hold a huge number of people, we thought we would spread it out to the different areas of the riding and make sure that we have something that was accessible for everybody,” she said.
In addition to that, Gladu has sent out householders asking for comments, and she’ll be putting all that feedback together in her report.
Though not a Conservative MP, NDP MP Kennedy Stewart has already used a telephone town hall.
“I had a fantastic electoral reform telephone town hall call with folks in Burnanby North Seymour tonight. It was unanimous – folks in Burnaby and North Vancouver want a Mixed Member Proportional Electoral System and no referendum. They also what Trudeau to Stop Kinder Morgan. Great discussion!” he wrote on his Facebook page.
At least 56 Liberal MPs and 16 NDP MPs have already conducted a town hall or have scheduled one. Green Party Leader Elizabeth May has four scheduled, beginning in September.
Only one Bloc MP, Xavier Barsalou-Duval, appears to have a town hall scheduled.
In June, the party said that since it doesn’t have official party status, it doesn’t have the resources to conduct town halls.
Mark Holland, parliamentary secretary to Minister of Democratic Institutions Maryam Monsef, clarified in June that the town halls weren’t mandatory — and that there’d be no punishment for not holding one — but MPs who didn’t would have to “answer to their constituents”.
According to one of the committee clerks, a few town hall reports have already started to come in and will be translated and shared with members of the committee before being posted on the committee website.
If MPs choose not to produce them, that decision will be on display for anyone interested. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it will serve as an incentive.
“The vision that we have is 338 reports from 338 town halls,” Monsef said in May.
For the time being, that vision looks exceedingly optimistic.SPOILERS FOR HARRY POTTER!
I’ve seen Voldemort appear on bloggers’ lists of the greatest kids’ book villains of all time. Personally, I don’t think he’s even the best villain of the series that he’s in.
The Harry Potter series does have great villains, but Voldemort is one of the least interesting. He’s the generic evil problem I talked about in my last post. The more interesting characters are the ones with internal conflict, or the ones who make us angry because they remind us of people we’ve met.
Before I continue: a shout out to the deviant artists whose work I’m using in today’s post. I didn’t want to use movie screenshots because I was sure that fans could capture the characters in interesting ways, and help me keep this about the books. Clicking on images will take you to the artists’ pages.
5. Grindelwald
I find Grindelwald a more interesting character than Voldemort for a few reasons. His motivation is similarly generic, but there’s more mystery and detail around him.
Really though, it’s because of his relationship with Dumbledore. Rowling has said that the reason Albus didn’t take a strong enough stance against Grindelwald is that he was enamoured with him. I like to take this a step further. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry asks Dumbledore what he sees in the Mirror of Erised. According to the mirror’s rules, it should be something that he longs for, but can’t have, and may actually cause him damage.
He tells Harry that he sees himself with a new pair of socks, an obvious lie. I like to think that he sees himself in a relationship with Grindelwald.*
4. Dudley Dursley
I love the Dursleys. From the opening description of the first book, they’re hilarious and on point. The fact that Uncle Dursley works with drills is the perfect detail for his character.
Dudley is the one who makes my list because he’s the one who changes most over the course of the series. There’s a tendency in the series for the overweight characters to be lazy and stereotypically stupid (Uncle Vernon, Slughorn, Umbridge, etc.) Dudley still hits that note.
But he also gets a redeeming scene after Harry saves him from the dementors. He gets a little respect for his cousin, and actually stands up to his dad.
3. Draco Malfoy
Like Dudley, Malfoy experiences internal conflict, and changes over the series. He also has to stand up to his dad. But for Malfoy, the struggle is a lot more intense. He gets dragged into a situation where he almost has to kill Dumbledore, and after he’s gone this far, it’s incredibly difficult for him to turn around.
He also works well on the level that a punk-brat villain should–he’s very easy to hate. When Hermione curses him, everybody is happy. The two-dimensional sneer isn’t that complex, but it’s highly effective.
In short: he’s a great rival when the series is acting as middle-grade, and he transitions well into a more tortured character when the series becomes young-adult.
2. Severus Snape
I don’t have Snape this high on my list for the reason that most HP fans adore him. I think his relationship with Lily is more creepy than heroic. I think it’s interesting, but I don’t think it redeems him, and I think it’s really weird that Harry names one of his kids after him.
I have him high on my list because I was never sure whether he was actually a good guy or a bad guy. I was so sure each way, and especially when he kills Dumbledore, I thought that was it.
For keeping me guessing, Snape is #2.
1. Dolores Umbridge
I hate her so much!
And that’s great. There’s the description as toad-like and dressed in pink that makes her instantly iconic. There’s her repeated phrase, “Hem-hem”, annoying and evocative of character. There’s her meanness.
What really sells it is her restraint. The fact that she’s in such a position of power, and that she’s so stubborn, and that she dials it up slowly until we can’t stand her any more without ever tipping over the edge.
I really don’t think I’ve ever hated a character more. She made me want to throw the book across the room. In a good way.
Honorable mention to Gilderoy Lockhart. He was very, very close to stealing #5.
Next week, it’s another list of Five Great Things! I’m going to expand my focus and look at villains across all of children’s literature. Will Umbridge stay at #1?
*EDIT: Apparently Rowling has said what Dumbledore saw in the mirror: “He saw his family alive, whole and happy – Ariana, Percival and Kendra all returned to him, and Aberforth reconciled to him.” So I guess #5 should be Lockhart.
AdvertisementsAfter a dozen years and nine major releases, OS X has had a full life: the exuberance of youth, gradually maturing into adulthood, and now, perhaps, entering its dotage. When I am an old operating system I shall wear… leather?
The 2011 release of OS X 10.7 Lion seemed to mark the natural endpoint of the “big cat” naming scheme. But Apple couldn’t resist the lure of the “cat, modifier cat” naming pattern, releasing OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion a year later. Perhaps it just wanted to give its cat nine lives.
The 10th major release, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, is named after an awkwardly plural California surfing spot, finally ending the feline dynasty. But what part of the operating system’s existence is this? The afterlife?
Read it your way Don't want to read an article this long on the Web? Don't want to read an article this long on the Web? Ars Technica premier subscribers can download a (free) Kindle, iBooks-compatible EPUB, or PDF version of the complete review from the links in the upper right of each article page. Non-subscribers can buy the e-book from the iBookstore or the Amazon Kindle store.
When it comes to OS X, many people are suffering from the end-of-history illusion: the belief that while the Mac platform has consistently experienced significant enhancements in the past, it will somehow not continue to grow and mature in the future.
So let’s readjust our perspective. Perhaps the first seven big-cat releases were OS X’s early childhood: birth, potty training, learning to walk and talk, and so on, culminating in some form of self-actualization.
With Lion, the Mac entered an awkward adolescence, acquiring a newfound concern about what the other kids were doing. Accordingly, OS X’s last two releases included several naked attempts to ape the look and feel of its more successful sibling, iOS.
But that was all before last year’s ouster of Scott Forstall, senior vice president of iOS Software. By all accounts, Forstall was one of the driving forces behind the iOS aesthetic that Lion and Mountain Lion so enthusiastically embraced. Jony Ive's iOS 7 strikes off in a bold new direction based on a philosophy that Apple is eager to generalize to the company as a whole—leaving OS X holding the stitched-leather bag.
An OS out to sea
Let’s say we accept that this is not the end of history and that OS X will continue to evolve. To what end? Aside from undoing the most egregious peer-pressure-motivated interface changes, what should this first non-cat release of OS X do differently from its predecessors?
One option would be to continue to follow iOS’s lead, switching gears from rich textures and simulations of analogous physical products and setting off in pursuit of the new, spare iOS 7 aesthetic. I’ll spoil it for you: Apple hasn’t chosen this path—not yet, anyway. Time and resource constraints alone could explain this choice. After all, Apple didn’t even have the iPad version of iOS 7 ready in time for WWDC this year. An interface overhaul in Mavericks was clearly out of the question.
Mavericks is also not an internals-only release like Snow Leopard, which famously promised “no new features.” There are new features in Mavericks, even new bundled applications.
To some degree, the content of any OS release is determined by what did and didn’t make the deadline for the previous release. There are exceptions, like Fusion Drive, which didn’t quite make it into Mountain Lion but also couldn’t wait for the next major OS release because it was a prerequisite for some new hardware products.
Nevertheless, Apple does try to give each new OS some sort of theme. Mavericks is the first California-themed release of OS X, named after “places that inspire us here in California,” according to Craig Federighi, who says this naming scheme is intended to last for at least the next 10 years. The pressure is on for Mavericks to set a new direction for the Mac platform.
According to Apple, Mavericks has a dual focus. Its first and most important goal is to extend battery life and improve responsiveness. Secondarily, Mavericks aims to add functionality that will appeal to “power users” (Apple’s words), a group that may be feeling neglected after enduring two releases of OS X playing iOS dress-up.
Is that enough for Mavericks to live up to its major-release version number and to kick off the next phase of OS X’s life? Let’s find out.
Table of ContentsNo trifle, this truffled Sottocenere is rich
Holiday entertaining provides an excuse to splurge on cheeses that we might not buy otherwise -- rich cheeses such as Vacherin Mont d'Or, costly ones such as a whole Epoisses or cheeses that seem too fancy for everyday.
Sottocenere (soh-toh-CHEN-er-eh), a truffled cheese from northern Italy, fits both of the last two categories, running about $20 a pound and definitely dressed for company.
Although a relatively new cheese, Sottocenere -- which means "under the ashes" -- derives from a long tradition of preserving cheeses in ash. According to Michele Buster of Forever Cheese, a New York company that imports Sottocenere, the cheese was created only seven or eight years ago by a cheesemaker in the Veneto.
Truffles galore
Made with raw cow's milk and aged about 100 days, Sottocenere is studded with bits of black truffle and rubbed externally with truffle oil. According to Buster, the gray ash coating includes nutmeg, cloves, coriander, cinnamon, licorice and fennel. I don't smell a single one of those spices, either on the rind or internally. The dominant aroma is truffle, which seems to come more from the pungent oil than from the specks inside.
Under that thin, brittle rind, the paste is a pale butter color with a smooth, moist, semisoft texture. To my taste, the cheese is too intensely truffled to include on a cheese board, where it might overwhelm its companions. But I have no trouble thinking of ways to showcase its silky texture and seductive aroma in the kitchen.
Warm up cold nights
On a recent cold evening, I arranged thin slivers of Sottocenere on top of creamy, just-cooked polenta and let the cheese melt in the heat. Toasts topped with Sottocenere and broiled briefly would be a glamorous accompaniment to a green salad. You could top a hamburger with slices of Sottocenere to make an elegant cheeseburger, or tuck some slices into a holiday omelet. A crusty grilled cheese sandwich made with Sottocenere and cut into small, neat squares would make a festive hors d'oeuvre with Champagne.
Choose a wine that matches the nature of the dish -- perhaps a Barbera d'Alba with cheese-topped polenta, a white Burgundy with that classy cheese omelet, a not-too-serious red Burgundy with a Sottocenere-topped burger.
Buster says that another Italian producer has entered the market with a nearly identical cheese illegally called Sottocenere. (Her company owns the trademark.) The rival product has a thicker, more crumbly coating and a more pronounced truffle taste, says Buster, which would take it over the top for me.
Look for the leaf
The authentic item has a leaf on top and comes packaged in paper and tied with twine. You may not be able to see the packaging at the store, but look for a wheel with a thin coating of gray ash.
Note: Sottocenere is distributed in the Bay Area, but The Chronicle is unable to list retail sources with certainty. If you can't find it where you shop, ask the merchant about future availability.
Next up: Beaufort, a cow's milk cheese from the French AlpsAccording to a new study, almost 9 out of 10 PCs currently used by businesses are capable of running Windows 7. That's almost double the equivalent proportion when Vista launched.
The figures come from IT assessment firm Softchoice. Rather than conduct an opinion poll, it gathered the information from the actual set-ups of 248 clients with a total of more than 450,000 Windows computers.
The research found that 88 per cent of the computers met the minimum specifications for running Windows 7. That compares with a similar study the firm carried out on Vista's release which found just 50 per cent were ready for the new operating system. (Source: pcworld.com)
Perhaps more importantly, 65% of today's machines meet the recommended specs to get "optimum performance" from Windows 7. With Vista's release, the equivalent figure was only 6 per cent.
Windows 7: Easier on Hardware
One of the main reasons for the increase in compatible machines is that Windows 7 doesn't ask for grandiose hardware set-ups. Its 1Ghz speed and 1GB memory demands are identical to those of all but the most basic editions of Vista, while it actually requires even less spare hard disk space to run.
This means that as firms have replaced older machines with newer, higher spec computers since Vista's release, the proportion meeting the requirements has inevitably gone up.
To some extent, it's surprising that so many machines are capable of running Windows 7, given how many businesses are still using Windows XP, a system released more than eight years ago. Softchoice says it suspects that the picture may have been distorted by businesses who have bought modern machines but chose to downgrade their operating system from Vista to XP.
Another welcome note for Microsoft: the study found that 95 per cent of machines which aren't currently suitable to run Windows 7 could be brought up to spec with comparatively simple measures such as upgrading memory. With Vista, only 84 per cent were in that position. (Source: marketwire.com)Like a few others, Sony has introduced a new smart speaker at IFA 2017, the LF-S50G, which will have a retail price of around £200 ($250 USD) when released in November. The LF-S50G is based around the Google Assistant technology.
Sony’s speaker includes the company’s own audio technology and will be available in two colors, Black and White. It has an embedded clock display and splash-proof coating. Because of the integrated Google Assistant technology, the speaker should drop into most Android or Google-using customer homes and is simple to set up and control. The LF-S50G is able to provide the same rich blend of information as the Google Home speaker, such as information on the commute to work, the weather, news, and similar.
The LF-S50G has been designed to provide 360-degrees of “room filling,” balanced sound. It’s compatible with a number of music streaming services including Spotify, Google Play Music, Pandora, TuneIn, and iHeartRadio. It can integrate with other smart speakers around the home for the customer wishing to make a multi-room set up. The audio side of the Sony speaker includes a full range speaker for clear vocal and treble sound combined with a dedicated sub-woofer to reproduce bass sounds. Sony has included a damped bass reflex duct and an omni-directional two-stage diffuser to provide that full room coverage.
The Sony smart speaker is also able to organize, monitor and control compatible Internet of Things (IoT) devices also in the home, but it is not just controlled by your smartphone or voice – there’s a gesture control top for music playback, allowing customers to skip tracks, play or pause, and change the volume. The Sony speaker supports both Bluetooth and NFC and is compatible with Android and iOS devices. Let’s hope it stops by the US!
View our constantly updating IFA 2017 guide at the link below.
We’ll keep you posted on everything IFA 2017 right as it happens! Follow us on social media for up to the minute updates from the show floor in Berlin.
SOURCE [Sony]A British man who attempted to kill Donald Trump is facing up to 30 years in prison after a grand jury in Las Vegas decided to charge him.
Michael Sandford, 20, is accused of trying to grab a police officer's gun to shoot the presumptive Republican presidential nominee at a campaign rally in the city.
Sandford, who has a history of mental health problems, told police he drove from California to kill Mr Trump, and he went to a Las Vegas gun range to learn to shoot the day before the June 18 rally.
Daniel Bogden, US attorney, said the grand jury charged Dorking-born Sandford with disrupting an official function and two firearms counts that, together, could sentence him to up to 30 years in prison.
His parents have pleaded for him to be released, with his mother Lynne telling Federal Magistrate Judge George Foley that her son was treated for obsessive compulsive disorder and anorexia when he was younger, and once escaped a hospital in England.A dedicated Chinese farmer spent 36 years digging through three mountains and 10 hills using hand tools and explosives just so he could bring water to his remote village.
Huang Dafa built the six-mile passageway situated in southeastern Guizhou Province between 1958 and 1994. Villagers who were inspired by his vision also helped him finish his endeavor. Villagers named the six-mile irrigation channel, Dafa Channel in honor of Huang Dafa’s unrelenting passion for helping the village.
His inspiring undertaking was only made known to the public this week, according to local Chinese media (via Daily Mail).
Before the channel was completed, getting water in Caowangba Village was a serious problem. Situated at an altitude of 4,101 feet in the mountains of Guizhou Province, Huang Dafa’s village has no water sources. Villagers would take two hours to walk to the next village of Yebiao where they would queue all day long just to fetch drinking water. The village’s 1,200 residents would also use rainwater saved using a well or those collected from dangerously high cliffs.
Thanks to Huang Dafa and the 200 villagers who helped him, water now flows to their doors.
Huang Dafa’s ambitious project began after he was elected as the head of the Caowangba Village in 1958. As a man of action, he decided to do something for the villagers that generations would benefit from.
With little knowledge of building irrigation, Huang began digging. He figured that him picking up a shovel and starting to dig would inspire others to join him. He and his equally devoted volunteers used hand tools and explosives to create a 15-inch-wide and 20-inch-tall passageway.
After boring a 330-foot-long channel through one peak, Huang and his men were disappointed to find no flowing water. The project did not go as expected due mainly to their lack of knowledge about irrigation. But while the passageway was not used as an irrigation system, it eventually became a shortcut for the villagers when they went out.
Still holding on to his dream despite the previous setbacks, Huang pursued studying water system engineering in the Fengxiang Water Conservation Bureau in Zunyi at the age of 54 in 1989.
The following year, as Caowangba was hit by a terrible drought, Huang restarted digging the channel. Equipped with the right knowledge that time, he was more confident than ever that his dream for his beloved village would be realized.
To jumpstart his project anew, he first persuaded local authorities to fund the project with 60,000 yuan ($8,700) and 190,000 kilograms (420,000 pounds) of corn. Even the villagers, who did not have much chipped in with 13,000 yuan ($1,900) in combined contribution to increase their funds. They were able to start digging again in 1992.
Huang, who’s now 81 years old, remembers how he spent numerous evenings sleeping in caves, dreaming of completing his project. Unfortunately, Huang had to endure two tragedies while working on his dream. While he was toiling away, digging through the channel, Huang’s daughter and grandson died back home.
Huang and the villagers finally completed their irrigation system in 1995, three years after they restarted their project. The 7,200-meter-long main channel, plus a second section spanning 2,200 meters, wrapped around three large mountains, and flowed across three cliffs. It took
Huang 36 years to make the impossible possible with sheer will.
Now with enough water, people are able to grow rice. The village was also finally connected to electricity in the same year.
“We shouldn’t wait for things to happen,” Huang, the village hero was quoted as saying. “Dozens of years of my life could have passed without anything happening.”An 8,000-year-old body of knowledge is finding its way into the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Kharagpur, the oldest of India’s elite engineering schools.
From August this year, architecture students at the institute, which counts Google’s Sunder Pichai among its alumni, will be taught vastu shashtra, the ancient Indian “science of architecture.”
Believed to have been developed between 6000 BC and 3000 BC, vastu shastra involves designing buildings by making the best possible use of the geography and location of the plot—including the influence of the sun’s light and heat, wind directions, the moon’s position, and the Earth’s magnetic fields. The architecture study is similar to the Chinese feng shui, essentially focussing on harmonising human life with its surroundings.
Many of India’s ancient temples and other structures have been built on the principles of vastu shastra and the architectural form traces its roots back to the Rig Veda, an ancient collection of Sanskrit hymns.
“With the advent of green technology, green lifestyle, and affordable environmental materials, there is a growing focus on green living and hence on understanding vastu across the world,” Joy Sen, head of IIT-Kharagpur’s Ranbir and Chitra Gupta School of Infrastructure Design and Management, told Quartz. “Vastu as a science form uses the interrelation between ecology, passive energy, and living beings.”
The institute decided to introduce the subject as a part of |
best bird-watching is at.
Third, the thrive-survive dichotomy says materially insecure people are going to value community and conformity more. Polyamory is still pretty transgressive, and unless you feel very safe or feel sufficiently mobile and atomized that you don’t care what your community thinks about you, you’re not going to feel comfortable making that transgression. Many of these things require leaving the general community to participate in a weird insular subculture, and that requires a sort of lack of preexisting community bonds that I think only comes with the upper middle class.
Fourth, black people might avoid weird nonconformist groups because they’re already on thin enough ice in terms of social acceptance. Being a black person probably already exposes you to enough stigma, without becoming a furry as well.
Fifth, we already know that neighborhoods and churches tend to end up mostly monoracial through a complicated process of aggregating small acts of self-segregation based on slight preferences not to be completely surrounded by people of a different race. It doesn’t seem too unlikely to me that a similar process could act on hobbies and interest groups.
Sixth, even when black people are involved in weird subcultures, they may do them separately from white people, leading white people to think their hobby is almost all white – and leading mostly white academics to miss them in their studies. I once heard about a professor who accused Alcoholics Anonymous of being racist, on the grounds that its membership was almost entirely white. The (white) professor had surveyed AA groups in his (white) neighborhood and asked his (white) friends and (white) grad students to do the same. Meanwhile, when more sober minds (no pun intended) investigated, they found black areas had thriving majority-black AA communities.
Seventh, a lot of groups are stratified by education level. Black people are only about half as likely to have a bachelor’s degree. This matters a lot in areas like atheism that are disproportionately limited to the most educated individuals. Polyamory also falls into this category – the most recent survey found 85% of poly people had a college education, compared to 30% of the general population (!). 30% of poly people had a graduate degree compared to only about 10% of the general population and only about 3% of blacks. There has to be a strong education filter on polyamory to produce those kinds of numbers, and I think that alone is big enough to explain most of the black underrepresentation.
Eighth, people of the same social class tend to cluster, and black people are disproportionately underrepresented among the upper middle class. Most of these fields are dominated by upper middle class people. The nickname for weird self-actualizing upper middle class things is “Stuff White People Like”, and this is not a coincidence. [EDIT: Commenter John Schilling says this better than I – a lot of these groups are about differentiating yourself from a presumedly boring low-status middle class existence, but black people fought hard to get into the middle class, or are still fighting, and are less excited about differentiating themselves from it.]
So I think positing that black people feel “fetishized as an exotic sexual plaything” in the poly community is unnecessary. Black people are underrepresented in the poly community for the same reason they’re underrepresented in everything in the same vague circle as poly. Heck, black people are even underrepresented in the activity of complaining about black people being fetishized as exotic sexual playthings – check out Tumblr’s racial demographics if you don’t believe me.
II.
The eight points above add up to a likelihood that black people will probably be underrepresented in a lot of weird subculturey nonconformist things. This is not a firm law – black people will be overrepresented in a few weird subculturey nonconformist things that are an especially good fit for their culture – but overall I think the rule holds. And that’s a big problem.
A few paragraphs back I mentioned that Occupy Wall Street was had disproportionately few minorities. Here are some other people who like to mention this: Michelle Malkin. The Daily Caller. American Thinker. View From The Right. New York Post. American Renaissance.
All of these sources have something in common, and it’s not a heartfelt concern for equal minority representation.
Likewise, you know who’s got an obsessively large collection of resources on the underrepresentation of minorities in atheism? Conservapedia (Western Atheism And Race, Racial Demographics Of The Richard Dawkins Audience, Richard Dawkins’ Lack Of Appeal To The Asian Woman Audience, etc, etc, not to mention the very classy Richard Dawkins’ Family Fortune And The Slave Trade.)
Here it is easy to see that “you have low minority representation” serves as a stand-in for “you’re racist” serves as a stand-in for “you suck”. So here’s the problem:
In theocracies ruled by the will of God, people will find that God hates weird people who refuse to conform.
In philosopher-kingdoms ruled by pure reason, people will find that pure reason condemns weird people who refuse to conform.
And in enlightened liberal democracies where we “tolerate anything except intolerance”, people will find that weird people who refuse to conform are intolerant.
And if blacks are underrepresented in weird nonconformist groups, and nobody mentions that this is a general principle, that’s making their job way too easy.
So here’s why this article annoys me. In the midst of black underrepresentation in everything in the same ontological category as polyamory, people bring up black underrepresentation in polyamory and suggest it’s because poly people are “objectifying” and “preying on” them, positing that “there’s a problem” with “a standard of whiteness that erases people of color” in the polyamory community.
We know from OKCupid statistics that (mostly monogamous) white men are very reluctant to date black women, but monogamous people don’t have to listen to well-meaning friends going up to them and saying “So, you’re mono, I hear the monogamous community has a racism problem.”
But now I and other polyamorous people are going to have to answer one more round of annoying questions about “You’re polyamorous? Isn’t that a bunch of racist nerdy white dudes?”An Ontario court has approved a deal for Rogers Communications Inc. to buy Mobilicity in a $465-million sale.
The Globe and Mail reported Tuesday evening that sources familiar with the negotiations said the small wireless carrier, which has been under creditor protection since September, 2013, had accepted the agreement after weighing competing bids from Rogers and Telus Corp.
Bill Aziz, Mobilicity's chief restructuring officer, said in an affidavit that he understands the agreement has the support of "substantially all of [Mobilicity's] secured debt holders."
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The filing said services for Mobilicity subscribers will continue uninterrupted. The carrier offers discount wireless services and has customers in Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver.
The company's main asset is its spectrum – the airwaves used to build cellular networks – which it purchased for $243-million in 2008. The federal government must approve transfers of spectrum and has previously blocked Mobilicity's attempts to sell its licences to Telus, one of Canada's three largest wireless carriers. Telus offered $380-million in its original 2013 deal and $350-million in a deal last year.
Rogers said Industry Canada has already approved the deal in a press release Tuesday.
The deal includes the transfer of some cellular spectrum to new entrant carrier Wind, which is believed to be a factor in the federal government's willingness to approve a transaction at this time. "Following the acquisition of spectrum from Shaw and Mobilicity respectively, Rogers and Wind will undertake an AWS-1 spectrum swap in Southern Ontario to create contiguous spectrum for Rogers," the company said in a release. "Rogers will also divest certain non-contiguous AWS-1 spectrum to WIND Mobile in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Northern Ontario and Eastern Ontario."
As part of the deal, Rogers will also pay $100-million to complete an option to purchase unused spectrum licences from Shaw Communications Inc.
Rogers and Shaw struck a broader deal that included the option in 2013 but have to date been unable to win government approval for the spectrum transfer. According to one source, Rogers had been under pressure to get approval for that option as it is set to expire soon.
Rogers said in its release the purchase price is $440-million, but the company is also assuming $25-million in net negative working capital, leaving the total consideration for the deal at $465-million. The purchase price is offset by tax losses valued at approximately $175-million which Rogers will acquire, the company said.
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"The transaction with Rogers provides the best possible outcome for Mobilicity's customers, dealers and employees," Anthony Booth, president of Mobilicity said. "Rogers ensures certainty of service for Mobilicity customers, provides a great network, national coverage and high quality products and services. At the same time, Mobilicity employees will have the opportunity to work at a great Canadian company in Rogers."
Ottawa's policy on the wireless industry has been aimed at encouraging a fourth carrier in every region to give consumers an alternative to the Big Three and the government has said it would not approve deals that resulted in an undue concentration of airwaves in the hands of Canada's dominant players.
Yet, the landscape has shifted thanks to recent policy changes allowing for more spectrum to be put to mobile use, as well as three public auctions in little more than a year plus the 2008 auction that first reserved airwaves for new entrants.
While Canada's dominant carriers together held 98 per cent of available mobile spectrum in 2006, Industry Minister James Moore has said he expects new players to control 25 per cent by this summer. Wind Mobile Corp. has also emerged as a more viable competitor in recent months, with new ownership, a new CEO and a swath of new airwaves it purchased for a low price.
Mr. Aziz stated in the affidavit, "It is my understanding, given recent developments in the Canadian wireless industry and specifically recent auctions of spectrum, that Industry Canada no longer has the same concerns it once did about 'undue spectrum concentration' among certain wireless carriers in Canada."
"We're pleased to have worked with the government to put this unused valuable resource to work," Rogers CEO Guy Laurence said in the release. "We got the spectrum we needed where we needed it for our customers and this keeps Rogers in the leading competitive position across the country."
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Telus, which has been pursuing Mobilicity for more than two years, is said to have offered more than Rogers, according to one source, and could seek to challenge the deal in court.
However, Mobilicity's creditors felt the Rogers deal was more likely to be approved by the federal government.
Mr. Aziz said Mobilicity has been in continuous discussions with potential buyers, including Rogers, for the past two weeks, a process that included multiple offers and counter-offers. He said the company was aware that Rogers needed to conclude a transaction by Wednesday, June 24 due to "other related dealings it had."
Mobilicity therefore asked its suitors to provide their last and final offers by 10:30 p.m. Monday. Stakeholders considered the options into the night, held further discussions with the bidders and finally, the company's board approved the Rogers deal on Tuesday.
Mr. Aziz said the carrier has outstanding secured and unsecured debt totalling approximately $600-million, including accrued interest and financing costs. The company's original equity investors also invested approximately $250-million.
Funds from the proposed sale will be used to fully repay the company's secured debt and repay its unsecured creditors on a pro rata basis. However, a portion of Mobilicity's first lien bonds, which are held by Catalyst Capital Group Inc., will remain outstanding, Mr. Aziz said. The motion materials include an agreement between the company and Catalyst that was struck on Tuesday and filed with the court in confidence.
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Rogers will assume Mobilicity's outstanding debts to its trade creditors -- such as suppliers and landlords – as well as its obligations to employees and dealers.
Representatives for Mobilicity, Rogers and Telus all declined to comment on the developments Tuesday evening before the court filing.
Mobilicity had 157,000 subscribers as of the end of April. In addition to its spectrum licences, it is also valuable to Rogers for its tax losses, which stood at $567-million as of the end of 2013.
Mobilicity will first seek the approval of the Ontario Superior Court judge who has been presiding over its creditor protection proceedings under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act. It is then expected to seek approval from Industry Canada.Discovery Channel will mark Bulgaria’s national holiday (March 3) with a special episode of the survival show “Kings of the Wild” shot in the Rhodope mountains.
This is Discovery’s first survival show shot in Bulgaria.
“Kings of the Wild” stars experienced hunter Josh James from New Zealand and renowned British chef Matt Tebbutt.
The duo is taken to different remote locations in which they have to prove they can eat like kings in the most extreme conditions.
They have to spend a week at each location by sleeping in the open and eating whatever they could find.
The new episodes of the show take Josh and Matt to Mexico, Malaysia, Borneo, Finland before they arrive to the Rhodopes.
Upon their arrival to Bulgaria, the two commented that they are very satisfied with the conditions in the country.
The episode shot around the town of Devin will be broadcasted at 22 o’clock (EET) on March 3.Track List:1. Canterlot Calling2. Brand New Chariot3. Mr. Cake Bake4. Friendship5. Luna Can't Fail6. Dragon Bombs7. The Right Pony8. Lost in Ponyville9. Friendoff10. Guns of Fillydelphia11. Winter Wrap-up12. Sharing Kindness13. Hay Smoothie14. The Great Trixie15. Friendship Rock16. Four Ponies17. I'm Not Parasprite18. Jr. Speedsters19. Mane in VainI've been seeing a lot of pics of ponies playing guitar. I love the idea. I don't want to and probably can't top the fantastic art other people have done already, but it inspired me to do this. It'll let me get my funk on while making a tribute to a fantastic album.I see Dash as a metal head. On the other had, I feel like there had to be some point in her life where she went through a punk (inb4 London Calling isn't punk) phase.I would like to thank my bronies on /co/ for this one. I had some great feedback that actually allowed me to make this like 20% better in 10 seconds flat.Any critique is always welcome, as usual.EDIT: Forgot to mention... This is a reference to this album:METALLICA is featured in the new advertising campaign for the Italian luxury menswear house Brioni.
According to Business Of Fashion, the campaign — which was shot in black-and-white — features two portraits of METALLICA members James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo as a group — one in black tuxedoes, one in white tuxedoes — overlaid with the word "Brioni" in a large, gothic font, a new interpretation of the house's first official logo, which it used from 1955 until the 1980s.
Said METALLICA in a statement: "We are beyond thrilled to have been invited to be the face of Italian luxury menswear powerhouse Brioni as they kick off their first creative campaign under the direction of newly appointed creative director, über-cool style star Justin O'Shea.
"The black-and-white QUEEN 'Bohemian Rhapsody'-inspired photos were shot last month in San Francisco by photographer Zackery Michael. We're sporting Bespoke Brioni suits and tuxedos as well as sunglasses from their new eyewear collection."
The campaign will be distributed on social media channels and will appear on billboards and kiosks in Paris and in The New York Times, reflecting a more focused initial print advertising buy. Wider print distribution and billboards in New York, Los Angeles and Moscow will follow in the autumn.A Roman Catholic Priest, an Eastern Orthodox Priest, a Protestant Pastor, and two Jewish Rabbis were blessing weapons. Does that sound like the beginning of a joke? But, see the images above for an example of each of them. But, wait, OK, I will tell you one joke. I do not know from where it comes.
The two thousand member church was filled to overflowing capacity one Sunday morning. The preacher was ready to start the sermon when two men, dressed in long black coats and black hats entered thru the rear of the church. One of the two men walked to the middle of the church while the other stayed at the back of the church. They both then reached under their coats and withdrew automatic weapons. The one in the middle announced, “Everyone willing to take a bullet for Jesus stay in your seats!” Naturally, the pews emptied, followed by the choir. The deacons ran out the door, followed by the choir director and the assistant pastor. After a few moments, there were about twenty people left sitting in the church. The preacher was holding steady in the pulpit. The men put their weapons away and said, gently, to the preacher, “All right, pastor, the hypocrites are gone now. You may begin the service.”
Ah, yes, you may begin the service. Whether we agree with the blessing of weapons or not, we need to admit that in both Jewish and Christian history, there is a long history of the blessing of weapons. We can argue that the blessing of weapons is not found in the New Testament or in the Early Church. But, it is also true that in Romans 13 Saint Paul argues that it was the Lord who gave government the right to use weapons as a way to keep lawbreakers down.
Somewhere along the line the Church finally crossed a certain line, after which it had to make some decisions. That line was when Christians became the majority in Armenia and in the Empire. At that point, the Church could no longer keep from becoming involved in the Empire. When the Emperor is a Christian, when the Army is mostly Christian, when the Senate is mostly Christian, when the judges are Christian, then the Church has no choice but to speak out clearly into the governmental life of the country. The American experiment with the separation of Church and State did not take into account that reality, but rather assumed it. The Founding Fathers never thought through what it might mean for governance if the Church was fully separated from the State. They assumed a morality that was basically Christian, but were reacting to the persecution that non-approved denominations experienced in Europe. Even the non-Christian Founding Fathers assumed a generally agreed upon morality, although Benjamin Franklin was quite the exception.
But, the Early Church Fathers were faced with a country that had no inherited Christian morality, but now was governed by Christians. It is at that point that the Church had to help guide the country into a new morality. The attempt was not perfect, but it did change the society. In the midst of that attempt, they had to face the issue of the Army. Either the Army was part of God’s plan, and in that sense godly, or it was not. If it were part of God’s plan, then—just like Saint Paul said in Romans 13—they wielded the sword as part of God’s assignment to them. If that is true. If the Army carried weapons in an appropriate manner and because God had appointed that role for them, then it is also not inappropriate to think that weapons should be blessed so that the Army may carry out the suppression of lawbreakers in a god-appointed and appropriate manner.
Many Christians who are horrified at the blessing of weapons are also not necessarily against having the Armed Forces. But, somehow they see the blessing of weapons as a terrible thing while wishing to acknowledge the need for Armed Forces. However, they do not realize that they are sending a mixed message to both the Church and the troops. Are they saying that it is OK to defend this country, but that the arms they use are ungodly? How do we counsel Christians that it is OK to be part of the Armed Forces but tell them that they are using ungodly weapons?
Now, some Early Church Fathers clearly saw it as inconsistent that a Christian serve in the Army because they would be using ungodly weapons in an ungodly task. But, they were not the majority. And, the Early Church Fathers from after the period that the Church became the majority no longer seem to have that restriction. They have had to face up to the issue of Christians in the Army when they are the majority of the country and the government. So, if it is OK to be in the Armed Forces, it is OK to bless the weapons that are used by the Armed Forces. If they task is godly, then most certainly many of the means must also be godly, even if they lead to unwelcome results.
No, I do not have easy answers. But, we must learn to think through this logically. Much of the revulsion to the blessing of weapons is from a hyper spiritualizing of the Church. At the other extreme, however, (and this is another blog post) are those who wish the Church to approve any and all use of weapons, including in self-defense, revolution, etc. Neither of those positions appears to be a logical one to me, although I have no easy answers to some of this.Justin Trudeau: Could he be marketed to voters as a more likable version of Stephen Harper?
More from Paul Adams, available More from, available here
Even if you leave aside the failed attempt to recruit Mark Carney, the federal Liberal leadership race so far has looked like a collective quest to find the party a home on the centre-right.
Martha Hall Findlay calls for an end to supply management.
Marc Garneau wants to open up telecommunications to foreign investment.
And most important — because he appears to be an almost prohibitive front-runner — Justin Trudeau has tried to outflank the Harper Conservatives in welcoming offshore money to the oilpatch. His website has many repetitions of his “pro-growth” mantra, but almost no mention of climate change. He has even gone to Calgary to trash his father’s National Energy Program.
“I’m proud of my father and the values he stood for but I’m here to try and challenge a whole new set of realities,” he was quoted as saying. “I had nothing to do with the National Energy Program. I was 10 years old.”
The Liberals built their 20th century dynasty by bridging the divide between left and right. The party’s left-leaning social policies took the party where the votes were, but its right wing was also key. No other party in the world was as successful at the straddle — and there were many others that tried.
There were at least three strands in the blue tinge to the Liberals’ red maple leaf.
First, the Liberals showed that moderate social reform could be a bulwark against more aggressive socialism — a real concern in the middle third of the 20th century. Social programs and progressive taxation not only starved the beast of radical reform (or even revolution), they helped create a consumer and customer class to buy the goods that industry produced. And the state also built the infrastructure that business used to make its money: C.D. Howe’s St. Lawrence Seaway, the Trans-Canada Highway and Trans-Canada Airlines.
Second, for all those good reasons it was members of the business class who bankrolled the 20th century Liberal party.
Third, the apparatchiki of the Liberal party — the political pros who staff ministers’ offices and run campaigns — mostly pursue their non-political careers in law firms, polling companies, ad agencies or as lobbyists working for big business. There are precious few Liberal insiders who earn their crust working for think tanks, universities, charities, churches or unions.
Two of these three blue strands are less important that they once were, and so should be less compelling to today’s Liberal party.
Perhaps because capital is more mobile in a globalized world, businesspeople seem less interested in social stability in any particular place, or even in government-built infrastructure. They prefer their preferments in the form of deregulation, privatization, low tax rates and generous tax concessions, which allow a quick getaway as need be. In other words, the social base of business Liberalism has shrunk.
More recently a series of changes to party financing has eliminated corporate donations and even screwed down the limits on individuals, wiping out the Liberals’ traditional fundraising strategy. Like it or not, the Liberals must now compete in the world of small donors, and it will not be easy raising money from ordinary folk if the party’s hot button issues are bringing in foreign investment and balancing the budget.
The third blue strand is still strong and clear, however. It is still the case that many of the political professionals the Liberals need to organize and run their campaigns come from the corporate client class and to some degree reflect the views of those who employ them. These apparatchiki are in a powerful position to influence the leadership campaigns — though they tend to be considerably to the right of the ordinary members of the party, and certainly of its (shrunken) following in the general public.
This may create an entry for the one certified progressive in the Liberal leadership race, Joyce Murray, but it seems very unlikely that she will be able to overcome Trudeau’s organizational advantage, not to mention his good looks, personality and pedigree.
Of course there are a couple of narrower, more tactical reasons why Trudeau in particular may be tacking to the right. In the short term, it may be a feint designed to shake people’s preconceptions of him during the leadership race and carve out a political image distinct from that of his father.
But Liberal supporters should be concerned that it is the germ of a general election strategy: to position Trudeau not as a centre-left alternative to the Conservatives, but as a more likeable, open, honest, youthful successor to Stephen Harper. A change in personalities, in other words, rather than a change in policies.
This was essentially the strategy of Michael Ignatieff, and it didn’t work. It didn’t work in part because Ignatieff’s inexperience contrasted with Harper at a nerve-jangling time in the economy. It also didn’t work because it forced Ignatieff to tack jerkily left in the election campaign when it was apparent that the only pool of voters actually available to the Liberals were there — further muddying the already murky Liberal brand.
Inexperience is also a problem for Justin Trudeau, and to an extent the Liberals’ much-diminished front bench. Trudeau is a more personally appealing figure than Ignatieff, but he also starts from much, much further behind.
Although the Liberals’ may have built a 20th century dynasty by campaigning from the left and governing from the right, the formula doesn’t fit so well on a third place opposition party for whom a Liberal government is both an increasingly distant memory and a distant dream.
Follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29
The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.Almaty (Kazakhstan): The charismatic late Indira Gandhi's short half-a-day stay here left such an impact on Kazakhs that many of them decided to name their daughters after her, with the trend still continuing.Charmed by the former prime minister during her visit to the erstwhile USSR in 1955 with her father Jawaharlal Nehru, several people named their daughters after Indira."The name Indira struck a chord with most of the people. Every other household decided to christen a newborn girl after the Indian leader," says 82-year-old Satarhan, a preacher at the central mosque here, whose granddaughter is named Indira."It is not that everyone got to see Indira and Nehru during their half-day stay in Almaty. Whoever saw the lady was mesmerised by her looks, her eloquence and her behaviour. People wanted their daughters and granddaughters to be like her and started naming them after her," Satarhan said."Such was the trend that almost every tenth Kazakh girl was named Indira," he says.Indira Ospanova, a receptionist at a four-star hotel here says, "My grandparents insisted that my name should be Indira."According to ambassador of India to Kazakhstan Ashok Sajjanhar, even today, young girls and those born in the 80s and 90s continue to be named Indira.Just days ago we reported that George Zimmerman’s girlfriend wanted to drop charges and filed a court affidavit denying that any crime was committed.
Prosecutors just announced that the State will drop charges. Zimmerman’s ankle monitor was removed and he is a completely free man now.
Via AP:
Prosecutors say they will not file domestic violence charges against George Zimmerman after his girlfriend said in a sworn statement she did not want to pursue the case. State Attorney Phil Archer in Seminole County said in a statement Wednesday that Samantha Scheibe’s decision not to cooperate and the lack of other corroborating evidence made a successful prosecution unlikely. Zimmerman had faced charges of aggravated assault, battery and criminal mischief following a Nov. 18 incident at the central Florida house he shared with Scheibe. She initially told police Zimmerman pointed a shotgun at her face, then recanted in an affidavit filed this week. Zimmerman was acquitted last summer in the shooting death of unarmed, black teenager Trayvon Martin. The case sparked a nationwide debate about race and self-defense laws.
Court records: #GeorgeZImmerman has been released from his bond conditions, his GPS device will be removed. #Zimmerman — Jeff Weiner (@JeffWeinerOS) December 11, 2013
PDF: Prosecutors inform court no DV charges will be filed against #GeorgeZimmerman. #Zimmerman released from bond. http://t.co/eQn5K2GpZo — Jeff Weiner (@JeffWeinerOS) December 11, 2013
(Featured Image: George Zimmerman at November 19, 2013 bail hearing)Just Desserts
I call this page just desserts because it features just desserts. And also, eventually everyone gets their just desserts. Jordana’s dad is MIA but at least there are snacks.
– Gary
You may or may not have noticed, but I’ve been going back and making covers for the older issues and setting up some ‘Previously In VANGUARD’ pages, to help readers keep on top of the story. As well as this, I’ve been trying to format the comics so that they can be uploaded to Comixology. Issue one is live and two and three are currently being reviewed by the staff at Comixology. I’m hoping they’ll be given the thumbs up soon.
– Dan
REDDIT: As always, upvotes on Reddit are more than welcome if you enjoyed the page/comic
Dan
Art, writing, etc.
Dan
Edited/written by
Gary CohenWhen a woman is having miscarriage symptoms, a doctor may order one or more ultrasounds to determine the viability of the pregnancy.
A common use of ultrasound in early pregnancy is to calculate a gestational age. For this purpose, an ultrasound is considered a highly accurate means of dating a pregnancy. In a normal pregnancy, the ultrasound results can provide an estimate of the gestational age to within five to seven days of accuracy.
In an abdominal ultrasound, the woman will be asked to come to the scan with a full bladder, because this positions the uterus in a way that makes it easier to obtain measurements. The doctor or technician then spreads a gel over the lower abdomen and uses a transceiver to take measurements from a number of angles.
In a transvaginal ultrasound, the doctor or technician inserts a thin probe into the vagina in order to take a series of measurements, including the size of the gestational sac, the size of the yolk sac, the length of the fetal pole, and the heart rate.
In the first trimester, doctors usually use a transvaginal rather than abdominal ultrasound to gather information about the pregnancy. The transvaginal ultrasound provides the most accurate information in early pregnancy, given that the early developing gestational sac and fetal pole are extremely tiny at this point and a vaginal ultrasound can get closer to the developing pregnancy.
Remember also that any uncertainty about the date of ovulation could affect what the ultrasound will show at any point in early pregnancy.
These are averages for when specific early pregnancy developmental points become detectable by transvaginal ultrasound. Generally, abdominal ultrasound is less sensitive and may not detect these milestones until a week or later in the pregnancy.
Why Early Ultrasound Results Can Be Inconclusive for Determining Miscarriage
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The results of an ultrasound are compared to what is expected for the gestational age of a pregnancy. The gestational age is calculated by the number of weeks since the last menstrual period; however, this method generally assumes a 28-day cycle with ovulation occurring on the 14th day. Many women have shorter or longer cycles and do not ovulate on the 14th day -- and this could affect what an ultrasound should show in the development of the pregnancy.
For example, if a woman has a 35-day menstrual cycle, she most likely ovulates around the 21st day of her menstrual cycle (because ovulation usually occurs two weeks before the menstrual period would begin). If the woman became pregnant and had an ultrasound scan six weeks from her last menstrual period date, her normally developing pregnancy would measure with a gestational age of five weeks, because the gestational age dating system assumes that she would have ovulated a week earlier than she did. If the woman did not know that she ovulated on the 21st day of her cycle, she might worry unnecessarily that she was having a miscarriage if she had an early ultrasound that showed only five weeks of development in her pregnancy when she was technical "six weeks pregnant."
Similarly, not everyone meticulously tracks the start of the menstrual period. If a woman cannot remember when her menstrual period started and guesses the wrong day, even if she does have a typical 28-day cycle, this could also change the expected results of an ultrasound scan."4K is not going to have a major lifetime on a plastic disc."
Before this week, the state of 4K content was fairly dire. While 4K cameras are slowly trickling into TV production, networks like AMC and Fox aren’t anywhere close to broadcasting in the higher-quality standard. Sony's media player is a high-end device tied to Sony televisions, and a Blu-ray standard won’t be locked down until the end of the year at best. When consumers start buying the first wave of affordable 4K TVs like Vizio’s $999 P-Series this year, the only way they’re going to get content is by streaming it over the internet.
"One of the interesting pieces is that 4K is not going to have a major lifetime on a plastic disc," Netflix’s chief product officer, Neil Hunt, tells us. "It’s not going to fit on a Blu-ray disc, and it’s unlikely that people are going to want to upgrade their DVD players."
It’s a streaming-first view that’s held not just by Netflix, but the industry at large: Vizio CTO Matt McRae and Sharp senior VP of product marketing Jim Sanduski both told us that they’re betting on streaming as the future of 4K. "A lot of it will come from streaming," says McRae. "And I think one of the best things that can happen is have streaming be first with content, be first with UHD [Ultra HD], be first with some of the [new] features."
That plays right into Netflix’s strengths: in addition to having the most popular 4K-capable distribution system in the market, the company also an ace up its sleeve: actual 4K content. The Emmy-winning House of Cards is ready to launch its second season in 4K in the second quarter of this year, and Hunt also told us that "all major original content going forward" will be shot and finished in 4K.Capcom has updated and made the full rules of CPT 2016 available to the general public, from the tournament format to the code of conduct players must follow.
While most rules should be familiar to experienced tournament players, there are a few important distinctions that have been made. First off, Capcom has officially barred sponsors that are involved in adult entertainment and leaves the door open to ban any other sponsor "Capcom deems inappropriate at its sole discretion."
Second, the company has also banned any form of gambling at the events, with violators to be ejected from the event and possibly banned from CPT.
The company has also taken a stance against swearing, violence and "other forms of thuggery." The rules can be found at the Capcom Pro Tour website.WASHINGTON — Saying that high-ranking Bush administration officials may have taken part in grave constitutional violations after the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal appeals court in New York on Wednesday revived a long-running lawsuit brought by immigrants, most of them Muslim, who said they were subjected to beatings, humiliating searches and other abuses in a Brooklyn detention center.
“The suffering endured by those who were imprisoned merely because they were caught up in the hysteria of the days immediately following 9/11 is not without a remedy,” Judges Rosemary S. Pooler and Richard C. Wesley wrote in a joint opinion for a divided three-judge panel of the court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
“Holding individuals in solitary confinement 23 hours a day with regular strip-searches because their perceived faith or race placed them in the group targeted for recruitment by Al Qaeda violated the detainees’ constitutional rights,” the judges said.
The case, filed as a class action in 2002, was the first broad legal challenge to the policies and practices that swept hundreds of mostly Muslim men into the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn on immigration violations in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks.LATEST PENGUINS RUMORS
Penguins winger Chris Kunitz name has come up as a buy-out candidate by the media but word is being sent out immediately from those in the organization that Kunitz won’t be under any consideration for a buy-out this summer.
Kunitz has two years left on his deal and a cap hit of $3.85 million.
One source on buying Kunitz out:
“Absolutely not. Are you kidding me?”
As Jim Rutherford mentioned yesterday, the Penguins believe Kunitz can still contribute.
“We have guys that are capable of scoring that can probably score more,” Rutherford said. “I mean, in Chris Kunitz alone, his goal production dropped off dramatically. I don’t think his play dropped off as much as his production. I just went through that with him. He |
," said Steve Wilson, a spokesman for the congressman. "We understand that Mr. Allocco and his son are safe and negotiations to allow them to return home will hopefully be concluded soon. In the meantime, we remain in touch with the Allocco family here in New Jersey."
The father and son helped arrange two New Year’s performances by Nas and Jemiah Jai in Luanda, Allocco said.
But moments after he arrived at Quatro de Fevereiro International Airport on Dec. 30, Allocco said, he learned the rappers weren’t coming.
"When I told the local promoter that the acts had not traveled, he became extremely angry," Allocco said. Nas has wired $200,000 to Allocco’s attorney, Allocco said.
"He is supposed to send another $100,000, but now he is reneging," Allocco said.
Nas could not be reached for comment.
TMZ.com, which broke the story, reported that Nas did initially agree to perform in Angola, but called it off because of a "miscommunication" about travel plans.
Allocco said, and a report in The Miami Herald confirmed, that Nas instead attended a star-studded New Year’s Eve party with the Miami Heat’s LeBron James.
Fearing for their safety, Allocco said he and his son hailed a cab to the U.S. Embassy. Instead, he said, the driver dumped them in a lot surrounded by two dozen gun-toting men who threatened to throw them in jail.
The men, the Angolan promoter’s security guards, Allocco said, carted them to jail, where they endured hours of interrogation in Portuguese — which they do not speak.
"When we first arrived at the jail for questioning, they made sure to show me where I would be staying if I couldn’t get the act or the money right away," Allocco said. "It was a Third World holding cell that smelled of sweat and human body odor."
At the behest of U.S. Embassy Vice Consul David Josar, Allocco said, the father and son were released to a Luanda hotel, where they await a resolution of this "nightmare."
Allocco said he is an experienced promoter who has booked shows for James Brown, Earth Wind & Fire and Jermaine Jackson. He has worked in Colombia, Trinidad and India without incident.Reasons Why The Illuminati is Real: In today’s society, the Illuminati is generally thought of as a myth. The word Illuminati means enlightened, and those that are in this supposed secret society are the enlightened ones. These people are often suspected of being the most powerful people in the world, and are cited as the masterminds behind such events as President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Tupac Shakur’s ‘death’; events which have kept speculation about the secret society rife.
In modern society, the Illuminati is thought to be a group of leaders ranging from business men to politicians to celebrities, who control everything that happens with an eye on the distant and not-so-distant future. In particular, they are thought to be setting up society for their rule by controlling the majority of the wealth, monopolizing advances in health care to extend their lives, and eventually wiping out large swaths of society in a mass epidemic that will make the world’s population easier to control and lessen the burden on the planet they mean to rule.
As the digital age has emerged, theories on both sides of the fence have sprouted regarding the Illuminati. While at first there may have been valid points for and against its existence, the topic became so over-saturated that it was hard to separate legitimate theory from crock. One of the Illuminati ideas regards triangles and ancient Pyramids, and anytime anyone of fame makes this symbol, intentionally or not, people point to it as a sign that the Illuminati does in fact exist.
Moreover, if you’re interested in learning more about conspiracy theories on society, take a look at our list of The Top 5 New World Order ‘Facts.’ Specifically regarding reasons why the Illuminati is real, if you are one of those that simply dismiss it as an afterthought, you may may want to reconsider, as there are tangible reasons that show how the Illuminati may in fact exist today. By looking at the history of the Illuminati, along with the best of the conspiracy photography examples that exist, we ranked the best reasons why the Illuminati is real, and working to control us all.
5. Its Ongoing Relevance
In no way am I saying that the beliefs of those who founded the Illuminati in 1776 are still reflected in its depiction today. However, the fact that they’ve been talked about for this long is a reason in itself that in some fashion, it may still exist today. If there wasn’t so much ongoing press trying to disprove the Illuminati, frankly I most likely would not be writing this piece.
It seems every major controversial event in history brings up discussion of this secret society. Starting with the Bavarians (where the Illuminati was first created) being blamed for the French Revolution, all the way to major films on the events of September 11th, the Illuminati is used to explain events that otherwise seem incomprehensible. While many people try to disprove these theories, and some have been, the mere injection of Illuminati talk in the public is proof that people are trying to keep it alive, as there isn’t a direct financial incentive to claim Illuminati after every famous person dies.
4. Symbols
The Illuminati can be represented by many signs and symbols, the most famous being the singular eye in a pyramid. The pyramid symbol truly is everywhere in today’s pop culture. It’s in TV shows, there are clothing brands based off it, Jay Z’s Rocafella hand sign is him holding up a pyramid sign; the list goes on and on. I’m not making the case that pyramids themselves signify the legitimacy of the Illuminati, but rather, that if there are this many people in positions of power who insert this logo into society, it shows that there are people that want to keep the idea of it alive. It’s not just used for money or in brands; the logo, a pyramid with an eye in it, may appear on people’s backpacks, in kid’s shows, or as a more blatant representation in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Its continued pop culture presence is a reason why the Illuminati is real.
3. The Dollar Bill
This is yet further evidence of the Pyramid’s prevalence and less its own reason, but the evidence is so strong that it deserved a separate spot. The American one dollar bill has a well drawn version of this exact Illuminati symbol on it. Some people have said this is proof that it doesn’t exist, because if it was really a secret society, then why would it want people to know it exists. Yet, it wants people to know it exists, it just doesn’t want the public to know what it’s up to. Lastly, on the symbol of the dollar bill is MDCCLXXVI, which equals 1776, or the same year the Illuminati was founded…just saying.
2. Tupac Shakur’s Death
Okay, this one’s a little bit personal. Reading up on this topic is one Illuminati rabbit hole I suggest you don’t go down, as it can really shed light on one event that has long been tied to conspiracy theories. Shakur rapped about the Illuminati not being real, even dedicating the name of an album and song to the word ‘Killuminati.’ So, the biggest rapper of the era wanted to kill the Illuminati; big deal right?
Yet, his death was suspect in many ways. Not only was he shot on a main street in Las Vegas, but his body was never found and the only leaked photo that came out had a tattoo of his airbrushed on the wrong side of his chest. There are more details that are weird too that I won’t get into but it’s safe to say that his murder has never been ‘solved,’ or even very close. As he was anti-Illuminati, many people thought they were in fact involved in his death, and the lack of the shooting’s resolution has only given credence to this theory.
1. The Round Table Movement
One of the main objections to the Illuminati is that if it really did continue to exist, why weren’t its principles ever tried on a political level. However, there actually was such a happening. In the early 1900’s, a South African leader wanted to bring the United States back under British control. The idea of this group was to form an all-powerful federation that would bring world peace. This is also a main goal of the Illuminati. This group was called the ‘Round Table Movement,’ and was to be lead by a professor to help increase the connection between Britain and its colonies. While the full formation of this movement never came to fruition, it shows that people in power tried to operate as a secret society to change government order, causing it to be our number one biggest reason why the Illuminati is real.Time and time again, police officers shoot, and sometimes kill, civilians holding harmless objects, later claiming they mistook them for guns: a cell phone, a bible, and a Wii controller. In early February, police body camera manufacturer Taser announced that it had acquired the artificial intelligence startup Dextro Inc—a “computer vision” research team that claims it can use object recognition software to train officers to better discern actual threats. But privacy experts find the surveillance and profiling possibilities offered by this latest, but certainly not last, upgrade to police body cameras unsettling. Moreover, the question remains: The cameras may be getting smarter, but are they actually making the public safer?
Databases with massive surveillance potential
Dextro is a video analysis tool “trained” to recognize objects when scanning camera footage. Started in 2014 as advertising technology for tagging livestreaming videos, Dextro scans and pinpoints objects in footage that users are looking for, for example, a book, a Nike shoe, lines of text, or a gun. Dextro can also pick up motion information, like handshakes or a punch.
Once Dextro has identified the objects or movements, it creates a timeline for when they appear in the footage, providing timestamps and frequency data. Presumably, an officer could take four hours of boring footage, run it through Dextro, and then automatically redact everything but the moments in which the desired object or motion appears. Officers can then search entire databases for videos based on these key moments like “officer foot chase” or “traffic stop.”
“It’s really about improving redaction,” Marcus Womack, Taser’s executive vice president told Gizmodo. Before body camera footage can be released to the public and news outlets, police must blur faces and tattoos and edit out audio to maintain the privacy of those being filmed. “We’ve heard agencies say for every hour of video it takes eight hours of manual processing,” Womack said.
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The other part of Dextro’s pitch is its capabilities as a police training tool. Once Dextro has been taught to recognize an object, it can detect it in any video footage it analyzes, including dashcams, CCTV surveillance, and even aerial drone footage. Womack imagined an example of how that could help law enforcement: An officer’s body camera records an incident in which a cop mistook a cell phone for a gun; the software helps pinpoint the precise moments when the cop made a mistake; and the video is later used for training. Police departments could potentially analyze and compile hundreds of videos for similar purposes. That’s a hypothetical, ideal scenario.
“Police body cameras capture a lot of video about a lot of people that’s not in the public interest.”
While Dextro’s technical capabilities seem effective, what concerns experts isn’t just Dextro itself, but how its use, or misuse, can enhance the already powerful surveillance capabilities of police.
“This gives police departments as a whole massive search capabilities that could be used to turn these tools into surveillance cameras,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU, told Gizmodo. “Police body cameras capture a lot of video about a lot of people that’s not in the public interest...and for privacy reasons should not be indexed in the way this AI proposes to do so.”
Computer vision and ‘cyborg’ policing
There’s very strong support for body cameras nationwide, especially from black communities, but experts question whether the public knows the full extent of what the cameras capture, and how tech like Dextro’s AI can be added to systems after the fact. Given how object recognition can compound with many other police technologies—surveillance footage access, drones, Stingrays, face recognition databases, license plate readers—this technology can evolve in deeply troubling ways.
“Taxpayers wanted an accountability tool, not a surveillance tool,” Dr. Alvaro Bedoya, Executive Director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law told Gizmodo. Bedoya co-authored a landmark report on face recognition and police technology, which revealed that half of all American adults are in databases. On the Dextro tech he added, “It doesn’t strike me as an accountability tool.”
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Taser’s VP Womack says there’s no current timeline or pricing for Dextro’s release, though he imagines the product will eventually go for sale as an optional, stand-alone upgrade after more R&D testing. Its release would have massive implications on Taser’s police clients all over the country—Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Atlanta and Minneapolis police departments, as well as Chicago PD, the second largest police department in the U.S. (NYPD has a disputed contract with Seattle-based competitor, VieVu.) In its announcement of the acquisition, Taser said Dextro will perform “deep dive analysis” on more than five million gigabytes of stored video data.
“Taxpayers wanted an accountability tool, not a surveillance tool.”
Turning police body camera and surveillance footage into a searchable database would change the very nature of public spaces by chipping away at our ability to be anonymous. Taser denies that it has any current plans of using Dextro for face recognition, but confirmed that footage is typically only redacted when it’s released to the public. Internally, agencies can index and categorize uncensored footage, with full audio and un-blurred faces, as they see fit. That’s potentially troubling given how much data can be gleaned from even a passing glance in front of cameras.
“There is a wealth of information in images even at very low resolutions,” Adam Harvey, the Berlin-based artist and anti-surveillance advocate, told Gizmodo, explaining that object recognition is a rapidly accelerating field, capable of identifying tattoos, emotions, etc. How long until this software becomes commonplace? “If Taser wants to remain competitive in the field of AI and computer vision, building these multi-modal biometric profiles is the inevitable path forward,” he said. Harvey speculates that eventually, computer vision technology will allow cops to recognize people based on a whole suite of identifying factors as they simply walk by any camera.
While Taser’s Womack insists Dextro’s technology is about relieving the burden on officers to edit and redact hundreds of hours of footage, Harvey says that Dextro’s AI-backed automation fundamentally changes the law enforcement process by accelerating the collection of evidence.
“Computer vision and facial recognition enable new ways of enforcing laws,” Harvey told Gizmodo. “Violations can be determined faster, cheaper, and over extended periods of time. Police officers are quickly becoming networked cyborgs, augmented by the speed and power of technologies once developed for war,” he said, referring in part to police drones, GPS, and many other police resources that originate from the Department of Defense. On Dextro, Harvey added, “I think there are definitely privacy concerns here, but at a larger scale the issue is the amplification of enforcing laws that were originally designed to be enforced on a human-to-human level.”
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Regulation and the anti-activist climate
Ironically, while Taser pitches Dextro and its database capabilities as privacy enhancers, functionally speaking, they present the opportunity to dismantle privacy by changing the function of law enforcement and the nature of anonymity in public spaces. The difference between use and misuse will largely depending on what the law allows for.
Police departments have already used face recognition and social media surveillance software to track Black Lives Matter activists during protests. And in 18 states Republican lawmakers in have introduced bills that would punish protestors, likely reactions to Black Lives Matter, #NotMyPresident and NODaPL protests. The proposed bills vary, but some would punish protestors who wear masks or block highways. Object and facial recognition software would make it much easier for law enforcement to identify protestors, especially if they’re barred from wearing masks and bandanas that hide their face.
We’re giving up a lot of privacy in exchange for automated “video redaction.” And advancing this technology without proper regulation opens the door for troubling misuse.
Police accountability
“It’s really important that communities put in place policies that govern their use of technologies,” Taser’s Womack said. “It’s really imperative that there is an ongoing discussion with the community and the police about how the technology would be used and governed.”
But for these discussions to have any kind of effect, police departments need to be held accountable for their use of these technologies.
When it comes to body cameras, that accountability has been inconsistent at best. The officers who shot Alton Sterling last July claimed their cameras both “fell off,” an Albuquerque officer said a “malfunction” stopped the camera from recording his fatal shootout with a 19-year-old and in Oakland, police said they “mistakenly” deleted hundreds of hours of stored footage.
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And even when the video technology is used properly, the existence of footage is not a guarantee of police accountability.
Matthew Mitchell is a security researcher and encryption specialist that runs Crypto Harlem, a workshop in the historically black New York City neighborhood that teaches newcomers how to use encryption tools like PGP, WhatsApp, and Tor. Mitchell says the entire premise that having a video of an incident fosters police transparency or accountability is flawed.
“If we only get data of one perspective, we’re only gonna have evidence of one perspective.”
“You’ll never get camera footage that’s as good as the public execution of Eric Garner,” Mitchell told Gizmodo.
In 2014, NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo was caught on tape by a bystander, placing Garner in a chokehold. Garner suffocated, the video went viral, and a grand jury decided not to indict the officer who killed him, even as millions watched Garner die at Pantaleo’s hands. Many supporters of body cameras believe in the importance of transparency, but what does transparency matter if it doesn’t lead to a conviction? Especially now that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who leads the Department of Justice, suggested that he won’t monitor police departments accused of racial bias and chronic lack of accountability?
“That is probably the gold standard, as good as it can possibly get, of this technology serving the people,” said Mitchell of the Eric Garner footage. “And there was no justice.”
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Mitchell argues that because body cameras are designed to point away from the officers themselves, law enforcement won’t be subject to the same amount of data-sourced scrutiny as the public. And as cameras are adopted more widely and the data extrapolated from this footage becomes the bedrock for officer training and policy decisions, the biases inherent to body cameras can become embedded in the larger police force.
“If we only get data of one perspective,” Mitchell said, “we’re only gonna have evidence of one perspective.” Mitchell says AI will exacerbate, rather than remedy this.
Worst-case scenarios
Given these concerns about privacy and overreach, Dextro co-founder, David Luan, was willing to address potential misuses of the technology. The first: racial bias. Officers have long been trained to recognize certain jewelry, brands, tattoos, and hand movements as “gang related”—remember when hoodies were a cause for national concern? Because Dextro lets users choose their own objects for recognition, couldn’t the software automate racial profiling by scanning hundreds of hours of data for these same prejudiced indicators of criminality?
Luan said Dextro has been in contact with policy experts and academics at Stanford and UCLA about the risk for profiling.
“The goal of this is something that’s used after the fact to determine and basically release footage to the public and help departments speed up their ability to review lots of evidence,” Luan said. “As a result, there’s always a human left in there. Our goal in that is that we’re not replacing that last human judgment. There’s a separate issue of ‘Is that human judgment good?’”
Womack said that Taser would work closely with agencies and communities about the varying filters. Mitchell offered that officers using Dextro should disclose which keywords they search for, but acknowledges that that is asking a lot, since departments are already reluctant to release video footage.
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Human error, or worse, menace, could be disastrous with this level of data comprehension. So I asked Luan: what if an officer wanted to misuse Dextro for his own defense? Could police officers, after a fatal shooting, go back to the footage to identify objects they could then later use as justification? Civil rights activists have long cautioned that, in cities where officers can view body cam footage before filing official reports, officers have the opportunity to tailor their report to the footage to avoid contradicting themselves. In fact, police departments in Boston, Aurora, Dallas and Las Vegas explicitly encourage officers to view the body cam footage before completing the written report.
In our conversation, Luan brought up a great point: an officer doesn’t need advanced AI technology to exaggerate evidence. “The fact that the footage exists already creates the ability to do [that],” he said. The technology doesn’t create officer malfeasance any more than it disables it.
Tech’s buzzy litany of cliches like “breakthrough” or “innovative” mischaracterizes what technology actually does. Body cameras are a potential resource for enhancing police accountability; they don’t automatically make individual officers accountable or magically eliminate all possibilities of abuse.
“We’re not replacing that last human judgment. There’s a separate issue of ‘Is that human judgment good?’”
I asked Luan if it worries him that he won’t have complete control over how this technology is used. “We can basically craft that argument over anything that’s been invented over the last 100 years,” Luan said. “The goal for the technology is not to make decisions for people. It’s people making the decisions at the end. We’re just helping speed up the process at which people can find the info they needed to make a decision, [and] speed up the search for their definition of truth inside video.”
Roughly 4,000 US police departments use body cameras, with the two largest departments, the Chicago PD and NYPD, announcing plans to equip every patrolling officer by 2019. Body cameras are in schools, and worn by bouncers and face recognition is part of international travel procedures in Paris and Australia. Taser’s object-recognition conceit may be the latest attempt to rebuild community trust in law enforcement, but the realities of “computer vision” and object recognition adds dangerous new layers of surveillance opportunities. The privacy the public would sacrifice is not worth what such technology has to offer. And without regulations, there are no stop guards to prevent abuse of this software.
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“There’s this idea that we can’t be bad if we’re using computers. It leads to ‘I was just following an algorithm’ instead of ‘I was just following orders,’” Mitchell said.Looking for news you can trust?
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Donald Trump, the billionaire New York real estate magnate and presidential aspirant, is on a quest to court the hard-line social conservatives of the Republican Party. Recently, he has repeatedly questioned President Barack Obama’s citizenship, and has demanded to see Obama’s birth certificate. Interviewed by the Today show last week, he said he considers himself a tea partier. And after decades of supporting abortion rights, he has pronounced himself pro-life.
But Trump’s political makeover doesn’t end there. He has also changed his once-moderate stance on gay rights—a reversal that could spell trouble with the conservative base. Last month, Trump told the Des Moines Register that he opposes giving gay couples the same benefits as married ones, a position that’s in stark contrast to his past support for gay rights on everything from domestic partner benefits and civil unions to gays serving openly in the military. Asked about his position legalizing on gay marriage and giving “civil benefits” to gay couples, he replied, “No and no.” (A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.)
That’s a dramatic change to his past position on gay rights. In February 2000, Trump gave a long interview to The Advocate, a leading magazine covering the gay community. At the time, Trump was mulling a presidential run on the Reform Party ticket, the party founded by billionaire Ross Perot that counted former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura among its members. In his response to The Advocate‘s questions, Trump laid out a decidedly progressive stance on gay rights issues for a Republican.
Trump told The Advocate he opposed legalizing gay marriage, but said he supported “a very strong domestic-partnership law” giving gay couples the same legal protections provided to heterosexual married couples. “I think it’s important for gay couples who are committed to each other to not be hassled when it comes to inheritance, insurance benefits, and other simple everyday rights.”
Trump said he cared more about a person’s capabilities than their sexuality, and insisted that “sexual orientation would be meaningless” if he were president, opening the door for gay employees in a hypothetical Trump administration. He told The Advocate he supported the idea of amending the 1964 Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, and believed legislation to prevent hate-crimes was also necessary. “Amending the Civil Rights Act would grant the same protection to gay people that we give to other Americans—it’s only fair,” he said. Trump also said that he fully backed gays serving openly in the armed forces. “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” he added, “has clearly failed.”
Trump is expected to announce whether he’s running in June, coinciding with his headline speech at the Iowa Republican Party’s Lincoln Day dinner. If he does officially enter the race, could Trump’s past support for gay rights sink his presidential run?
Dave Peterson, a political science professor at Iowa State University, says Trump’s past position will seriously damage his campaign in the eyes of Iowa’s social conservatives, whose support can make or break the outcome of that state’s curtain-raising caucus. “Those kinds of social positions in the past are going to do him in,” says Peterson, who calls Trump’s presidential aspirations a publicity stunt.
Chris Barron, founder of the gay conservative group GOProud and a supporter of Trump’s would-be candidacy, says it’s too early to judge Trump on the issue of gay rights. He downplays the importance of Trump’s interview with the Des Moines Register.* Barron, who believes Trump is “dead serious” about running, pointed to the “gay people who work for him and gay people in his life” as evidence of Trump’s ties to the gay community. “I don’t think there is a bigoted bone in his body,” Barron says.
Barron says Trump’s climbing support in polls shows that his message is resonating with voters. As for how Iowa voters take to Trump’s past, Barron adds, “We’re going to have to watch and see how it plays out.”
Steffen Schmidt, an Iowa State political science professor who’s studied the caucuses for 40 years, says the fate of Trump’s candidacy is a no-brainer once Iowans learn of his past positions on issues including gay rights. “The moment at which Donald Trump’s campaign collapses is the moment the 18 or 20 other candidates bring up these views and chop him off at the knees,” Schmidt says. “I have no idea why he thinks he could launch his campaign in Iowa, but he’d probably be successful launching it in Las Vegas.”
*An earlier version of this story said GOProud supported Trump’s candidacy. The group doesn’t currently support any candidates.Monday May 5, 2014
Toronto, ON – The Ontario Hockey League today announced that New Jersey Devils prospect Ben Thomson of the North Bay Battalion is the OHL Player of the Week for the playoff week ending May 4 with three points in two games including a goal and two assists with a plus-minus rating of plus-1.
Thomson helped the Battalion earn a split on the road in the first two games of the Rogers OHL Championship Series for the Robertson Cup against the Guelph Storm. Thomson opened the scoring in Game 1 of the series with his fifth goal of the post-season despite a 3-2 overtime loss to the Storm on Thursday night. The Troops evened the series on Friday night in Game 2 with a 4-3 overtime victory with Thomson assisting on Nick Paul’s game-tying goal on the power play at 14:32 of the third period, then he set-up Barclay Goodrow’s game-winner at 2:30 of the extra frame. The series shifts to North Bay for Game 3 on Tuesday night.
Thomson, a 21-year-old from Orangeville, ON, is playing in his fifth and final OHL season. Selected by the Devils in the fourth round of the 2012 NHL Draft, Thomson began his OHL career with the Kitchener Rangers before joining the Battalion midway through the 2013-14 campaign where he scored 24 goals and 15 assists for 39 points in his final 43 games finishing the season with a career-high 45 points including 27 goals in 55 games. The overage forward has also added 14 points in 19 playoff games with the Battalion.
Watch highlights of the Rogers OHL Championship Series in Game 1, and Game 2.
Also considered for the award this week was 2014 NHL Draft prospect Robby Fabbri with two goals and one assist for three points in two games for the Storm, and Minnesota Wild prospect Zack Mitchell who scored once with two assists for three points in two games for the Storm. In goal, the Storm’s Justin Nichols made 69 saves in two games with a goals-against-average of 2.92 and save percentage of.920.
2013-14 OHL Post-Season Players of the Week:
Apr. 28 – May 4: Ben Thomson (North Bay Battalion)
Apr. 21 – Apr. 27: Kerby Rychel (Guelph Storm)
Apr. 14 – Apr. 20: Barclay Goodrow (North Bay Battalion)
Apr. 7 – Apr. 13: Robby Fabbri (Guelph Storm)
Mar. 31 – Apr. 6: Daniel Altshuller (Oshawa Generals)
Mar. 24 – March 30: Matt Murray (Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds)
Mar. 17 – Mar. 23: Hunter Smith (Oshawa Generals)
2013-14 OHL Regular Season Players of the Week:
Mar. 10 – Mar. 16: Cameron Brace (Belleville Bulls)
Mar. 3 – Mar. 9: Connor McDavid (Erie Otters)
Feb. 24 – Mar. 2: Sam Bennett (Kingston Frontenacs)
Feb. 17 – Feb. 23: Scott Laughton (Oshawa Generals)
Feb. 10 – Feb. 16: Andreas Athanasiou (Barrie Colts)
Feb. 3 – Feb. 9: Nick Ritchie (Peterborough Petes)
Jan. 27 – Feb. 2: Max Domi (London Knights)
Jan. 20 – Jan. 26: Josh Ho-Sang (Windsor Spitfires)
Jan. 13 – Jan. 19: Justin Nichols (Guelph Storm)
Jan. 6 – Jan. 12: Connor Brown (Erie Otters)
Dec. 30 – Jan. 5: Franky Palazzese (Sudbury Wolves)
Dec. 16 – Dec. 29: Remi Elie (Belleville Bulls)
Dec. 9 – Dec. 15: Max Domi (London Knights)
Dec. 2 – Dec. 8: Andreas Athanasiou (Barrie Colts)
Nov. 25 – Dec. 1: Dane Fox (Erie Otters)
Nov. 18 – Nov. 24: Zac Leslie (Guelph Storm)
Nov. 11 – Nov. 17: Alex Fotinos (Windsor Spitfires)
Nov. 4 – Nov. 10: Matt Murray (Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds)
Oct. 28 – Nov. 3: Spencer Martin (Mississauga Steelheads)
Oct. 21 – Oct. 27: Brock McGinn (Guelph Storm)
Oct. 14 – Oct. 20: Scott Kosmachuk (Guelph Storm)
Oct. 7 – Oct. 13: Connor Brown (Erie Otters)
Sept. 30 – Oct. 6: Scott Laughton (Oshawa Generals)
Sept. 23 – Sept 29: Gemel Smith (Owen Sound Attack)
Sept. 19 – Sept. 22: Michael Dal Colle (Oshawa Generals)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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On September 16, 1992, 10,000 protesters descended on City Hall. They blocked traffic for the better part of an hour, climbing over cars, buses, and police barricades. Some were violent and inebriated, and a few physically assaulted members of the press, as others hurled racist epithets at New York’s first African-American mayor, David Dinkins. They eventually burst through barricades into the City Hall parking lot, much to the indifference of the 300 uniformed police officers there to oversee the demonstration. The protesters were off-duty cops. Ad Policy 10,000 protesters burst through City Hall barricades. They were off-duty police officers.
Bused in by police unions and egged on by would-be mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, they were indignant over that day’s heated hearing on a bill supported by Mayor Dinkins. The bill was designed to establish an independent civilian agency providing oversight of police, at a time not too different from today, when unrelenting police brutality was the subject of both weekly headlines and unyielding protests. The agency was pushed for by a “rainbow coalition” of community groups, civil-liberties agencies, and City Council representatives.
In the wake of the September 16 police riot, public opinion turned more vehemently against the police. The bill, which had been six votes shy of passing the day before the police stormed City Hall, was passed by a substantial majority the day after. It established an independent Civilian Complaint Review Board, which began its work a few months later. It was the first significant independent entity in the city to oversee civilian complaints against police. Supporters were euphoric.
But euphoria would turn to disappointment and the CCRB pass from a dream to a nightmare. For all the hope the board’s creation generated, supporters soon realized that “passing legislation [had been] relatively easy,” as Norman Siegel, the director of the NYCLU for 15 years and one of the key instigators behind the CCRB told The Nation: “The real challenge was implementation.”
Hope of civilian oversight soon withered with the 1994 election of Rudolph Giuliani, who had been so opposed to the board’s implementation. The board was firmly placed under mayoral control: All the CCRB’s decision-making powers lie with 13 persons, three members of which are appointed by the police commissioner, five by the mayor, and five by the City Council, putting the majority vote in the hands of the same city administration that is in charge of policing. Giuliani packed the board with former prosecutors, commonly believed to be sympathetic to the police. During Giuliani’s tenure, several CCRB employees and some board members resigned in protest of board decisions not to pursue incriminating investigations.
Four years into the Giuliani administration, the mayor’s staunch opposition to “any external check on police conduct,” as an NYCLU report emphasized in 1998, left the agency so understaffed and underfunded that it “virtually ensured it would not provide the oversight called for in the city charter.” While the city reeled from news of Abner Louima’s torture and sodomy at the hands of NYPD officers, the CCRB revealed a month after Giuliani’s reelection that it had previously undercounted the number of complaints against police filed in the aftermath of Louima’s case. Police accountability seemed far away. As recently as 2007, according to the latest NYCLU report on the CCRB, the CCRB had declined to investigate 55 percent of complaints filed in the preceding four years, and the investigations that did occur were so delayed and cursory that evidence disappeared and statutes of limitations expired. New York was found to have one of the lowest rates of substantiated complaints of police misconduct nationally.
But it wasn’t just the mayor’s grip on the CCRB that stymied oversight. The structure of the board severely limits its ability to punish police for infractions. The board can only recommend sanctions to the NYPD’s police commissioner, which he imposed at his discretion. In the majority of cases, he simply declined. The NYPD dismissed 63 percent of the CCRB’s findings of police officer misconduct between 1998 and 2004, or instead endorsed discipline that was, according to the NYCLU, “little more than a slap on the wrist.” As a result of the distorted proceedings, New York was found by the NYCLU to have one of the lowest rates of substantiated complaints |
: 14th
/ PROJ: 13 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 16 Pts
Evans is doing something you love to see from the good receivers in that even when they're having a bad game they still find a way to produce. Last week at Detroit, Evans had just four catches for 45 yards on 11 targets, but he found the end zone twice for 16 Fantasy points. He has double digits in Fantasy points in five of his past six games, and he should keep playing well against the Panthers this week, even if the Buccaneers go back to Mike Glennon as the starter over Josh McCown. Prior to shutting out the Saints receivers in Week 14, Carolina had allowed a receiver to score in three consecutive games, and the Panthers have given up 16 touchdowns to receivers this season. Evans is vying for top rookie honors, so he should look to finish the season strong. Fantasy owners also should continue to count on him during the playoffs.
Sleepers
Sit 'Em
Anquan Boldin SF (at SEA) START: 100/61
/ WEEK 15 RANK: N/R
/ PROJ: 5 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 5 Pts
He should rebound against this porous secondary.Look for Jacksonville to be throwing a lot in this game.Reggie Wayne's health will determine his value.Last week should be a sign of things to come.Let's hope he's a factor in this potential bonanza.
Boldin is likely the only semblance of hope the 49ers have in their passing game this week, but realistically what can you expect from him in this matchup with the Seahawks? In Week 13 at home, Boldin was held to three catches for 14 yards, and he struggled against the Raiders last week with four catches for 54 yards. You have to sit Michael Crabtree in this game also since Richard Sherman will lock him down (he had three catches for 10 yards in Week 13), and last year Boldin was held to one catch for 7 yards at Seattle in Week 2. The only way I would consider using Boldin this week would be as a No. 3 receiver in PPR leagues, but I would avoid all the 49ers if you can.
Larry Fitzgerald ARI (at STL) OWN/START: 99/26
/ WEEK 15 RANK: N/R
/ PROJ: 4 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 3 Pts
Fitzgerald is playing through a knee injury which cost him two games, and he struggled in his return to the field in Week 14 against the Chiefs with four catches for 34 yards on nine targets. He just hasn't been good with Drew Stanton as the starter, and it's hard to trust him this week. In five starts with Stanton, Fitzgerald has combined for 17 Fantasy points against the Giants, 49ers, Broncos, Lions and Chiefs. He has 37 targets in those five games, but he failed to top 60 yards in any outing with no touchdowns. He played well against the Rams at home with nine catches for 112 yards on 10 targets, but that was the game when Carson Palmer tore his ACL. Fitzgerald hasn't been the same since, and you can't start him now in the Fantasy playoffs when your season is on the line.
Pierre Garcon WAS (at NYG) OWN/START: 81/30
/ WEEK 15 RANK: 41st
/ PROJ: 6 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 9 Pts
It was great to see Garcon put together a good game in Week 14 against the Rams with nine catches for 95 yards on 11 targets, and he stepped up with DeSean Jackson (shin) out. The catches, yards and targets were all his best totals since Week 3 at Philadelphia, but he's been a non-factor most of the season because of Jackson's presence and poor quarterback play. Jackson is expected to return this week, meaning Garcon will return to a limited role. He had two catches for 28 yards on six targets against the Giants in Week 4, and he's combined for 13 Fantasy points against the Giants in a standard league in his past three meetings going back to last year. He should only be considered a No. 3 in PPR leagues at best, and he’s gone six games in a row without scoring a touchdown.
Marques Colston NO (at CHI) OWN/START: 92/43
/ WEEK 15 RANK: 42nd
/ PROJ: 6 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 7 Pts
Colston scored in his last game outdoors in Week 13 at Pittsburgh, but otherwise he was non-existent outside once again. He had just three catches for 16 yards and the touchdown against the Steelers, and he has now gone 12 games in a row outdoors without reaching double digits in Fantasy points. The last time he did it was Week 12 of the 2012 season, and since then he's played in Chicago in Week 5 last year. He finished with two catches for 15 yards in that game, and you just can't trust Colston away from home. He hasn't played well there either or anywhere this season for that matter with double digits in Fantasy points in just two games. The matchup is great for the Saints, which is why we like Stills and expect Brees and Graham to rebound, but keep Colston on your bench in the majority of leagues.
Mohamed Sanu CIN (at CLE) OWN/START: 87/39
/ WEEK 15 RANK: 36th
/ PROJ: 7 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 1 Pt
Sanu might be forced to step up this week if the Bengals can't get anything going with Green vs. Haden. But we haven't seen Sanu do much of late with Green healthy. He has one game in his past five outings with more than two Fantasy points, which was Week 12 at Houston. His targets have faded with six combined in his past two weeks against Tampa Bay and Pittsburgh, and he struggled against the Browns in Week 10 with two catches for 20 yards on seven targets. Sanu also has just two touchdowns away from home this season in six games, and he's not worth trusting any more now that Green is back as the focal point of this passing game.
Bust alert
Mike Wallace MIA (at NE) OWN/START: 100/56
/ WEEK 15 RANK: 39th
/ PROJ: 6 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 3 Pts
Wallace got off to such a great start this season with at least eight Fantasy points in each of his first six games, including seven catches for 81 yards and a touchdown against the Patriots in Week 1. But he's tailed off since then with one game with double digits in Fantasy points since Week 7, and he's struggled the past two games with nine catches for 108 yards on 15 targets against the Jets and Ravens. Now he faces a matchup with Revis, who didn't shadow him in Week 1 but should now. This isn't a matchup to trust Wallace with the way he's been struggling on the road against a great cornerback. We hope Wallace can finish the season the way he started, but don't plan on using him in the majority of leagues this week.
TIGHT END
Start 'Em
Larry Donnell NYG (vs. WAS) OWN/START: 83/53
/ WEEK 15 RANK: 5th
/ PROJ: 10 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 2 Pts
The first time Donnell faced the Redskins in Week 4 he had a career game with seven catches for 54 yards and three touchdowns on eight targets. We hope Eli Manning and the Giants remember that because the Redskins haven't improved against tight ends since then, especially of late. In their past six games, Washington has allowed four tight ends to reach double digits in Fantasy points with six touchdowns allowed over that span. Coby Fleener and Jared Cook have combined for eight catches, 188 yards and four touchdowns the past two weeks against the Redskins, and Donnell should be in line for a big game. He hasn't scored in his past four games, but the targets have been there with 14 in his past two outings. If there was ever a good week to buy into Donnell, this is it based on the matchup.
Delanie Walker TEN (vs. NYJ) OWN/START: 97/67
/ WEEK 15 RANK: 7th
/ PROJ: 8 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 2 Pts
Walker has struggled the past two games with five catches for 33 yards and no touchdowns on 13 targets, but we're counting on a rebound game this week against the Jets. New York leads the NFL with 12 touchdowns allowed to tight ends. Since Week 8, a span of six games, the Jets have allowed five touchdowns to tight ends. The Titans are going back to Jake Locker this week with Zach Mettenberger (shoulder) hurt, and Walker and Locker played well together to open the season. In their first two games against Kansas City and Dallas, Walker had 13 catches for 179 yards and two touchdowns on 18 targets, so hopefully they pick up from their in this tasty matchup at home against the Jets.
Travis Kelce KC (vs. OAK) OWN/START: 86/55
/ WEEK 15 RANK: 11th
/ PROJ: 7 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 9 Pts
The last time Kelce faced the Raiders in Week 12 he had four catches for 67 yards on five targets. That's a good game for a tight end these days, and he's coming off a great performance at Arizona with seven catches for 110 yards and a fumble in Week 14. Anthony Fasano scored at Oakland in the first meeting, and he's always a candidate to steal a touchdown from Kelce. But this matchup is enticing since the Raiders have allowed four touchdowns to tight ends in the past five games and seven overall for the season. We hope the momentum Kelce had in Week 14 carries over to this week.
Sleepers
Sit 'Em
Mychal Rivera OAK (at KC) OWN/START: 42/12
/ WEEK 15 RANK: 17th
/ PROJ: 6 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 16 Pts
He should be able to exploit this great matchup.A strong finish can salvage his down season.He's scored three times in his past three games vs. ARI.
Rivera rebounded with a huge game in Week 14 against San Francisco after three consecutive poor outings with seven catches for 109 yards and a touchdown on seven targets for 16 Fantasy points in a standard league. He combined for six Fantasy points in his previous three outings against San Diego, Kansas City and St. Louis. In that game against the Chiefs, Rivera had one catch for 8 yards on four targets. The Chiefs have allowed eight touchdowns to tight ends this season, but Antonio Gates in Week 7 is the lone one to reach double digits in Fantasy points. Since that game, the Chiefs haven't allowed a tight end to score more than six points in any outing. I wouldn't count on Rivera having a repeat performance from last week in this matchup.
Heath Miller PIT (at ATL) OWN/START: 77/34
/ WEEK 15 RANK: 16th
/ PROJ: 6 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 8 Pts
We're glad Miller has come around the past three games, and he's been beneficial to Fantasy owners who stuck with him. He has at least seven Fantasy points in three games in a row, including eight points in the past two outings against New Orleans and at Cincinnati. While I'm expecting a huge offensive outburst for both teams this week, I'd be a little wary of Miller in this matchup. The Falcons haven't been good defensively this year, but they have done well against opposing tight ends. Only two tight ends have scored against Atlanta, and only Owen Daniels in Week 7 has reached double digits in Fantasy points, including matchups with Jimmy Graham (eight points), Martellus Bennett (five points) and Greg Olsen (six points). We hope Miller continues to play well, but this matchup suggests he should struggle. You might want to consider other options this week.
Kyle Rudolph MIN (at DET) OWN/START: 68/33
/ WEEK 15 RANK: 21st
/ PROJ: 6 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 0 Pts
I was holding out hope Rudolph would be a good tight end to use down the stretch, and maybe he gets hot over the next three weeks. But I can't trust him now with the way he's played the past four weeks since coming back from hernia surgery. Bridgewater isn't looking in his direction enough with only 10 targets in four games, and he's responded with seven catches for 66 yards and a touchdown for 11 Fantasy points. The Lions have struggled with tight ends recently against New England and Chicago over the past three games, but only four tight ends have reached double digits in Fantasy points against Detroit with six touchdowns allowed. Also, in his past five meetings with the Lions, Rudolph has just 15 catches for 138 yards and one touchdown. He's not a good option to use right now unless you're desperate.
Bust alert
Jason Witten DAL (at PHI) OWN/START: 100/70
/ WEEK 15 RANK: 15th
/ PROJ: 7 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 2 Pts
The Eagles had a blip in their defense of tight ends briefly in Week 10 against Greg Olsen and Week 12 against Walker when both had over 100 receiving yards. But those are the only two tight ends to hurt them this season since they've allowed one touchdown to the position and no one else getting double digits in Fantasy points, including matchups with both Colts, Donnell and Witten in Week 13. He was held to one catch for 8 yards in that matchup on two targets in that game, and he also struggled last week at Chicago with two catches for 26 yards on three targets. It's hard to bench Witten at this time of year, but he hasn't scored double digits in Fantasy points since Week 8 and has only hit that mark once this season. You can find better options to start this week like Reed, Cameron and Cook.
KICKER
Start 'Em
Matt Bryant ATL (vs. PIT) OWN/START: 66/46
/ WEEK 14 RANK: 4th
/ PROJ: 12 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 7 Pts
Bryant had a better game than I expected in Week 14 at Green Bay with nine Fantasy points, and he's scored at least eight points in five games in a row. In his last two home games, Bryant has 25 Fantasy points, and this game should be an offensive outburst for the Falcons. The Steelers have allowed seven kickers to make multiple field goals against them this season, and Bryant is typically better at home. He's worth starting as a No. 1 option in all leagues this week.
Sleepers
Sit 'Em
Phil Dawson SF (at SEA) OWN/START: 82/63
/ WEEK 15 RANK: N/R
/ PROJ: 4 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 7 Pts
Six kickers have at least 10 Fantasy points vs. OAK.Eight kickers have multiple field goals vs. ATL.SD has allowed seven field goals in the past two games.
I think we've illustrated the point enough that the 49ers offense is bad heading into this game, so relying on their kicker isn't the best move. Dawson had one field goal and no extra points against the Seahawks at home in Week 13, and he's scored double digits in Fantasy points just once since Week 5. Last year at Seattle, Dawson also was held to one field goal and no extra points, and the Seahawks haven't allowed a kicker to score more than six points in six games in a row. I would avoid all 49ers players if you can.
DEFENSE/SPECIAL TEAMS
Start 'Em
Ravens BAL (vs. JAC) OWN/START: 85/56
/ WEEK 15 RANK: 3rd
/ PROJ: 17 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 12 Pts
The Ravens played like an elite DST in Week 14 at Miami with a season-high six sacks on Tannehill. That might have more to do with the Dolphins offensive line than the Ravens pressure, but Elvis Dumervil and Terrell Suggs combined for five sacks and harassed Tannehill all game. The same could happen this week since Blake Bortles has been sacked at least four times in each of the past four games and 19 times over that span. He also has an interception in all but one game this year, and the Ravens should be a Top 5 DST in this matchup.
Sleepers
Sit 'Em
Dolphins MIA (at NE) OWN/START: 77/36
/ WEEK 15 RANK: N/R
/ PROJ: 7 Pts
/ WEEK 14: 3 Pts
WAS has allowed 29 sacks in the past five games.CLE scored 24 Fantasy points vs. CIN in Week 10.TEN has allowed three DST touchdowns in the past four games.
The Dolphins DST has been a good unit for a good portion of this season, but they have struggled of late and should not be started in this matchup. They have single digits in Fantasy points in two of their past three games, and their pass rush and turnover ability has fallen off with four sacks and just two interceptions over that span. The Dolphins sacked Tom Brady four times in Week 1 and had two fumbles, but Brady hasn't been sacked multiple times since Week 7 and only the Chargers DST has reached double digits in Fantasy points against the Patriots in the past nine outings. This is an easy sit for Fantasy owners.
Full Disclosure from Week 14
Mark Ingram, and the entire Saints offense, was a disaster against the Panthers at home last week. I'm not sure how many people saw that coming, but New Orleans completely crumbled, with Ingram a terrible option as our Start of the Week.
Cam Newton also was a surprise given his previous history against the Saints, and the same could be said about Ben Roethlisberger and his history against the Bengals and Matt Ryan outdoors. All three were better than expected, and I whiffed on all three in Week 14.
I also missed on DeAndre Hopkins, Kenny Stills and Mohamed Sanu as starts, but we were correct is saying to sit Brandon LaFell, Keenan Allen and Jordan Reed, among others.
As for our good start selections, including sleepers, we had five Top 12 quarterbacks in Russell Wilson, Andy Dalton, Matthew Stafford, Jay Cutler and Tony Romo. We had three Top 10 running backs in Joique Bell, Jonathan Stewart and Andre Williams. We also had a Top 10 receiver in Percy Harvin and the No. 3 tight end in Martellus Bennett.
There should be more good than bad in Week 15, and we expect Blount to be a great Start of the Week. Good luck to all of you this week.Boston Red Sox principal owner John Henry entered into an agreement early Saturday to buy The Boston Globe, a deal that will put the 141-year-old newspaper, its websites, and affiliated companies into the hands of a personally shy businessman with a history of bold bets.
The impending purchase for $70 million in cash marks Henry’s first foray into the financially unsettled world of the news media.
“The Boston Globe’s award-winning journalism as well as its rich history and tradition of excellence have established it as one of the most well respected media companies in the country,’’ Henry said in a statement. He cited the “essential role that its journalists and employees play in Boston, throughout New England, and beyond.’’
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Henry, 63, made his fortune in investment funds and has built a sports empire that includes the Red Sox and New England Sports Network, as well as the Liverpool Soccer Club and Roush Fenway Racing, a NASCAR team.
“We are excited about the prospect of working with John Henry and committed to giving Boston and New England high-quality news, information, and entertainment for years to come,’’ said Christopher M. Mayer, Globe publisher and president of New England Media Group.
A Quincy, Ill., native and a son of soybean farmers, Henry turned his knowledge of agricultural crops into a complex commodities-investment business, managing $2.5 billion at its height. Since Henry bought the Red Sox with partners Tom Werner and Larry Lucchino in 2002, the team has won two World Series championships following an 86-year drought.
Henry, who lives in Brookline, said he would disclose more details about his plans for the company in coming days.
“This is a thriving, dynamic region that needs a strong, sustainable Boston Globe playing an integral role in the community’s long-term future,’’ he said.
In buying the Globe and its websites, BostonGlobe.com and Boston.com, Henry bested a field of more than a half dozen bidders, including members of the Taylor family who sold the Globe to the New York Times Co. in 1993. Other bidders included local business people and West Coast investors.
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As part of the agreement with the Times Co., Henry also will acquire the Worcester Telegram & Gazette newspaper and its website, as well as the Globe’s direct mail business and a 49 percent interest in the Metro Boston commuter newspaper.
“We’re delighted to have found a buyer in John Henry, who has strong local roots and a deep appreciation of the importance of these publications to the Greater Boston community,’’ Times Co. chief executive Mark Thompson said in a statement.
Globe publisher Christopher Mayer, in a note to the staff, thanked the Times Co. for its stewardship and said he looked forward to working with Henry.
“I have no doubt that we will turn our full attention to moving our business forward and fulfilling our enduring mission: to be a voice for New England through our award-winning journalism across all mediums and platforms,’’ Mayer said.
The sale is expected to close in 30 to 60 days.
Bill Grueskin, dean for academic affairs at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, said the Globe is likely to benefit from a local owner. “Having somebody with roots in the community and an intrinsic interest in local coverage and local government is better than having some from out of town,’’ he said.
Noting Henry’s lack of newspaper experience, Grueskin said, “What the Globe needs now is not so much a journalism guy as someone with strong business credentials and the integrity to keep the business separate from the journalism,’’ he said.
In a statement, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino offered his congratulations to Henry and the Globe, calling them “two of Boston’s best leaders with a rich history of success in building Boston’s brand.’’
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“I have no doubt this will be a winning combination,’’ Menino said.
The deal brings under one owner two Boston institutions that have been connected before. The Times Co. owned a minority 17.5 percent stake in the Red Sox from 2002 to 2012, reaping a $150 million profit on the investment.
During that period, the Globe continued its normal coverage of the team and routinely disclosed in news stories that the Times Co. was a partial owner of the Red Sox.
The Globe-Red Sox history also goes back further — all the way to the early 1900s, when members of the Taylor family owned the Red Sox and built Fenway Park.
Even so, the deal is sure to spark debate in journalism circles and among Globe readers about whether the Globe’s coverage of the Red Sox, which regularly includes critical commentary, will be affected.
“We have no plans whatsoever to change our Red Sox coverage specifically, or our sports coverage in general, nor will we be asked,’’ Globe editor Brian McGrory said Saturday. “The Globe’s sports reporting and commentary is the gold standard in the industry.’’
The Times Co. is selling the Globe for far less than the $1.1 billion it paid for the paper in 1993, when the business was highly profitable and the Globe fetched a record price. The Times Co., like other business owners, withdrew a large stream of cash from the Globe during its ownership — a sum at least equal to the purchase price, according to several former high-ranking Globe executives.
Henry would be taking ownership of the Globe during a period of dramatic changes in the newspaper industry, as print advertising revenues at papers nationwide continue to slide and readers increasingly want to consume news online, where revenues are improving but are still much lower than traditional newspaper advertising.
Governor Deval Patrick in a statement called the Globe “an American institution, and a vital source of information here in Massachusetts and across New England.’’ He noted, “John Henry has already proven his dedication to the Commonwealth with his winning stewardship of the Boston Red Sox, and I have every confidence that he will bring that same level of excellence to this new endeavor.’’
Many newspaper transactions over the past decade have been tumultuous, as new owners took on massive debt at the same time the business was struggling. Major news outlets such as the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune have ended up in bankruptcy, amid deep cost cuts and layoffs.
In 2009, the Times Co. tried to sell the Globe, but it took the paper off the market because it did not fetch the price it was seeking. It received wage concessions from the newspapers’ union members and management after threatening to shutter the paper because the company was losing money.
The Globe’s financial health is stronger now, but the company is still working to turn around declining advertising revenue, a problem that persists industrywide.
Henry is known for his keen grasp of numbers and a disciplined approach to statistics and analysis that he brought to commodities futures and to the Red Sox. His models for making smart bets on the market, he told the Globe in 2004, focused on “what is, not what should be.’’
After many years of investment success, the funds managed by John W. Henry & Co. began to falter after the financial crisis. Henry shut down the hedge fund firm last year, although it continues to manage his personal money.
When asked last year about whether his financial resources were diminished in such a way that it could affect his Sox ownership, Henry said, “I have no interest in reducing that. If anything, I expect it to increase over time.’’
While Henry has shown himself to be a long-term investor, how he plans to run the Globe is still largely unknown.Well to preface, there is a little bit of a learning curve with this. Since it's not your average OS as it's built primarily around Google Chrome you're going to likely run in to a few issues, especially if you're intent on using it with standard Desktop software available on Windows or macOS. With that said, once you are able to get past that fact, ChromeOS is actually a really nice and slim operating system. There's really not a lot of overhead, and it may seem like an i5 or i7 and 8 or more Gigabytes of RAM is overkill, depending on your use, it may be just perfect. There are methods out there to install Windows on to once of these, however, that's entirely at your own risk. I have to say, I do have a Windows 10 tablet and I find myself going back to this more. I think that is in part because this has twice the available RAM, but all the other specs are nearly identical. It's fast, very fast, and that is in part due to the relatively small footprint of ChromeOS. It only takes a couple seconds to start up. Setup was a breeze and very fast. It really just works, and I love that. One of the biggest things a lot were clamoring for with ChromeOS was the ability to use app's from the Google Play Store. With some of the latest Chromebooks this has become a possibility. Now it is not perfect, and some apps just don't look right, and some apps just work flawlessly. There are some Mobile games I play on here and it handles them just as well, if not even better than some of the most powerful Android or iOS devices. The Pixelbook is currently the premier Chromebook that does offer this support for App store compatibility. Other more recent Chromebooks are slowly becoming available, however the Pixelbook has it right out of the gate. One caveat with this however, as this does use an Intel i5/i7 depending on which you settle on, this is only utilizing their integrated graphics. While potent for a lot of standard run of the mill games, it's not going to be able to utilize some features found in High-End Android, iOS or Windows based devices A gaming machine this is not, but it will not let you down with typical apps in the Google Play Store. I will note, when using it for games for a long time, it does get quite warm to the touch around the top of center of the keyboard. So if you are using it for this, I would highly suggest to use it in Tent Mode, or Tablet Mode so you're not keeping your there or on your lap. It's not enough to cause an issue, but it can be a bit uncomfortable with heavy tasks, but this is true in most devices, so your mileage may vary with how you use. You can pretty much throw just about anything at this. Even the battery life on it is great. For a heave session of web browsing and gaming, I'm sure I got around 6-8 or maybe even more hours. It uses USB-C to charge, I believe Ver. 3.1. It only takes a couple hours for a full charge with the adapter it came with, which is also fast charging. The cable itself is USB-C on both ends, so this will not connect to your run of the mill USB charger, you would need an adapter for that, or USB 2.0/3.0 Cable. I wouldn't recommend anything less than 3 for optimal charging. The screen on it pretty darn nice. It us only an LCD, which is pretty common for Notebook Computers. It's a little thick, and the bezels are a bit of turn off as there is quite a bit of space from the edge to the screen, probably an inch on the top and bottom and half an inch on the sides. It also get's plenty bright. If you use it outside, I don't see you running into to many issues, but direct sunlight may be an issue as it does have a reflective glass screen. Also, the ability to use it in either Notebook orientation, Tent orientation or Tablet Orientation is really great and the hinge design seems top notch. It doesn't feel loose, and I've had it for about 2 or 3 weeks now and it's like I just took it out of the box. Also, this is more about the construction of it, on the sides of the touchpad, there are softish like pads to rest your wrists or palms on. It also acts as a cushion that the screen will rest on. It also has this material on the opposite side of the device to cushion the screen when you have it in table mode. I does get a bit unwieldy as when you hold it, you're likely going to want to hold it in the middle, the problem there is that you are going to be pressing down on the touchpad. While it doesn't affect anything, it could over long use wear it out. Thankfully there's those cushioned pads on the side of the touch pad you can use so it is a little more comfortable. The all aluminium build of it definitely makes this a standout as it feels incredibly well built. It is a bit heavy, but when it comes to solidity and durability, I hold a lot more faith in this than I would in a Notebook with a bunch of plastic. They keyboard is very nice, and has a great tactile feel to is. I also appreciate that it is backlit so if you're in a dark place, you can still see when you type. They also did not stop with lighting the edges of the keys, the letters themselves are also illuminated.The touchpad is also very responsive. I did experience some false touches with it with the tap-to-click feature so i did turn it off. There's not a way to decrease the sensitivity of the feature as it's an all or nothing setting. Aside from that quirk it really is an all around great device. Also one of the other cool things it does feature is Google Assistant. This is something that has been slowly rolling out to other devices. It first started if I recall with the first Google Pixel and has slowly trickled into other devices. It's a really cool feature especially if you have a connected home with things like lighting, WiFi Thermostats, Speakers, Stereos, Security Systems and such. The google Home app also does work natively on the Pixelbook. When it boils down to it, in looking for a device that is a Notebook, you want to determine how to you want to use. If you're looking for something such as casual games, either a iOS, Android or Chromebook device will fill that role, so longs as you're not looking to play things from something like Steam, or another Desktop PC oriented app. If you're looking for productivity, this can also do that as you can get MS Office on the App Store. Also, you can even do drawing on it and it comes with LightRoom as well. If you go this route, you'll want the pen, and that's another $99 sadly. If none of the above is what you need or fulfills your needs, you will want to look for something with a dedicated Operating System like Windows or macOS. Overall, if you're looking for something that's not more than you need for everyday use, this is a great device, and I'm sure I will enjoy it for years to come, or till the next big thing at least! Oh yeah! Since this does have a glass screen, keep a Microfiber cloth handy, cause it picks up fingerprints like it's going out of style.
Read moreThe election of Donald Trump has brought new people into politics and re-ignited activists. As people on the left aim to resist what they view as Trump’s dangerous and harmful policies, and people on the right try to sustain political engagement after the election, both sides are debating about the effectiveness of various political strategies. For example, Indivisible, a guide compiled by Congressional staffers on tactics for opposing President Trump, spread quickly across the internet as people grappled with how to effectively influence policy-making.
Contacting legislators is one of the most common forms of political engagement in the United States. Hearing from constituents, particularly in face-to-face meetings and phone calls, can influence politicians’ action on an issue. The greatest impact, however, is when the contact is outside of routine communications and part of a collective campaign. Social scientists have found that politicians are more likely to react to new information that indicates a change in the political landscape and ties their stance to their electability. An organized effort can demonstrate that a group has powerful resources, such as volunteers and donations, which in turn can affect politicians’ ability to get re-elected.
Legislators are not always just responding to public opinion either. They are also influenced by lobbyists, political donations, personal political views, and party platforms. Nevertheless, popular opinion may play a larger role in shaping elected officials’ positions when it signals a dramatic shift and the public feels strongly on one side of an issue. Thus, political organizations and concerned citizens can influence policy by raising and changing public awareness, and then explaining these popular sentiments to politicians who learn about their constituents attitudes.
The effectiveness of contacting politicians also depends partially on the party and race of the official and the constituent. People are more likely to contact a politician from their own political party, so contacting leaders outside of one’s own party disrupts political norms — which is sometimes effective and sometimes discounted. The response of elected officials to the public is also shaped by racism. For example, a real-world experiment found that white legislators discriminate against emails and calls from black constituents.Chelsea Clinton has responded to Donald Trump’s early morning Twitter claims that the media would have treated Hillary Clinton’s daughter differently than his own, who was criticized for temporarily filling the president’s seat at the G20 Summit.
“Good morning Mr. President. It would never have occurred to my mother or my father to ask me. Were you giving our country away? Hoping not,” Clinton wrote.
Trump fired off a Twitter storm on Monday morning, retweeting a variety of “Fox & Friends” segments and defending his daughter Ivanka holding his seat. He wrote, “When I left Conference Room for short meetings with Japan and other countries, I asked Ivanka to hold seat. Very standard. Angela M agrees!”
Also Read: Trump's Monday Twitter Storm Echoes Fox News, Defends Ivanka
He continued: “If Chelsea Clinton were asked to hold the seat for her mother,as her mother gave our country away, the Fake News would say CHELSEA FOR PRES!”
Although UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s aide briefly took her place while she stepped out, it was Trump’s action that fired up critics, sparking accusations of nepotism when the president’s daughter took a seat between May and Chinese President Xi Jinping during a session titled “Partnership with Africa, Migration and Health.”
According to the Agency France-Presse, a White House official emphasized that “when other leaders stepped out, their seats were also briefly filled by others.”
Good morning Mr. President. It would never have occurred to my mother or my father to ask me. Were you giving our country away? Hoping not. https://t.co/4ODjWZUp0c — Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) July 10, 2017There are four globally endemic human coronaviruses which, together with the better known rhinoviruses, are responsible for causing common colds. Usually, infections with these viruses are harmless to humans. DZIF Professor Christian Drosten, Institute of Virology at the University Hospital of Bonn, and his research team have now found the source of "HCoV-229E," one of the four common cold coronaviruses -- it also originates from camels, just like the dreaded MERS virus.
The Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus was identified in humans for the first time in 2012. It causes severe respiratory tract infections that are often fatal. Dromedaries were confirmed to be its animal source some time ago.
"In our MERS investigations we examined about 1,000 camels for coronaviruses and were surprised to find pathogens that are related to 'HCoV-229E', the human common cold virus, in almost six percent of the cases," says Drosten. Further comparative molecular genetic |
given by machine learning have to be part of science's toolkit because the real world is complex: for phenomena such as the weather or the stock market, a reductionist, synthetic description might not even exist. “There are things we cannot verbalize,” says Stéphane Mallat, an applied mathematician at the École Polytechnique in Paris. “When you ask a medical doctor why he diagnosed this or this, he's going to give you some reasons,” he says. “But how come it takes 20 years to make a good doctor? Because the information is just not in books.”
To Baldi, scientists should embrace deep learning without being “too anal” about the black box. After all, they all carry a black box in their heads. “You use your brain all the time; you trust your brain all the time; and you have no idea how your brain works.”It’s been a week since the release of Kobolds and Catacombs and the Wild Metagame remains in flux. I’ve gathered a couple of the best decks that players have a lot of success with in week 1. There’s still a lot of exploration and deckbuilding to do, especially in Wild where there are so many new interactions with the larger card pool. Look for these decks to become more refined, tuned, and for new decks to still pop up in the coming months!
With that, let’s get into some of the coolest and best performing decks from week 1.
Paladin
Paladin looks to be an early winner with the addition of Call to Arms to various different archetypes. Aggro Paladin came out with guns blazing in week 1 as players quickly put together a refined list. Powerful Wild two-drops like Ship's Cannon, Shielded Minibot, and Haunted Creeper really push the power level of Call to Arms in this deck. Powerful cards like Muster for Battle, Corridor Creeper, Val'anyr, and Sunkeeper Tarim also give the deck a lot of staying power heading into the mid and late game. Aggro Paladin is certainly one of the best performing decks week one.
RenoJackson’s Bubble Paladin is a take on a more midrange style Paladin Deck. The deck has a lot of synergy with Divine Shield, with main deck Blood Knights and Potion of Heroism. Call to Arms, as usual, overperforms in this deck as it will always hit Righteous Protector, Shielded Minibot, and Dirty Rats. Perhaps the coolest addition to this deck is Lynessa Sunsorrow, which when playing Potion of Heroism, Spikeridged Steed, and Blessing of Kings, can be a terrifying threat.
The last deck featured is a Wild Classic that got some powerful new tools: Anyfin Can Happen Paladin. Yet again, Call to Arms is a great new include in this deck in its ability to pull murlocs like Bluegill Warrior, or more card draw like Loot Hoarder. This deck is capable of putting pressure early in the game with its aggressive curve, while also drawing towards its late game finisher: Anyfin Can Happen.
Control, Haydumb, Eon_HS - Aggro Paladin RenoJackson's Bubble Paladin Sipiwi's Anyfin Can Happen ^
Priest
Priest is still in a good spot with the addition of Psychic Scream to existing archetypes. Reno Priest remains strong as ever, with many players slotting the card in place of Lightbomb, Dragonfire Potion, or Emperor Thaurissan. Awedragon hit legend this month with a unique take on Reno Priest utilizing the dragon package and the incredible new card Duskbreaker.
With the new Lesser Diamond Spellstone, Big Priests gain a powerful new tool as well. The deck is still as powerful and highroll as ever. The Spellstone increases the threat count of the deck significantly.
Awedragon's Dragon Reno Priest Roffle and ConcernedMom - Resurrect Priest ^
Rogue
Rogue is in a bit of a rough spot as a lot of aggressive decks like the new Aggro Paladin popped up. Players are also still figuring out how best to utilize new Rogue cards like Kingsbane, Elven Minstrel, and Fal'dorei Strider.
Kohai’s had some success with Oil Rogue in the expansion despite the aggressive metagame. His variant decides to forego cards like Cavern Shinyfinder and Elven Minstrel and focus more on Tinker's Sharpsword Oil and Oil Rogue’s classic game plan.
Capilano experimented early on with a Miracle Rogue list that focused heavily on buffing Kingsbane as a win condition.
Lastly, classic Prince Keleseth rogue is still a strong option with the inclusion of Elven Minstrel and Corridor Creeper, as we’ve witnessed in Standard.
Kohai's Oil Rogue with Kingsbane Capilano's Miracle Rogue with Kingsbane Tempo Rogue ^
Warlock
Warlock is in an exciting place with the creation of a new archetype: Cubelock. With Voidlord in Wild to provide redundancy to its gameplan of cheating big demons into play, Cubelock is able to cheat into play enormous demons like Doomguard, Mal'Ganis, and Voidlord as early as turn 5. The surprising innovation to the deck however is the namesake card Carnivorous Cube. With Carnivorous Cube and Dark Pact, the deck can quickly multiply its huge threats, creating an insurmountable board presence. This powerful midgame, alongside Bloodreaver Gul'dan and N'Zoth, the Corruptor as finishers, this deck packs a huge punch. Many players are having a lot of success with this new archetype in High Legend, and it looks to be a very real contender in the Metagame.
The other deck that many players have been experimenting with is Zoolock, which gained the addition of Kobold Librarian and Vulgar Homunculus. This upped the demon package quite a bit, so many players have returned to playing Imp Gang Boss, Crystalweaver, and even Demonfire and Bloodfury Potion. There doesn’t seem to be a general consensus on how to build Zoolock yet as there are so many options in Wild. I decided to feature a deck that is an aggregate list of many of the cards players chose to include in their Zoolock deck.
Capilano's Cubelock Aggregate Zoo List ^
Druid
There are three Druid decks you can expect to see on ladder: Token Druid, Jade Druid, and Malygos OTK druids.
Token Druid looks to maintain its position as a top deck in Wild with the addition of Dire Mole and Corridor Creeper.
Jade Druid has not changed much, but some players are trying cards such as Arcane Tyrant and Lesser Jasper Spellstone to help the decks inherent weakness to Aggressive and Tempo decks.
Malygos OTK druid decks gained a lot of potential new tools from Kobolds and Catacombs. Zed hit legend this season with a unique deck that uses Ixlid, Fungal Lord, Malygos, and Faceless Manipulator alongside Aviana and Kun the Forgotten King to create 4 Malygos in one turn and deal an insane amount of damage. The deck also utilizes Greedy Sprite and Tar Creeper with Oaken Summons for a more proactive and defensive early game.
Zed's Legend Quadruple Malygos OTK Sipiwi's Aggro Druid ^
Hunter
Hunter gained some much needed tools from Kobolds and Catacombs. The new cards Dire Mole, Lesser Emerald Spellstone, and Corridor Creeper shores up a lot of weaknesses that Hunter’s have gaining board control in aggressive mirrors.
Spell Hunter is still a very experimental deck, but Seviang was able to have some success in Legend with Barnes and [Y’shaarj] as the only creatures.
HIOCKY was able to hit legend with with a very aggressive Hunter deck featuring plenty of secrets, Mad Scientist, Dire Mole and the new Spellstone.
Seviang's Legend Spell Hunter HIOCKY's Aggro Hunter ^
Mage
One of the most popular decks to come out from the new expansions was Secret Mage. With the addition of Explosive Runes and Aluneth, most deckbuilders are leaning towards a more aggressive version of the list with plenty of burn.
Aluneth solves many of the decks problems as burn heavy lists like this often run out of cards fairly quickly. Explosive Runes is just a solid secret and the extra damage to the face is very relevant in a deck like this.
Wild provides access to cards like Ice Lance, Mad Scientist, and Forgotten Torch, all powerful options in this deck. Featured is Kaedemi’s Secret Mage list that he used to hit Legend on Asia Servers.
Kaedemi's Legend Secret Mage ^
Shaman
With the addition of Healing Rain alongside Healing Wave as potent burst heal options, we’re seeing more controlling Shaman variants pop up to counter the suite of aggressive decks in week 1. Shaman has always had access to some of the most potent AoE clears in the game in Maelstrom Portal, Lightning Storm, Devolve, and Volcano. These cards are particularly effective against the variety of aggressive paladin decks that have been popular on week 1 of ladder.
RenoJackson was able to hit rank 5 Legend with a unique variant of Control Shaman that abuses Ancestor's Call to cheat out enormous threats like Deathwing, Dragonlord and even [Sleeping Dragon] as early as turn 4. The deck is filled with the full suite of Shaman removal and AoE, and an absurd 52 points of healing with Healing Wave and Healing Rain.
Another deck that benefitted greatly from Healing Rain is Malygos Shaman. Without having to rely on only playing high cost creatures in the deck to win Jousts on Healing Wave, Malygos Shaman is able to play some of the best draw engines in the game such as Mana Tide Totem and Acolyte of Pain. Acolyte of Pain alongside Volcano functions as a great board clear alongside a draw 3, and Mana Tide Totem helps immensely in slower matchups or threatens to run away with the game after playing an AoE clear.
Amplive's Legend Malygos Shaman RenoJackson's Concede Shaman- Rank 5 Legend ^
Warrior
And then there’s warrior. Players have not seem to be experimenting much with Warrior as Pirate Warrior remains the best aggressive warrior archetype, and building a strong control deck week 1 is difficult to do. Pirate Warrior is still a strong option as its aggressive openings are still powerful as ever and capable of punishing unrefined decks. Perhaps Corridor Creeper may find a fit in Pirate lists soon.
Speculative Pirate Warrior with Corridor Creeper?In this Feb. 16, 2016, photo, Mike Tupper, pastor of Parchment United Methodist Church, poses for a portrait by his tent outside of his home in Lawrence, Mich. Tupper said that he has been sleeping outside in his tent since Nov.30, 2015, to represent the ways in which the LGBTQ community is kept outside of the doors of the church and in the cold. Tupper plans to sleep outside for 175 nights total. (Chelsea Purgahn/Kalamazoo Gazette-MLive Media Group via AP) LOCAL TELEVISION OUT; LOCAL RADIO OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT (Photo: AP)
LAWRENCE - A Michigan pastor has been sleeping outside in a tent for weeks to protest his denomination’s stance on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.
The Rev. Michael Tupper of Parchment United Methodist Church near Kalamazoo started sleeping in a tent Nov. 30 and plans to continue doing so for 175 consecutive nights, Kalamazoo Gazette reported. He usually heads outside around 9:30 p.m., spends the night in the tent, and then goes back inside around 6:30 a.m.
In other news: Charge dropped when wife won't testify after walking 8 miles naked
“It’s a symbol of how our denomination, the United Methodist Church, is responding to LGBTQ persons and pushing them outside the church,” Tupper said, adding that members of the LGBTQ community “are being forced out of our church and into the cold.”
Tupper often pitches the tent in the front yard of his Van Buren County home, but he has also taken it on the road, sleeping in front of United Methodist conference headquarters in Indianapolis and Madison, Wisconsin. He plans to camp outside of United Methodist offices in Columbus, Ohio and Des Moines, Iowa, and take his tent in May to the church’s General Conference in Portland, Oregon, where clergy and laity are expected to discuss the church’s official position on gay pastors.
“My ultimate goal is to raise awareness of the problems of discrimination and to inspire people to make a change to allow for LGBTQ persons to be married in our church and to allow LGBTQ persons to serve as pastors in our church,” Tupper said.
Tupper has faced discipline several times for supporting same-sex marriages.
In 2014, the district superintendent filed a complaint against Tupper, prompting an investigation, after he signed the marriage license for his daughter’s same-sex wedding in Baltimore.
Last summer, he signed the marriage license of Benjamin Hutchison, a gay pastor at Cassopolis United Methodist Church who said he was forced to resign after the district superintendent learned that he had a gay partner.
Tupper was among nine pastors from western Michigan who defied church doctrine, which says pastors can’t officiate gay weddings, after they pronounced Hutchison and his partner “husband and husband” at their wedding in July.
“It starts with family and then it extends out to Rev. Hutchison and others,” Tupper said of his advocacy in the church for LGBTQ people.
Read or Share this story: http://bcene.ws/1TsL0rDBoston-Area Cemeteries Say No To Burying Bombing Suspect
From the NPR Newcast: WBUR's Deborah Becker reports (with introduction from Jean Cochran) Listen
Officials in Cambridge, Mass., have urged the family of deceased Boston Marathon bombings suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev not to ask that he be buried in a city-owned cemetery. Meanwhile, at least four private cemeteries in the area have already turned down such a request.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Barcroft Media /Barcroft Media /Landov Barcroft Media /Barcroft Media /Landov
From Boston, WBUR's Deborah Becker tells our Newscast Desk that Cambridge City Manager Bob Healy issued a statement over the weekend. In it, as The Boston Globe reports, he says that "the difficult and stressful efforts of the residents of the City of Cambridge to return to a peaceful life, would be adversely impacted by the turmoil, protests and wide spread media presence at such an interment. The families of loved ones interred in the Cambridge Cemetery also deserve to have their deceased family members rest in peace."
Cremation is not an option for Tsarnaev's Muslim family.
Three people were killed and more than 250 people were wounded April 15 when two bombs exploded near the marathon's finish line. On April 18, authorities say, Tsarnaev and his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar, were responsible for the shooting death of a MIT police officer on the Cambridge school's campus. In the early hours of April 19, according to investigators, they engaged in a gun battle with police in Watertown, Mass. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died from the gunshot wounds and blunt trauma he sustained during that firefight. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured later that day in Watertown.
According to The Associated Press, the funeral director who has been holding Tsarnaev's body says he will now seek help from the commonwealth of Massachusetts.
The AP also says that:This article is over 5 years old
Controversial conspiracy drama's second six-part series to go into production this year after 'phenomenal audience response'
Channel 4 has ordered a second series of controversial conspiracy drama Utopia.
The second six-part series will go into production later this year, again written by Utopia creator Dennis Kelly.
Piers Wenger, Channel 4 head of drama, said the first series had "shocked and delighted critics and fans by turns". "We are thrilled to announce the further adventures for Utopia's eclectic cast of characters which are already shaping up to be more imaginative, outrageous and brilliantly intriguing than the first."
Jane Featherstone, chief executive of Kudos, the independent producer responsible for Utopia, said the drama had received "phenomenal audience response". "This means we all get the chance to watch as Dennis unravels his unique and imaginative world even further."
Kelly and Featherstone will share executive producing duties on the second series with Karen Wilson.
• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email media@theguardian.com or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".
• To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook.President Rodrigo Duterte called on Filipino-Chinese businessmen not to give in to demands by corrupt government officials, and said they should report such offers to the authorities and he would do something about it.
Mr. Duterte also promised to show no mercy to the crooked government workers and said their positions could be given to any of the numerous Filipinos looking for jobs.
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Addressing members of the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Mr. Duterte said corruption was pulling the country down.
“If somebody asks for a compromise, you don’t have to give in. Don’t waste your money on the corrupt. Nothing will happen there,” he said.
They should shun bribes even for traffic violations and should just surrender their licenses, he said.
“Just pay the fine rather than allow this guy to continue with his trade. He would just victimize more people, even your children and fellow Chinese,” he said.
As for government workers, he said they should cut red tape and not give people transacting with the government the runaround.
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MOST READHaripriya Mukundarajan
This beetle is one extreme waterskiier. It skims across the surface of water so fast that it seems to vanish.
Haripriya Mukundarajan from Stanford University and her colleagues have filmed water lily beetles (Galerucella nymphaeae) in the lab to figure out how they stay on the surface while travelling at speeds of up to 0.5 metres per second –which scaled for size would be equivalent to a human travelling at about 500km/h.
“It’s one of the fastest horizontal speeds ever seen in an insect moving on water but nobody has looked at the physics behind it,” she says.
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When a beetle “takes off”, it lifts its middle legs, then angles its body upwards before vigorously flapping its wings to launch itself horizontally, travelling up to a few metres forwards.
The beetles move so fast that they interact with the ripples generated by their own motion, which increases drag and causes a bumpy ride. “It’s as if surface tension acts as a pogo stick that the beetle is jumping on,” says Mukundarajan.
Her team also found that skimming across water expends more energy than flying in air. Water lily beetles are also agile in air, but only fly occasionally, for example when threatened by predators.
They could be moving on water rather than in the air because they feed on water lily leaves floating on ponds, say the researchers.
Elegant solutions
The team also discovered that the beetles are well adapted for gliding on water. Compared with flies and mosquitoes for example, their wings are stronger and allow them to produce a lot of lift while counteracting drag from the surface.
And their legs are covered with tiny hairs that repel water while a claw at the tip is hydrophilic, allowing them to pin themselves to the surface of the water. “This structure is critical for the beetle to maintain its level exactly on the water surface,” says Mukundarajan.
“I’m surprised that they have something this elegant,” says Jake Socha from Virgina Tech in Blacksburg, who has previously uncovered the aerodynamics of flying snakes. “It suggests that skimming is evolutionarily important.”
Understanding the motion of the beetles could help us develop robots that move across water quickly. Many current designs are based on water striders, which move more slowly.
Mukundarajan also thinks studying the beetle’s wings could give insight into a phenomenon that occurs when an aircraft is flying low. “The beetles flatten their wings when they are close to the water,” she says. “This could create tiny vortices that reflect off the surface to give them a boost.”
Journal reference: Journal of Experimental Biology, DOI: 10.1242/jeb.127829
Read more: Why insects are the real rulers of the worldOn Friday, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump tweeted something—stop me if you’ve heard this before—truly stupid:
Just arrived in Scotland. Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back. No games! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2016
Trump’s tweet is even more ignorant than usual, as Scotland voted 62% to 38% to remain in the European Union. It was on the losing side of the vote.
Luckily, Twitter was there to remind Trump of the facts. And it did so with a veritable waterfall of sweet, vicious, very British replies. Let’s go to the tape!
@realDonaldTrump the country literally voted almost unanimously to stay but hey what are facts to you, right? — Nate Gilbert (@NateGilbert) June 24, 2016
Amazing!
@realDonaldTrump Delete your golf course. — Richard Fry (@RichFryUK) June 24, 2016
Sassy!
At this point, the insults get INSANELY British:
@realdonaldtrump Scotland voted Remain, you weapons-grade plum. — Sue Perkins (@sueperkins) June 24, 2016
Weapons-grade plum!
.@realDonaldTrump Scotland voted Remain you muppet. — Megan Stamper (@megzaz) June 24, 2016
MUPPET.
@realDonaldTrump Scotland voted to stay you numpty. — Count Scarfula 🎃 (@Scarfulhu) June 24, 2016
@realDonaldTrump Scotland voted to remain, you tit. — Clair Woodward (@Clairywoowoo) June 24, 2016
@realDonaldTrump Oi, buttplug face, Scotland are pro-EU. — Rated Ade ✪ (@Ade__Star) June 24, 2016
AHHHHH.
.@realDonaldTrump Scotland voted overwhelmingly to stay in Europe you toupéd fucktrumpet — Finn den Hertog (@FinndH) June 24, 2016
FUCKTRUMPET.
@realDonaldTrump SCOTLAND VOTED TO STAY, YOU WITLESS FUCKING COCKSPLAT! — Tim Footman (@CulturalSnow) June 24, 2016
WITLESS COCKSPLAT.
Even British pop star Lily Allen got in on the dogpile:
@realDonaldTrump Scotland voted IN you moron — lily allen (@lilyallen) June 24, 2016
As did British comedian, actor, and Trump nemesis Peter Serafinowicz:
@realDonaldTrump You are a fucking moron. — Peter Serafinowicz (@serafinowicz) June 24, 2016
And that about sums it up! All in all, another fun, successful day on Twitter for a man who could be America’s next president. No games!We welcome the announcement last week that noted scholar Lani Guinier '71 accepted tenure from Harvard Law School (HLS) and hope her appointment will be followed by offers to others from a diversity of backgrounds.
Guinier will become the first female African-American professor in the 181-year history of HLS. A former Clinton nominee and former NAACP lawyer and an expert on voting rights and civil-rights law, Guinier is a welcome addition to the HLS faculty. However, her appointment is the first in what continues to be a painfully slow process of bringing professors of minority ethnicities to the Harvard University faculty.
Harvard Law School currently has only one tenured minority woman, Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, who is Native American. The racial makeup of the HLS Faculty has been an issue before as well: in 1989, Harvard dismissed Weld Professor of Law Derrick A. Bell after 18 years of teaching because the noted expert on race and law refused to end his leave in protest of the absence of minority women on HLS faculty.
Speaking to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Guinier said, "Though I am the first woman of color to join the tenured faculty, I know that I will not be the last, and this is important to me". In the news release, Dean of the Law School Robert C. Clark said he felt Guinier's appointment would help "attract other top scholars of diverse backgrounds."
Harvard Law School and Harvard University as a whole are woefully behind their peers in the ethnic diversity of their faculties, and therefore are missing out on the benefits that a diverse group of top scholars can bring. The administrators of Harvard University must increase the pace of their search and work harder to bring innovative scholars from a wide array of backgrounds to the Harvard University faculty.
AdvertisementA new study challenges some widely held assumptions about coercion, sexual assault and gender. According to a paper published in the American Psychological Association journal, Psychology of Men and Masculinity, 43% of high school and college-aged men say they’ve had “unwanted sexual contact,” and 95% of those say a female acquaintance was the aggressor.
Researchers surveyed 284 young men and found that 18% reported sexual coercion by force, 31% said they were verbally coerced sex, and 26% said they’d experienced “unwanted seduction by sexual behaviors.” Half of those surveyed said they ended up having sex against their will, 10% said sex was attempted, and 40% said the coercion resulted in fondling or kissing.
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Dr. Bryana French, who teaches counseling psychology and black studies at University of Missouri and co-authored the study, says that male victims are often less willing to describe sexual coercion in detail, “but when asked if it happened, they say it happened.”
But what about the, urm, erectile aspect of sex? French says that the study defined “sex” as oral, vaginal, or anal, so it’s possible that the sex didn’t involve an erection. But she also said that it’s not impossible for men to have an erection even if they don’t want to have sex. “Sometimes when women are experiencing sexual violence, their bodies respond in ways that don’t correspond to how they feel,” she said. “They can not want the experience to happen, even if their bodies said otherwise.”
French’s survey sample was small, nonetheless, she hopes her research helps upend our assumptions about sexual violence and gender. “That’s an unfortunate myth, that men can’t be raped by women,” she said. “This is not to deny the gendered impact of sexual violence, but it’s important not to ignore that men are victimized too.”
Write to Charlotte Alter at charlotte.alter@time.com.Do voters in 2012 face a choice between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush? That's how President Barack Obama, returning to the campaign trail with gusto after a break to respond to Sandy, cast the election during a final push in the battleground state of Wisconsin. He also looked to harness the bipartisan truce fostered by the devastating superstorm.
"We know the ideas that work. We also know the ideas that don't work, because in the eight years after Bill Clinton left office, his policies were reversed," Obama told about 2,600 people in Green Bay, Wis. Obama pointed to Bush's tax cuts that chiefly benefited the wealthiest Americans and charged that his Republican predecessor had given "free license" to the rich and corporations to "play by a different set of rules" than middle-class Americans.
The result was sluggish job growth, he said, and "an economic crisis that we've been cleaning up for the last four years." (The White House has struggled to draw a strong connection between Bush's tax cuts and the global financial meltdown of 2007-2008. Bush inherited an economy that was spinning down after the high-tech bubble burst and suffering from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes.)
"In the closing weeks of this campaign, Gov. Romney has been using all his talents as a salesman to dress up these very same policies that failed our country so badly—the very same policies we've been clearing up after for the past four years," Obama continued. "And he's offering them up as change. He's saying he's the candidate of change.
"What the governor is offering sure ain't change," the president quipped.
The embattled Democratic incumbent has made that argument a few times before—and Clinton has essentially done so as well, notably in his well-regarded speech at the party's nominating convention in Charlotte, N.C. The point is to defuse the political danger that the still-sour economy—the top issue on voters' minds—poses to Obama. While recent polls have shown the public trusts Mitt Romney more to manage the economy, they also show that more Americans think Obama has their interests in mind.
"After four years as president, you know me by now. You may not agree with every decision I've made. You may be frustrated at the pace of change. But you know what I believe, you know where I stand. You know I'm willing to make tough decisions even when they're not politically convenient," Obama said. "And you know I'll fight for you and your families every single day as hard as I know how."
(Ironically, Obama also seemed to echo Bush's stump speech in 2004, when he faced a stiff challenge from Democratic Sen. John Kerry. At a Nov. 1, 2004, rally in Milwaukee, Wis.—and indeed at most late campaign events that year—Bush riffed that sometimes he was too blunt and sometimes he mangled the English language, "but at all times, whether you agree with me or not, you know where I stand, what I believe and where I'm going to lead this country.")
So is Clinton, who will be campaigning for Obama through Tuesday, a kind of "supersurrogate"?
"We'd rather have President Bill Clinton out there than Newt Gingrich or whomever the Romney team has on their side," said Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki. "There's no one better to make the case for the middle class, for why the American people should send the president back for another four years, why he's the better fighter for the middle class, than President Bill Clinton."
After keeping off the campaign trail since Monday to oversee the federal government response to Sandy, the president played up his role and looked to harness the political truce that the disaster fostered. He noted that he visited devastated areas of New Jersey on Wednesday with Republican Gov. Chris Christie, who has warmly praised Obama's handling of the catastrophe.
"For the past few days, all of us have been focused on one of the worst storms in our lifetimes, and we're awed and we're humbled by nature's destructive power," he said. "We mourn the loss of so many people, our hearts go out to those who've lost their loved ones. We pledge to help those whose lives have been turned upside down.
"We've also been inspired these last few days, because when disaster strikes, we see America at its best," the president continued. "All the petty differences that consume us in normal times all seem to melt away. There are no Republicans or Democrats during a storm: They're just fellow Americans."Jérôme Garcès (born 24 October 1973, in Pau) is a French rugby union referee who regularly officiates high-profile club matches in tournaments such as Pro14, Top 14 and the Heineken Cup.
He made his first full international appearance in 2010, after refereeing the 2009 Junior World Championship in Japan. His debut was between England and Barbarians in the 2010 mid-year tests. During the 2010 end-of-year tests he was touch judge for the Ireland v Samoa match, one of his high-profile appointments of the year. During the 2014 Autumn Internationals Garces took charge of the Cook Cup match between Australia and England at Twickenham. Garces won notable praise from both coaches due to the high level of fitness he showed in the match.
Garcès was also touch judge in the annual Calcutta Cup match between Scotland and England during the 2011 Six Nations. In the 58th minute he became match referee, after the original referee, Romain Poite, was injured during play.
In April 2011, Garcès was named as an assistant referee for the 2011 Rugby World Cup,[1] and served as touch judge for four matches – Ireland v Russia, Fiji v Namibia, Samoa v Namibia and Wales v Namibia.
Garcès took charge of the England v Italy match in the 2012 Six Nations Championship. He also refereed matches between British and Irish Lions and club teams during the 2013 Lions tour to Australia.
In 2015 he refereed Japan's victory over South Africa at Brighton's Amex Stadium during that year's World Cup tournament. He later refereed his first world cup semi-final when he took charge of the New Zealand vs South Africa game.[2]
References [ edit ]Barack Obama never did what President Donald Trump is about to do, and that should be told nationwide!
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President Trump will be signing an executive order to help Historically Black Colleges Universities (HBCU) while asking for HBCU college officials to serve as advisors to the President’s agenda.
The media and Democrats will fight this narrative and say how Trump is pandering to the black community with this action but I see it as a promise he gave to Black Americans to work for them and try to fix things the Democrats have destroyed over the years.
From Washington Examiner:
President Trump is set to sign an executive order aimed at boosting historically black colleges and universities, known as HBCUs, on Tuesday amid a period of increased outreach to the institutions from high-level members of the administration. The order will allow HBCU officials to serve as advisors to Trump on his urban agenda as well as increase the private sector’s role in the colleges and universities, a White House official said. Trump’s executive order comes one day after Vice President Pence and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos hosted representatives from dozens of HBCUs at a “listening session” in the executive office building next door to the White House. “Our administration, at the president’s direction, is working to find new ways to expand your impact so that more students, especially in the underserved communities in this country, have the chance at a quality education,” Pence said at the outset of the meeting on Monday.
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Education for blacks has tipped sideways for years, and while many have had the opportunity to excel, there is a large contingent of black Americans who can’t get past the door. This should help out in a huge way.
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Don’t forget to follow the Wayne Dupree Show social media accounts on Facebook, Google Plus & Twitter.Share. Do you wanna sing to Frozen? Do you wanna sing to Frozen?
Just in time for the holidays, Walt Disney Animation Studios is releasing Frozen: Sing-Along Edition on DVD and Digital on November 18.
Frozen Sequel Officially Happening in Book Form
Directed by Chris Buck (Tarzan) and Jennifer Lee (Wreck-It Ralph), Frozen tells the story of Anna (voiced by Kristen Bell), who sets off on an epic journey -- teaming up with rugged mountain man Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) and a snowman named Olaf (Josh Gad) -- to find her sister Elsa (Idina Menzel), whose icy powers have trapped the kingdom of Arendelle in eternal winter.
Exit Theatre Mode
The film's all-new one-disc set will include both the Sing-Along and theatrical versions of the Oscar-winning animated feature, a new featurette called "Breaking the Ice," and the "Get a Horse!" Mickey Mouse short.
Max Nicholson is a writer for IGN, and he desperately seeks your approval. Show him some love by following @Max_Nicholson on Twitter, or MaxNicholson on IGN.Laibach might just be the most absurd group ever to have existed. Their darkly comedic, high-camp cover versions of classic pop songs and mid-20th century totalitarian visual aesthetic is at once romantic, ridiculous and – since the end of the cold war – distinctly retro in tone. A decade ago, they seemed as irrelevant as a statue of Marshal Tito rusting in a scrapyard in their Slovenian homeland. With the release of new album Spectre, however, they openly comment on Snowden, WikiLeaks, protest movements, the wobbling Euro and the Arab spring. It's high time to start catching up with this most unusual and frequently misunderstood group.
Founded in 1980 in the mining town of Trbovlje (claim to fame: Europe's tallest chimney), Laibach hardly made things easy for themselves. Seeing TV footage of the Beatles and the Stones in their 60s finery, the young musicians realised that having some kind of uniform was a key element of the rock'n'roll myth. Then conscripts in the Yugoslav army, they used their fatigues as stage outfits, while smoke effects at early gigs came from stolen grenades. This, along with their black cross emblem and undefined critique of the political status quo, meant their aesthetic and intentions were open to interpretation, to the extent that some accused them of being Nazis. "We are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter," was their typically obscure response.
Laibach's cultural appropriation extends from the visual borrowing of totalitarian tat to their music itself. Behind the iron curtain they created their own playful musical culture out of the decontextualised scraps of what filtered over from the west. The songs of Queen are a recurring motif in their work, while one of their most popular covers is a trumpets-blaring take on 1985 hit Live Is Life by Austrian group Opus. In 2006, they recorded versions of 14 national anthems, including one for their art collective, NSK, which they had declared a virtual country in 1991, issuing their own passports. They've also borrowed from Churchill's speeches, the Beatles' Let It Be, the musical Jesus Christ Superstar and Bach.
This cheeky subterfuge came with a refusal on Laibach's part to explain |
a test case – a huge one, covering 1.3 billion people. If it works in India, it works throughout the developing world. That’s the evil thought behind it. “Tests” are already running in Europe.
The Nordic countries, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, are moving rapidly towards cashless societies. Electronic money, instead of cash, allows the hegemon to control the entire western world, all those who are enslaved to the dollar monetary system. Meaning literally everybody outside the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that includes, China, Russia, most of Central Asia, Iran, Pakistan and – yes, India is an apparent candidate to join the SCO alliance.
There was no limit set in rupee amounts that were allowed to be deposited in bank or postal accounts. But exchanges or withdrawals were limited the first two days to 2,000 rupees, later to 4,000 rupees, with promises to further increases ‘later on’. The restrictions have to do with limited new bank notes available. The new money is issued in denominations of 500 and 2,000 rupee-notes.
On 9 November, none of the country’s ATM machines were functioning. Withdrawing money was possible only from banks. Queues behind bank counters were endless – lasting hours and in some cases days. Often times, once at the teller, the bank was out of cash. Imagine the millions, perhaps billions of labor hours – production time and wages – lost – lost mostly by the poor.
The banned bank notes constitute about 85% in value of all cash in circulation. India is a cash society. About 97% of all transactions are carried out in cash. Only slightly more than half the Indian population has bank accounts; and only about half of them have been used in the last three months. Credit or debit cards are extremely scarce – basically limited to the ‘creditworthy’ elite.
In rural areas, where most of the poor live, banks are scarce or none existent. The poor and poorest of the poor, again – as usual – are those who suffer most. Hundreds of thousands of them have lost almost all they have and will be unable to fend for their families, buying food and medication.
According to most media reports, Modi’s demonetization was an arbitrary decision. Be sure, there is nothing arbitrary behind this decision. As reported on 1 January 2017 by German investigative business journalist, Norbert Haering, in his blog, “Money and More”, this move was well prepared and financed by Washington through USAID ().
Mr. Modi didn’t even bother presenting the idea to the Parliament for debate.
In November 2010 President Obama declared with then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a Strategic Partnership with India. It was to become one of his foreign policy priorities which was renewed during Obama’s visit to India in January 2015 with the current PM Modi (image right). The purpose of this partnership was not just to pull one of the most populous BRICS countries out of the Russia-China orbit, but also to use it as a test case for global demonetization. Mind you, the orders came from way above Obama, from the omni-potent, but hardly visible Rothschild-Rockefeller – Morgan – et al, all-domineering bankster cartel.
This horrendous crime that may cost millions of lives, was the dictate of Washington. A cooperation agreement, also called an “anti-cash partnership”, between the US development agency (sic), USAID, with the Indian Ministry of Finance, was worked out. One of their declared ‘common objectives’ was gradually eliminating the use of cash by replacing it with digital or virtual money.
It takes two to tango. The PM of the second largest nation in the world, one would expect, would have a say in the extent to which a foreign country may interfere in India’s sovereign internal affairs, i.e. her monetary policies – especially a foreign country that is known to seek only Full Spectrum Dominance of the globe, its resources and its people. The head of India, a prominent BRICS country (BRICS = Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), one would expect, could have sent the naked emperor to climb a tree – and say NO to this horrendous criminal request. But Modi did not.
Is India with PM Modi still a viable BRICS country? Or more importantly, India is currently poised to become a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Is India under Modi worthy of being admitted into this powerful Asian economic and military block, the only authoritative counterbalance to the west? – At this point, putting hundreds of millions of his countrymen at peril by obeying Washington’s nefarious dictate, Modi looks more like a miserable traitor than a partner of the New East.
USAID calls this operation “Catalyst”
Inclusive Cashless Payment Partnership“. Its purpose is “effecting a quantum leap in cashless payment in India” – and of course, eventually around the globe. According to the Indian Economic Times, this program had been stealthily financed by USAID over the past three years. Funding amounts are kept secret. Who knows, where else in the world Catalyst is quietly funding and preparing other human financial disasters.
All fits into the Big Scheme of things: Reducing the world population, so less resources are needed to maintain 7.4 billion people – and growing – many of them finite resources that can be used by a small elite, supported by a few million slaves. This is the world according to still ticking war criminal numero UNO, Henry Kissinger. Forcefully reducing the world population is his one big objective since just after WWII, when he became a key member of the Rockefeller sponsored Bilderberg Society.
Some of the same people are currently spreading neo-fascist mantras around the world, at the infamous WEF (World Economic Forum) in Davos, Switzerland (17-20 January 2017). WEF attendees (by invitation only) are a mixed bag of elitist ‘private’ billionaires, corporate CEOs (only corporations registering at least US$ 5 billion in sales), high-flying politicians, Hollywood’s cream of the crop, and more of the kind. Pretty much the same definition applies to the Bilderbergers.
Like with the Bilderbergers, the key topics discussed at the WEF, those themes that are supposed to guide the world further and faster towards the New (One) World Order, are discussed behind closed doors and will hardly surface into the mainstream. It is, however, highly likely that the “Cashless India” decision – a trial for the rest of the world – had previously been discussed and ‘ratified’ by the WEF, as well as the Bilderbergers. None of this is known to the common people, and least to the Indians.
All-out efforts are under way to maintain highly lucrative disaster capitalism, or at least to slow down its decline – because its end is in sight. It’s just a question of time. Hence, the term Catalyst (accelerator) for the USAID program is well chosen. Time is running out. One of the best ways of controlling populations and unbending politicians is through financial strangleholds. That’s what a cashless society is all about.
According to Badal Malick, former Vice President of India’s most important online marketplace Snapdeal, later appointed as CEO of Catalyst:
“Catalyst’s mission is to solve multiple coordination problems that have blocked the penetration of digital payments among merchants and low-income consumers. We look forward to creating a sustainable and replicable model. (…) While there has been (…) a concerted push for digital payments by the government, there is still a last mile gap when it comes to merchant acceptance and coordination issues. We want to bring a holistic ecosystem approach to these problems.“
This is further supported by Jonathan Addleton, USAID Mission Director to India:
“India is at the forefront of global efforts to digitize economies and create new economic opportunities that extend to hard-to-reach populations. Catalyst will support these efforts by focusing on the challenge of making everyday purchases cashless.”
What an outright heap of bovine manure!
Those who are supporting the Catalyst idea in India – and presumably elsewhere in the world, are, as per an USAID Beyond-Cash report, more than 35 Indian, American and international organizations (http://cashlesscatalyst.org/), mostly IT and payment service providers, including the Better Than Cash Alliance, the Gates Foundation (Microsoft), Omidyar Network (eBay), the Dell Foundation Mastercard, Visa, Metlife Foundation. All of them want to make money from digital payments – another transfer from the poor to the rich – another catalyst for widening the rich-poor gab – worldwide.
Screenshots from http://cashlesscatalyst.org
Interestingly, the USAID – Indian partnership to temporarily banning most cash coincides with Raghuram Rajan as President of the Reserve Bank of India (September 2013 – September 2016). Mr. Rajan has also been chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, and there is talk that he may be poised as Mme. Lagarde’s successor at the helm of the IMF. It is clear that the IMF, and by association the World Bank, is fully aboard with this project to transform western society into slavehood of digital money – with emphasis on wester society, because the East, the Russia-China-Iran-SCO axis, where the future lays, has already largely detached itself from the dollar based western – and fraudulent – monetary scheme.
Mr. Raghuram Rajan is an influential but also highly controversial figure. He is also a member of the so-called Group of Thirty, “a rather shady organization, where high ranking representatives of the world’s major commercial financial institutions share their thoughts and plans with the presidents of the most important central banks, behind closed doors and with no minutes taken.
It becomes increasingly clear that the Group of Thirty is one of the major coordination centers of the worldwide war on cash. Its membership includes other key warriors like Rogoff, Larry Summers and others” (N.Häring, 1.1.2017). On the other hand, Rajan is extremely disliked by the Indian business society, mostly because of his tight monetary policy as head of the Indian Central Bank (go figure!). Under pressure, he did not renew his term as India’s central bank governor in 2016.
The Group of Thirty sounds akin to the highly secretive Board of Directors of the infamous Basle-based BIS (Bank for International Settlement), also considered the central bank of all central banks, which meets once a month in secret (during a weekend for lesser visibility) and no minutes taken. The BIS is a Rothschild controlled private bank, close associate of the FED, also privately owned. It is clear, with the FED, BIS and IMF in connivance, the dice are cast for a cashless (western) society.
Washington’s interest in a cashless society goes far beyond the business interests of IT, credit card and other financial institutions. More importantly is the surveillance power that goes with digital payments. As with electronic communications today – every one of them read, listened to and spied on throughout the world – some 7 to 10 billion electronic messages per day – every digital payment and transfer will be controlled and checked worldwide by the Masters of the dollar-based hegemony. Every transfer will be registered and monitored by an American-Zionist control mechanism. This is the only way (totally illegal) sanctions can be dished out to governments that refuse the dictate of Washington and its western European lackeys. Cases in point are Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria — the list is endless.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) recently reported that Employees of a German manufacturing firm doing completely legal business with Iran were put on a US terror list, which meant that they were shut off most of the financial system and even some logistics companies would not transport their furniture any more.
Norbert Häring concludes,
“Every internationally active bank can be blackmailed by the US government into following their orders, since revoking their license to do business in the US or in dollars, basically amounts to shutting them down. Deutsche Bank had to negotiate [in September 2016] with the US treasury for months whether they would have to pay a fine of 14 billion dollars and most likely go broke, or get away with seven billion and survive. If you have the power to bankrupt the largest banks even of large countries, you have power over their governments, too. This power through dominance over the financial system and the associated data is already there. The less cash there is in use, the more extensive and secure it is, as the use of cash is a major avenue for evading this power.”
Concluding Remarks
Back to India. It is not difficult to imagine what the implications of such a massive demonetization operation might have in a country like India, where hundreds of millions live in or near poverty, with a large rural population, where almost all transactions are carried out in cash – and where cash is everything for survival. This is death by financial strangulation.
No blood, No traces – no media coverage. It is a clandestine willful mass-murder, carried out by the Indian government on its own people, while instigated by the chief assassins, operating from within the Washington Beltway killer farms, no scruples, no morals, no ethics – what Washington knows best to achieve its purpose.
This no-holds-barred strategy is accelerating, as time runs out. The ship is slowly but surely turning towards another dimension, another world view – one of in which humanity may gain back its status of a solidary being. These atrocities around the globe may go some ways – but I doubt they will go all the way. There is a spiritual limit on how far evil can go.
Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, The 4th Media, TeleSUR, TruePublica, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.The NRL grand final looks set to remain in Sydney for at least the next decade with the NSW government demanding a long-term commitment before investing a billion dollars into the city's major stadiums.
With the grand final up for grabs from 2020, the NRL had previously indicated the competition's showpiece event could go on the road for the first time in more than a century.
However the NSW government is desperate for the grand final, which injected close to $17 million into the state's economy in visitor spend last year, to remain in Sydney for decades despite a strong push from the Queensland government to take it north of the border.
It is understood former NRL boss Dave Smith had threatened to take the grand final to Brisbane or Melbourne if the state government didn't come to the party with substantial funding to upgrade Sydney stadia, ARLC chairman John Grant last year admitting the NRL was considering taking the decider away from its traditional home.Michael Sam Passed Over By Every NFL Team
Michael Sam had hoped to become the NFL's first out player but was cut from the Rams on Saturday and not picked up by any other team by the deadline.
Michael Sam's chances of playing in the NFL got worse today as every team let the window close on a chance to pick him up, reports ESPN.
The Rams cut the out defensive end from its roster on Saturday in favor of another rookie, Ethan Westbrooks, who had been undrafted. After putting Sam on waiver, teams had 24 hours to sign him, but none did.
Now ESPN reports that Sam must focus on making a practice squad. Even there, the Rams won't say if they will take Sam.
Sam reacted to Saturday's news in a statement shared on social media, seeming hopeful about eventually making a team.
"The most worthwhile things in life rarely come easy, this is a lesson I've always known," he said. "The journey continues."
Whether Sam deserved a spot on the Rams or another NFL team is hotly debated. Outsports described the Rams' decision as solely based on which positions were available but said homophobia did "play a role" in his being passed over by the other 31 teams.
"Sam has proven he can play in the NFL," wrote the site's co-founders, Jim Buzinski and Cyd Zeigler, in a joint editorial. "Only a couple other players have more sacks this preseason than his three. In a league that places a high value on pass rushers, and continues to develop rules that help passing offenses, guys like Sam are coveted. Sacks aside, he’s played well or very well in each of his three preseason games."
Super Bowl-winning coach Tony Dungy made headlines for saying in July that he wouldn't have taken Sam if he still led a team. Dungy said Sam "should have a chance to play, but I wouldn't want to deal with all of it."
Sam's preseason has obviously not been devoid of homophobia. In one of the clearest incidents, happening in the week before Sam was cut, ESPN reported on whether fellow Rams players were showering with their openly gay teammate. The network apologized afterward and some on the team publicly voiced disappointment with the coverage, which included anonymous worries by Rams players about showering together.
When Sam was drafted at number 249 of 256 players, the first uproar started because he kissed his boyfriend to celebrate while ESPN was broadcasting live. An online kiss-in started over the aggressively homophobic reaction that the kiss sparked across social media.
Almost immediately, Sam's jersey for the Rams was a top-seller, showing his huge support. Even One Direction member Harry Styles sported a jersey during a concert in St. Louis. It was ranked second among rookies in sales only to star Johnny Manziel — who Sam sacked during the preseason. And Out magazine put Sam on the cover of its sports issue.
Sam has been the target of the usual antigay voices. When the antigay Westboro Church picketed a basketball game that Sam was attending, thousands of supporters lined up outside to counter. Peter LaBarbera, president of the antigay organization Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, wrote an open letter encouraging Sam to get so-called reparative therapy and warned against his influence on black youth. A right-wing lobbyist named Jack Burkman pushed for national legislation that would ban any professional sports team from employing a player who “has openly declared himself to be a homosexual.”
But even with all of that, Rams coach Jeff Fisher told reporters yet again on Saturday, according to The New York Times, that Sam wasn't a distraction. “He’s not about drawing attention to himself," he said. "He kept his head down and worked and you can’t ask anything more out of any player for that matter.”Yet more than the other candidates, Bush's presence in the race would force many Republicans to recalibrate their attacks on Clinton. So far, party officials have targeted her on a range of issues, from criticizing her handling of the Benghazi terrorist attacks in 2012 to lampooning her comment that the Clintons were "dead broke" after they left the White House. When Clinton went on her book tour over the summer, the Republican National Committee sent a intern dressed as a squirrel to trail her while wearing a T-shirt that said, "Another Clinton in the White House is Nuts."
The undercurrent of the GOP's argument is that the 67-year-old Clinton is a relic whose wealth and cloistered life in the government for the last three decades has put her out of touch with ordinary Americans.
“People are kind of tired of this show, quite frankly. There’s Hillary fatigue out there. It’s setting in,” RNC chairman Reince Priebus said on NBC's Meet the Press at the end of June.
Jeb Bush, of course, is no fresh face either, and the fact that a Bush or a Clinton has occupied the White House for 20 of the last 26 years is exactly what his mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush, had in mind when she spoke out in opposition to his candidacy in 2013.
"If you're planning to make a legacy argument, having Jeb Bush as the nominee would complicate that," said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist and former RNC spokesman. "But I don't think that's the best argument to make against Hillary Clinton." Heye said Republicans would be better off focusing on Clinton's record as New York senator and then secretary of state.
Bush would face his own obstacles in a Republican primary, particularly on the issues of immigration and education, where the party's base has moved to the right in the years since he served as governor and his brother, George W. Bush, served as president. And there is little doubt that Bush's opponents–particularly the more libertarian Paul–would argue that the country needed to move on from the Bush family just as it should leave the Clintons in the past.
Democrats would probably relish a Bush candidacy, even if some in the party would fear his strength with Hispanic voters who have been alienated by just about everyone else in the GOP in recent years. If both Bush and Clinton made it to the general election, a battle for nostalgia between the Clinton era of 1990s and the George W. Bush era of the 2000s would undoubtedly favor Democrats.
That in itself is a big reason why Republicans are now trying to link Hillary Clinton closer to her one-time rival, the unpopular President Obama, than to her more widely-admired husband. Jeb Bush, they point out, has his own stellar record as governor of Florida.
"She is so tied to this administration," a Republican strategist in Iowa, Tim Albrecht, said of Clinton on Monday. "Jeb Bush was part of one administration, and that was his own in Florida."
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.Life on the practice squad is far from living the lifestyle of the rich and famous. Players generally make $6,000 a week, $102,000 for the season and, if they're unable to impress, which many are, their careers are over before the average fan realizes it even started.
So every penny counts for a player fighting for NFL relevancy. Anyone who has the leverage to earn a few extra dollars after they fail to make the final cut grabs it while they can.
Trenton Robinson appears to be no exception. He jumped to the Eagles from San Francisco in part because they paid him more than the $6K/week minimum.
Robinson, who will be paid $8,000 every week he's on the Eagles practice squad, was a sixth-round pick last year by the San Francisco 49ers. He will make $34,000 more than the minimum if he's on the practice squad for the season's full 17 weeks.
Robinson is one of just six players on an NFL practice squad to receive more than the minimum salary this season, according to the NFL Players Association website. Eagles wide receiver Greg Salas also negotiated extra money to remain with the team. He is set to make $7,000/week, $119,000 if he is there for the entire season.
The bigger salaries show that the Eagles' strong desire to have Robinson and Salas on their roster, partly because of their skill sets and the team's lack of stability at their respective positions. The Eagles are thin at wide receiver and have what some have called the weakest group of safeties in the NFL.
Only four other practice squad players around the league (Tampa's Chris Owusu and Deveron Carr, Baltimore's Matt Furstenberg and New England's Josh Kline) received above the minimum salary. Owusu is the only one receiving more than $8,000/week. His $10,000 per week ($170,000 for the season) makes him this year's highest-paid practice squad player.619 shares
World’s largest classification society DNV GL has released details of a new concept ship design for the short sea shipping market which is battery powered, highly efficient, and, you guessed it, unmanned.
Details of the “ReVolt” concept were released this week at SMM Hamburg, one of the world’s leading maritime trade fairs. DNV GL says the ReVolt is a vessel that is greener, smarter and safer than conventionally fueled and operated vessels, offering a possible solution to the growing needs of marine transport.
Instead of using diesel fuel or even LNG, ReVolt is fully powered by a 3000 kWh battery, thus reducing operating costs by minimizing the number of high maintenance parts such as rotational components. DNV GL says that, at least in concept, the vessel has a range of 100 nautical miles before a recharge is needed and if the energy required is harnessed from renewable sources, this would eliminate carbon dioxide emissions.
The ReVolt could achieve even greater efficiency by slowing to an average operating speed 6 knots, leading to less water resistance compared to traditional vessels, which usually travel at about 8.7 knots, DNV GL says. The slower speed allowed DNV GL engineers to fit the concept with a straight vertical bow, further reducing water resistance along the ship’s entire profile and ultimately saving energy.
In order to tackle one of the shipping industries’ “weakest links”, safety will be enhanced through an autonomous navigation system that requires no crew, and therefore eliminates the risk of human error and makes the concept more cost-efficient to operate. DNV GL says that with an average of 900 fatalities per year, the mortality rate in shipping is 90 percent higher than in comparable land-based industries, primarily due to the human factor when it comes to accidents.
With no crew, there is also no need for crew facilities such as the superstructure, DNV GL says. This results in an increase in loading capacity and low operating and maintenance costs. Compared to a diesel-run ship, DNV GL says that ReVolt could save up to 34 Million USD during its estimated 30-year-life-time.
DNV GL notes that while the ReVolt concept ship is currently still being tested and will not be built until all the required technologies have matured, it should serve as example of what is conceivably possibly given today’s technology and what could also be in store for the future.
“Building and operating this vessel would be possible with today’s technology,” says Hans Anton Tvete, Senior Researcher at DNV GL. “‘ReVolt’ is intended to serve as inspiration for equipment makers, ship yards and ship owners to develop new solutions on the path to a safe and sustainable future.”
SEE ALSO: Rolls-Royce Testing Drone Technology for Unmanned Cargo Ships
Details: The Next “ReVolt” – Unmanned, Automated Ships (pdf)My soon-to-be-colleague Branko Milanovic writes forcefully against the term “human capital”; Elizabeth Bruenig notes an especially unpleasant use of the term by reformicons trying to sell child tax credits to their conservative allies.
I’m in agreement with both. It’s actually shocking how readily we have fallen into rhetoric that treats human beings as assets; it’s closely related to the remarkable, equally shocking way that we now talk about medical patients as health care “consumers”.
But I think there’s a bit more to add.
Branko says that the essential difference between skills and physical capital is that the former aren’t worth anything unless you work, and that is certainly an essential difference. I would, however, also emphasize the flip side: if you think of capital as something that rentiers can own, which is surely one of the important things we connote when we use the c-word, then labor force skills are not capital in that sense. Children of the wealthy can inherit or buy factories and buildings; absent indentured servitude or the coming of androids, they can’t buy worker skills.
Meanwhile, Bruenig is unhappy with James Pethokoukis for trying to sell humanitarian policies, more or less, as a cynical pro-capitalist ploy (which is, to give credit where it’s due, the opposite of the usual thing on the right). What I immediately noted was that Pethokoukis is wrong about what actually works in the direction he wants. He argues that big welfare states discourage having children, and dismisses pro-natalist policies as ineffectual. Here are fertility rates in advanced countries:
Photo
The two most extensive, generous welfare states in the world — France and Sweden — also have higher fertility than we do, significantly so in the case of France. And there’s a reason: strong pro-natalist policies, which greatly reduce the burden, financial and otherwise, of raising children. As I’ve written in the past, if you want to see policy informed by genuine family values — as opposed to “pro-family” values that are actually about patriarchy — France is a much better example than America.Every year at ConBravo!, we strive to collaborate with our guests, panelists, and other contributors to create a lineup of programming that’s tailored to our current event in an effort to make each year’s convention unique and memorable!
We don’t quite have our ConBravo! 2019 schedule ready just yet – check back in late July!
Recap: 2018 Programming Highlights
In the meantime, check out some programming highlights from last year, at ConBravo! 2018:
In a first for ConBravo!, we hosted a pro-wrestling event! Alpha-1 Wrestling took over our activity room on Friday evening and put on an incredibly intense spectacle for many eager viewers.
The Runaway Guys packed our main stage with their game show Thrown Controllers, a longstanding favourite with their fans (and ConBravo! attendees!).
A ConBravo! tradition, seasoned game master Big Mike hosted D20 Live on Saturday night. In 2018 a Pokemon RPG campaign was run for players (and special guests!) Linkara, Arkada, Calluna, and Proton Jon!
At the ConBravo! Concert series, an enthusiastic crowd took in performances from Epic Game Music, Ro Panuganti, Little V, Adriana Figueroa, and FamilyJules! Afterward, everyone was on their feet to dance the night away when convention DJs Kawaii Bass hosted DanceBravo!.
If you like comedy shows, 2018 was a great year for you: The 404s bestowed upon us four performances over the weekend (wow!!), in addition to hosting an improv workshop for inspired and curious attendees! We were also joined by award-winning comedy troupe Sex T-Rex for two of their brilliant scripted shows.
(Don’t see your favourite moment of ConBravo! 2018 listed here? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter what the best part of the weekend was for you!)
What can I expect at ConBravo! 2019?
We typically release the tentative weekend schedule about a week or two before the convention. However, even if we don’t know the “where” and “when” for every session just yet, we can tell you what kind of happenings you can expect to see at our 2019 event!
Shop in the Marketplace!
The ConBravo! Marketplace is your one-stop-shop for all your merch needs! Located in the Hamilton Convention Centre by Carmen’s, the Marketplace features a curated collection of more than 200 exhibitors of anime, gaming, and general geeky goodness. Here, you’ll find new and used games, licensed merchandise, cosplay accessories, beautiful artwork, handmade goodies, and indie game demos – and much more! Retailers, artists, and indie devs have travelled from near and far to peddle their wares, and no matter whether your fandom is mainstream and modern or niche and retro, you’re sure to find it here!
The Marketplace is open on all three days of the weekend, and a valid badge is required for entry. Not sure if you’ll have time to check out the rest of the convention? Consider grabbing a Marketplace-only badge – see our Ticket Info page for details!
Wanna take part in this year’s Marketplace as an exhibitor? Start by taking a peek at our Exhibitor Regulations page, and then follow the application instructions for the appropriate section.
Meet your Favourite Guests!
Each year, ConBravo! is privileged to play host to some very accomplished special guests who have found success in their industry! Based on your suggestions, we try to build a diverse list of talented guests by reaching out to your favourite Let’s Players, streamers, critics, voice actors, artists, and musicians – and we’re so fortunate that many of them join us year after year! Most guests will host a Q&A panel as well as an autograph session during the weekend, both of which are great opportunities for fans to connect with them. Also keep an eye out for special programming events that your favourite names are taking part in!
All guests are added to the Guests page as they’re announced, so be sure to check there for the most up-to-date list!
Have an idea of who you want to see? We collect your suggestions a couple times a year (through feedback and social media) when they are most helpful, but we’re here year-round to listen to your ideas! Drop us a line on social media, or using our contact form.
Check out the Live Events!
In addition to their Q&A panels and autograph sessions, many of our guests collaborate with us (and each other!) on live shows and events that become the highlight of our programming! These are often unique and planned together with the guests we have joining us in a given year. Examples of live events from previous years include our Super Feud series (where you cheered for teams of your favourite guests to win a very intense game of Mario Party), live shows from our performing guests (comedy shows and special “live” episodes), special presentations that our guests have prepared (such as The Runaway Guys’ Thrown Controllers, and Big Mike’s D20 Live), and, of course, events where you can get up and get involved – like pub quiz, and karaoke!
Tune in to the ConBravo! Concert Series!
Every year, we’re joined by some very talented musical guests, and you can catch them all on Saturday night, when they perform as a part of our annual ConBravo! Concert series! Located at our main stage, the ConBravo! Concert series brings together some of your favourite video game-inspired musicians for a diverse line-up spotlighting multiple genres – so whether you’re more into vocal ballads, aggressively metal VGM covers, or nostalgic chiptune arrangements, there’s sure to be something for you!
Boogie the Night Away at DanceBravo!
After the music jams have ended, it’s time to put on your dancing shoes (or, if you prefer, practical, comfortable, footwear) and join in the fun at DanceBravo!, where we make sure to send Saturday night out in style! The DJ will drop some beats while you and your friends dance until the sun comes up! Well, until curfew. We’ll be sure to let you know when that is.
Attend some Panels!
Throughout the weekend, take a break from the action by dropping in on some panels! Panels are discussions on a diverse selection of topics, as can be found detailed on the schedule. They are led by panelists, who hold a wide range of qualifications, from industry specialists to long-time enthusiasts – but most importantly, they’re fans just like you! Panels are a great place to meet fellow fans of an obscure series, to hear new perspectives on current issues, or to learn about aspects in the creation process.
Learn more about our panels – including how you can suggest a topic, or get involved as a panelist – right here!
Watch (or Participate in) the Masquerade!
Every year, ConBravo! offers an opportunity for proud cosplayers to show off their creations on stage at our Masquerade! No matter if you’re a newcomer, or a seasoned artisan, if you’ve dedicated time and honed your skill in creating a costume that is your pride and joy, then we encourage you to enter! Unsure if it’s the right time for you, or more of a spectator when it comes to the sport of cosplay? That’s a-okay too – you’re invited to come enjoy the show!
Typically planned for Saturday evening, our Masquerade operates in accordance with ICG regulations in regards to ranking and eligibility. For more information on entry, see our Masquerade page!
Meet New Friends at a Photoshoot!
Putting together cosplay from your favourite fandom, but want to round out the rest of the group? Or, not quite ready for the masquerade, but wanna make sure you get some sweet photo ops anyway? We got you covered! Photoshoots for various fandoms happen throughout the weekend – no reservations necessary, just show up! Even better, we make them at the request of our attendees, so we can make sure all your fave fandoms are covered!
Wanna request a photoshoot? Keep an eye out on social media as the convention nears, and we’ll be letting you know how to get in touch!
Finally… Games, Games, and More Games!
ConBravo! keeps several rooms in the Hamilton Convention Centre by Carmen’s dedicated to open play of games, and no matter whether you prefer your play in the form of video games, tabletop games, pen-and-paper RPG, or LARP, you’re in luck – we’ve got ’em all! An open library of tabletop games and plenty of video game stations are set up for open play on all three days, and we welcome players of all experience levels to get in on the fun. Up for a challenge? Be sure to check out the tournament schedule! RPGs, LARPs, and select WarGames are also run throughout the weekend with scheduled start times. If you’re looking for a specific experience, be sure to consult the schedule, and sign-up details!After a self-imposed 12-hour halt in trading due to crammed servers, Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox attempted to get back in business today with upgraded hardware — but it didn't take long before things went wrong again. The site is currently offline due to what the exchange tells The Verge is a "huge" DDoS attack; trading resumed for less than two hours.
We are experiencing a stronger than usual DDoS. We are working in it. — MtGox.com (@MtGox) April 12, 2013
Yesterday Mt. Gox issued a press release claiming that the service outages were due to increased demand rather than DDoS, but today this was followed by a seemingly contradictory release admitting that DDoS attacks had occurred over the past two days. The Verge contacted Mt. Gox to find out exactly what happened, and were told that while there were no DDoS attacks occurring at the time the initial statement was made, they came immediately after the server problems related to increased usage had been solved.
"We [suffer] DDoS every day, every single hour," said chief marketing officer Gonzague Gay-Bouchery. "This morning from 9 to 11 we had six." It wouldn't be the first time that DDoS attacks have |
." Keeping in mind that no one is in charge of a colony and that there is no central plan, how do the ants adjust their reconnaissance if their territory expands or shrinks? "No ant told them, 'OK, guys, if the arena is 20 by 20....' Somehow there has to be some rule that individual ants use in deciding to change the shape of their paths so they cover the areas effectively. I think that that rule is the rate in which they bump into each other." The more crowded they are, the more often each ant will bump into another ant. If the area of their territory is expanded, the frequency of contact decreases. Perhaps, Gordon thinks, each ant has a threshold for normality and adjusts its path shape depending on how often the number of encounters exceeds or falls short of that threshold. If the territory shrinks, the number of contacts increases and the ant alters its search pattern. If it expands, contact decreases and it alters the pattern a different way. In the Arizona harvester ants, Gordon studies tasks besides patrolling. Each ant has a job. "I divide the tasks into four: foraging, nest maintenance, midden [piling refuse, including husks of seeds] and patrolling - patrollers are the ones that come out first in the morning and look for food. The foragers go where the patrollers find food. "The colony has about eight different foraging paths. Every day it uses several of them. The patrollers go out first on the trails and they attract each other when they find food. By the end of an hour's patrolling, most patrollers are on just a few trails.... All the foragers have to do is go where there are the most patrollers." Each ant has its prescribed task, but the ants can switch tasks if the collective needs it. An ant on housekeeping duty will decide to forage. No one told it to do so and Gordon and other entomologists don't know how that happens. "No ant can possibly know how much food everybody is collecting, how many foragers are needed," she said. "An ant has to have very simple rules that tell it, 'OK, switch and start foraging.' But an ant can't assess globally how much food the colony needs. "I've done perturbation experiments in which I marked ants according to what task they're doing on a given day. The ants that were foraging for food were green, those that were cleaning the nest were blue and so on. Then I created some new situation in the environment; for example, I create a mess that the nest maintenance workers have to clean up or I'll put out extra food that attracts more foragers. "It turns out that ants that were marked doing a certain task one day switch to do a different task when conditions change." Of about 8,000 species of ants, only about 10 percent have been studied thus far. "It's hard to generalize anything about the behavior of ants," Gordon said. "Most of what we know about ants is true of a very, very small number of species compared to the number of species out there." -jns/ants- 931115Arc3062.html This is an archived release. This release is not available in any other form. Images mentioned in this release are not available online.
Stanford News Service has an extensive library of images, some of which may be available to you online. Direct your request by EMail to newslibrary@stanford.edu.I Bought It
Apologies, this is going to be the driest unboxing ever (literally an unboxing only). My collaboration sale with Memebox launched in the US Memeshop today (YAY!!!), but about two minutes after I got the word out, I heard terrible news from a colleague in Berlin that may result in me needing to go to Germany a lot for the next six months (not yay, also sad). On top of this, I have some sort of cold with a fever, but HEY! I GOT THE PEACH & LILY SEOULCIALITE BOX TODAY AND IT’S GREAT!!!
About Peach & Lily
The online Korean beauty shop is based in New York/New Jersey and has a strong emphasis on curation of quality products. I’ve never bought from P&L before, but I really liked the brands in their shop when I stopped by to buy my box.
About the Seoulcialite Box
This is the first and currently only box ever offered by Peach & Lily. I was attracted by the concept that they would be introducing kbeauty fans to new shop items through the box, then launching them in the shop. That actually makes loads of sense–so this box functions as a fall/winter preview of new items.
Price: $49 + tax (free shipping in the US, mine arrived within 1 day of shipping)
OK–here’s the info dump:
Banila Co. Clean It Zero
Size: 100ml/3.4 oz.
Retail price: $22
Cremorlab Triple Bright White Bloom Floral Cream
Size: 45ml/1.5 oz.
Retail price: $72
Be the Skin Non-Stimulus Face Polisher
Size: 100ml/3.4 oz.
Retail price: $29
Mizon Vita Lemon Sparkling Powder
Size: 12g/0.42 oz.
Retail price: $3
Peripera Smoothie Waterproof Pencil Liner (I received 01 Black)
Size: 1.5g/0.05 oz.
Retail price: $12
Mizon Correct Combo Lip Gloss
Size: 5.5g/0.19 fl. oz.
Retail price: $16
Cremorlab Travel Kit
Size: assorted
Retail price: $17
Earrings
Size: one pair of earrings
Retail price: $30
Details: plated base metal
Things I like a lot:
INGREDIENT TRANSLATIONS RIGHT ON THE BOXES OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YES!!!! THANK YOU!!!! I spend so much time struggling over ingredient translations for so many products that I barely have time to use them! What a relief.
The box is incredibly well-balanced between skincare (more of that yay!) and wearable makeup.
Peach & Lily delivered the spoiler item (which I was familiar with before due to Skin&Tonics sublime review of it) and then surprised with items I’ve never encountered before, even from known brands like Mizon and Peripera (like, I was in the Flushing Club Clio store last weekend and didn’t see that eyeliner)
mega value. The box was on the expensive end, but the products are seriously first-rate. Wow. I thought I knew my eyeliners, but that Peripera liner is SILKY!
I love the choice of Mizon Sparkling Powder rather than a sheet mask–it’s clever.
A+ job, really well done. I’m going to crawl into bed and snuggle with my P&L treasures now. >:)Europe is fighting mad over the possibility of new U.S. sanctions targeting Russia.
The headlines read as if Brussels and Washington are breaking up after years of coordinated efforts to punish Moscow over the annexation of Crimea.
The rift is so severe that the European Commission, which feels its economic interests are under threat, has even hinted at retaliation if Congress moves forward without addressing its concerns.
Here's what's going on:
This is a diplomatic spat that boils down mostly to one issue: Natural gas.
Despite efforts to reduce its reliance on energy imported from Russia, roughly a third of the European Union's natural gas still comes from the country.
Some of the relatively cheap gas is sent to Italy and France, but many nations in central and eastern Europe are far more reliant on supplies piped in from Russia.
Energy security is therefore highly politicized and an issue that Europe views as being off limits to interlopers -- even close allies like the U.S.
The worry now is that the sanctions being considered by Congress could hinder several key energy projects on the continent and further inflame internal EU divisions.
"The fear is that American policy would restrict the behavior of European companies and impact energy policy making within the EU," said Kristine Berzina, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
Related: Tillerson's Exxon violated Russia sanctions, Treasury says
There is one project in particular that has stoked animosity -- Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline that would extend from Russia across the Baltic to Germany.
Opponents in the EU say the pipeline would only increase the bloc's dependence on Russian energy. But it has found support in Germany.
Both sides agree on one thing, however: The U.S. should not intervene in the dispute via sanctions or other means.
"Europe's energy supply is a matter for Europe, and not the United States of America!," said a joint statement issued in June by Germany and Austria.
That message appears to have been heard in Washington, where many lawmakers oppose the pipeline. The sanctions bill was altered over the weekend to ensure that it didn't affect the project.
But concerns about the broad economic impact of the new sanctions remain.
"This goes beyond Nord Stream 2," chief EU spokesman Margaritis Schinas said Monday. "We have [an] indication that some of our concerns are being taken into account, but further work is necessary to fully address our comprehensive concerns."
Related: U.S. tightens sanctions on Russia over Crimea
Experts say the sanctions could undermine partnerships between EU and Russian firms to develop offshore energy projects in Egypt. They could also prevent Italian and Russian companies from working together on the so-called Southern Gas Corridor, which would go through Turkey to southern EU states.
The EU has tried to reduce its reliance on Russian gas produced by state-backed industry giant Gazprom.
It has been improving pipeline connections between individual member states, and started buying more gas from other countries, like Qatar and the U.S.
Since 2014, two liquefied natural gas import terminals have opened in Poland and Lithuania, making the region open to imports from elsewhere.
The EU has also forced Gazprom to stop preventing European countries from reselling its gas, and allow customers to renegotiate the price of long-term contracts.
Still, there is a lot more Europe could do. Import data suggest that gas imports from Russia have been relatively stable since 2014, and they actually increased in 2016 as prices dropped.
Against this backdrop, moves by U.S. lawmakers that could impact energy supplies in the region are unwelcome -- especially after three years of close coordination on sanctions.
"There is a sense of loss of a partnership," Berzina said of attitudes in Europe.A Note on Folding Pocket Squares
The pocket square is a charming accessory that has seen a huge surge in popularity over the past decade. The roots of this once functional piece of fabric can be traced back thousands of years. In ancient Egypt, a cloth akin to a handkerchief was commonly carried by the working man. These were used to stay clean and dry during a long day of labor. Eventually the handkerchief spawned a similar but functionally different sibling—the pocket square. Unlike a modern handkerchief which is carried in the inside jacket pocket and generally used for blowing noses, a pocket square is worn in the front breast pocket, for aesthetic purposes only.
When it comes to styling your pocket square, there are very few definitive rules. However, we recommend avoiding matching your tie and pocket square too closely. Instead, opt for a pocket square that complements and contrasts with the rest of your look. When in doubt, a simple white pocket square (with or without a colored edging) is a smart choice.
If you’re looking for a simple, no-nonsense fold, start with The Classic and Presidential folds. The Puff and Reverse Puff are equally simple to style but add a bit more organic, unpredictable flair. If you’re into precision, peaked folds like The Three Peaks, The Winged Peak and the Angled Peaks will serve you well. If you’re looking for more of a challenge, The Rose and The Stairs folds will help take your pocket square to the next level.A BBC reporter was left flabbergasted when he unintentionally interviewed a former footballer about a match he had played in.
Stuart Flinders stopped one man to ask him if he remembered the 1967 Merseyside derby game ahead of an Everton vs Liverpool match on Saturday night.
Unbeknown to him, he was interviewing Liverpool’s former goalkeeper Tommy Lawrence, who had been in the goals for that particular game.
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.
Flinders asked: “I’m just wondering whether you remember the derby match in 1967 at Goodison, FA cup, fifth round, and it was shown on a big screen at Anfield at the same time. Do you remember it?"
“That’s right", Mr Lawrence said, nodding. “Yeah I do, I played in it. I was goalkeeper for Liverpool.”
"It was a great game,” he added, “Alan Ball scored the winner."
Flinders described the encounter as a “stroke of luck”.
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 nowPage 2
Panel 1
Skye (off-screen): Hey Mark!
Close-up of Mark's hunched form, or his eyes over his watch or computer, as he checks the profiles of those he suspects of betraying the Guardians. He's looking at the same profiles we were looking at on the previous page. Skye's hand rests on his shoulder.
Panel 2
Make whacks Skye's hand off his shoulder.
SKYE
You're s'posed to be helping us vet Natasha as a new teammate, not staring creepily at pics of us and muttering to yourself!
MARK
I don't like her.
Panel 3
Establishing shot of the warehouse from Skye and Mark's angle/POV. Natasha poses confidently, both hands on her hips, in the center of the room as Jun clambers the ratty couch behind her, raising one fist in the air, and Black Butterfly shakes her finger at her new friend, mouth opened in laughing protest. They're joking around, having a good time. Robot-man sits uncomfortably on the fringe of the action, on an overturned bucket, smiling gently but uncertainly.
Mark and Skye lurk in the darkest corner of the room. There's a waterhose in the background.
SKYE
What's not to like?
Panel 4
MARK
She's a distraction.
Mark rises to leave, and by the next panel he's disappeared.
Panel 5
Skye's left with his phone in his hand, alone in the dark corner of the room.
MARK, PURPLE WITH BLACK, O.S. SQUARE BOX W. LINE POINTING IT TO SKYE'S PHONE
There's a traitor on your team, and you're all too busy playing Happy New Friend fun-time to notice.Arpa-E project deploys drones and robots to breed fast-growing, drought-resistant and greener biofuel from sorghum which could replace corn ethanol
A US government agency is trying to build a better biofuel, using a higher energy-producing plant with a lower environmental impact than corn ethanol or other known biofuels.
Sorghum, a food and forage crop widely grown in Africa and Central America which has tens of thousands of varieties, has emerged as one of the most exciting prospects.
The $30m Terra project, funded by the US government’s Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy (Apra-E), seeks to use new technologies – including ground-level robots and aerial drones – to breed a fast-growing, drought-resistant biofuel that would thrive outside the rich black soils of the midwest.
The ultimate goal is to develop an alternative to corn ethanol, which demands heavy investment in water and fertiliser and takes premium farm land out of food production. A US government study in 2014 found corn ethanol was worse for global warming than gasoline under some circumstances.
In a recent interview, Ellen Williams, Arpa-E director, singled out the sorghum research as among the most exciting programmes currently funded by the agency, which was set up by Barack Obama to support early stage energy research too risky for private industry.
Researchers said they were using sensing and imaging equipment loaded on to the robots and drones to zero in quickly on varieties of sorghum that have the greatest energy potential but do not suck up too much water, fertiliser, or farm land that would otherwise be used to grow food.
Conventional plant breeding is labour-intensive and takes time, Williams said. The Arpa-E project intends to speed up that process of identifying the physical characteristics of plants and their growth potential.
“The idea is you could send a person out in the field who could look at 10 plants or you could send robots out into the field who could look at thousands of plants, and they can measure thousands of different points of data, and you can bring that data back and develop an alternative faster way of making a better selection for the breeding of your plant,” Williams said.
The scientists said they were deploying wheeled robots at ground level and 35lb flying drones, equipped with cameras, Lidar (laser scanning), hyperspectral imaging and other sensing and imaging technology to monitor the plants throughout their growing season, and so cut the time of conventional breeding.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Terra robot developed to help scientists breed fast-growing strains of sorghum. Photograph: Simon Edelman/Energy Department
There are more than 40,000 varieties of sorghum, most of which are used for forage crops. But very few have been extensively studied, especially for their use as a biofuel crop, the scientists said.
They said they were looking to develop late-flowering varieties that could thrive on relatively low-value farm land, reaching 20ft in a single season and yielding as much as 20 tonnes a hectare – or up to four times current yields.
The US Department of Agriculture has been looking for replacements for corn ethanol – especially crops that could be raised outside the premium agricultural land of the midwest – to meet quotas set by Congress for renewable transportation fuels.
Under the standards, 18bn gallons of biofuels must be blended into US petrol supply in 2016.
Scientists involved in the Terra project say that sorghum could fit the bill – because it has relatively high energy potential without demanding too much in the way of fertiliser, land or soil.
“Sorghum is a natural because it doesn’t have the competition for food,” said Barry Flinn, the Clemson University scientist overseeing the breeding project. Unlike corn, which is sensitive to heat and drought, he said: “Sorghum tends to have a natural ability to survive. It’s growing in areas where almost nothing grows.”
The plant does not require fertiliser or irrigation – and it had tremendous untapped potential as a biofuel, Flinn added.
“It has a tremendous amount of genetic diversity that hasn’t been tackled yet that we could use to really increase and substantially boost overall biomass productivity,” he said.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A woman shows sorghum flour in Sexaxa village in Botswana, Africa. Photograph: Edwin Remsberg/Alamy
However, Danielle Nierenberg, founder of the Food Tank, which studies sustainable agriculture, said she was concerned about creating demand for sorghum as a fuel crop. Sorghum is an important staple in sub-Saharan Africa.
“My fear is that its importance as a crop high in iron, protein, and other nutrients will be overshadowed by its value for biofuels,” she said in an email. “But if farmers can use it for both fuel and food, it will do something that most other biofuel crops can’t do – provide both nourishment and fuel.”
Tim Searchinger, biofuels expert at the World Resources Institute, the environmental thinktank, rejected the entire notion that sorghum – or any biofuel – would be a better alternative to corn ethanol. “Any dedicated use of land for biofuels is a bad idea,” he said.
Existing farm lands are already under pressure to produce more food to keep up with a growing population, he said. Taking land out of food production to grow fuel would make it even harder to keep pace. In addition, he argued, plants were staggeringly inefficient at converting the sun’s rays into energy. A far better bet would be to give up sorghum and biofuels altogether, and just invest in solar panels.
“It is a waste of our money and effort,” he said. “We only have so much money we are going to throw at climate change, and even the most extraordinary example you could throw at me with sorghum, I will get more energy for less money [with] solar.”Published: 28 Jul 2017
Kia Stinger details revealed
Ahead of the official launch of the Kia Stinger later in the year, Kia-buzz.com has revealed details of the specification and performance that can be expected. Offering heart-pounding performance, the All-New Kia Stinger is set to place heavy emphasis on high-speed and long distance driving.
Search For Your Next New Kia Car Today Click here
Kia Stinger engine options
Available in a selection of turbocharged petrol and diesel engines, the All-New Kia Stinger will produce up to 370 horsepower and have a 0-62mph time of a highly impressive 4.9 seconds. Featuring an advanced ‘Launch Control’ function that allows maximum power when accelerating from a standing start, it limits the wheel spin. Through an electronic aid, the Kia Stinger is able to accelerate at a more rapid pace.
Theta II Improved FR 2.0 Turbo GDi
Low-medium speed improved Turbo charger
Intake CWT
Variable intake air flow improved VCM actuator dual relief BSM
Electronic thermostat
Head for reduction of exhaust temperature
Lambda II 3.3 Twin Turbo GDi
D-CWT (intake: centre)
Twin Turbo Charger
Head integrated exhaust manifold
Electronic thermostat
Diesel R2.2
Exhaust manifold combined with turbocharger
EGR valve
CC_LNT-DPF
Variable displacement oil pump
In order to deliver the highest levels of performance, a new medium-sized rear wheel has been developed exclusively for the Kia Stinger. Featuring a low centre of gravity and stiffness to keep it lightweight, it has reduced flow resistance to the front wheel that offers a engine cooling process that is more effective.
Kia Stinger multiple driving modes
Drivers can opt for the driving mode that best suits the individual driving conditions and requirements. Choose form Eco, Personal, Comfort, Smart and Sport for a truly responsive drive. A boosted NVH performance offers a pleasant ride as well improved sound insulation and body sealing.
Discover the Kia Stinger at Jennings Kia
The order book for the All-New Kia Stinger opens at Jennings Kia on 1 August 2017. For a chance to get up close and personal with the All-New Kia Stinger for the first time visit Jennings Kia in Stockton on Thursday 10 August between 16:30 and 18:00. To find out more information about the Jennings Kia launch event call 0333 414 9750 today.Deal with it
Typical demise of a Locust
before the hitbox fixes
One does not simply outsmart opponents with a Locust
Never ever ever be the first to engage in Locust. Never be the first mech that the enemy sees, no matter how occupied they are. Learn to hold back, learn to hide. Even if your team is badly losing, hang by your group and don't stray.
The rule you have to stick to: only engage when the enemy is actively engaging something else. If you get aggro, disengage immediately.
stick to: only engage when the enemy is actively engaging something else. If you get aggro, disengage immediately. Never ever stop in a Locust, even when nothing is happening. Go around in circles, check the flanks without going too far try to use this time to build up your situational awareness without putting yourself in danger.
Never ever run in a straight line when running towards/away from your enemy. Make zig-zags, try to put something behind you and them, use the terrain elevation. Just make sure they have a hard time aiming. Sometimes depending on the map, this is unavoidable, so plan ahead. This was probably the reason of half of my deaths.
SPLs are life. They require little time on target, you can be in and out instantly and they dump a lot of damage(20.4) in just 0.5 seconds. Use them. You can offset the terrible range with your speed and clever usage of terrain. Divide them to 3 groups of 2's to make heat more manageable. Take coolant flush when possible. After eliting, coolant flush will hardly be necessary.
Seduce and lure your enemies. Your Locust is an irresistible target, use it for your advantage. Most mechs will take great risks if they think they can quickly finish you off. Lure them to your team and disengage immediately, watch them get disintegrated.
LRMs are your worst enemy, especially LRM boats with target decay module will be able to hit you long after you're in cover. LRMs will screw up your legs, your weakest parts. Try to identify LRM boats and their positions. Do your engagements when they're busy with a friendly mech.
Protect your legs! This is one of the few mechs where you can leg yourself purely by accumulating fall damage and running into mechs.
How about a demonstration? This was a round where I did a pretty good job at being sneaky and following these rules. In fact, my little Locust was probably the reason of our comeback.
On top of these, you will need a lot of experience with MWO to make all the right decisions. You simply cannot make a mistake and get away with it. An AC20 to the leg, a Gauss shot to the CT and you're pretty much out. This may be the worst mech ever for some, but it's also a great training mech that will test your skills and instincts to their extreme. In that regard, I found them really fun to play with, especially since their legs aren't as bad as before.How about a demonstration? This was a round where I did a pretty good job at being sneaky and following these rules. In fact, my little Locust was probably the reason of our comeback.
Here's my latest Locust build as well, it's pretty straight forward:
About Rak I'm an engineer who likes to write extremely long articles about games that border simulation and mainstream.
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It's the double XP weekend! We all know these are the times when our most-hated mechs are dusted off and leveled. It's a painful process, but if you're a collectionist like me, it must be done nevertheless. This weekend's special for me was my LCT-1E, which I bought after getting harassed by one a week ago. That guy dove into our group, lit up a few mechs and got out before anyone grasped what the hell was happening. He used his small profile and speed so well that I never had a chance to properly aim. I was really amazed by this type of gameplay, you're literally one-shot away from dying at all times.When they it was first released, I found the Locust beyond horrible. I could work with limited armor and that "one-shot away from dying" thing, but their leg hitboxes were so broken that they never had a chance. They are the only mechs that I sold with frustration and had no regrets about. Just look at the video of these guys playing with Locusts to get a taste. Fast forward a few months, by some impossible chance, PGI noticed this and reduced the size of Locust's leg hitboxes in a patch. I still didn't bother as I had closed the "Locust book" for good, but PGI went ahead and released additional variants. 1E was especially very tempting among the two, with 6 arm-mounted lasers it's by far the hardest hitting Locust. At 1.5M a pop, it wasn't that expensive either. So why not give them a second chance?First a dozen or so rounds? Absolutely brutal. I tried to play it like how I play my other lights, which didn't end well. Rushing ahead got the attention of other lights who did a quick work of my Locust. Rushing ahead will also get you peppered with missiles and believe me each time you get hit by LRMs, that's your Locust dropping 5 or 10% every time, which is a really big deal. Your legs will suffer. Rushing ahead will also get you locked by the whole other team and if you're the first target that ever popped and locked on their screen, too bad. Now, whenever you pop up again their mechs will target you instantly, you will be the prime target again.It's not about "rushing ahead" though, being overeager is the number one killer of Locust pilots. Do you see a juicy Stalker side torso that is about to pop? Just go in there and pop it! Except there's a huge chance he's not alone and you will get insta-popped/legged by an AC/PPC round from a mech you didn't notice. Even in somewhat chaotic brawls people will actually stop firing at that DPS Cataphract tearing them apart and try to kill you. Why? Because they want that sweet cookie as TheB33f put it. You're an easy kill, so if they go down they might as well bring a weak Locust with them. Let's say you got lucky and caught an isolated LRM boat, but whatever defense weapons he has(MLs if you're lucky) are still very capable of killing you. They don't even need to properly aim, a few laser cuts here and there and your legs are already falling apart. I am not even talking about other lights, as soon as they see a Locust, they get kind of hypnotized and even do suicidal things to kill you. After dying dying and more dying I realized that, if you want to be useful you simply can not be noticed.The frustration doesn't stop at survivability, it gets worse when you try to build your 1E. What do you use? MLs? They're simply too hot and soon I realized they also require a lot of time on target. That's you exposed to return fire for one whole second and counting ingress and egress, that's a lot of time to eat an AC20 to the face. SLs? Too little damage and the duration still feels long, just not enough damage per beam. SPLs? Hmm these actually feel decent, but the heat is still somewhat hard to manage. I tried many variations I've never ever contemplated on putting on my mechs, like 2xSL and 4xSPL and 2xSL 2xSPL and 2xML. Nothing felt decent.After 37 matches in my 1E and having elited it purely solo with 1.26 K/D, here I am with the face expression of a man who survived a month of passage through a desert. I can really go into detail, but I don't want to prolong this further, so I'll just give a "lessons learned" list. Some rules apply to other lights too, but you have to be really strict about them when piloting a Locust(1E).The heads of the Jewish Agency have told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu they will no longer take part in a government initiative to strengthen ties between Israel and Diaspora Jews. In a letter sent to Netanyahu last week, Jewish Agency leaders criticized the conduct of the Diaspora Affairs Ministry, which is leading the initiative.
On Friday Haaretz reported on a new program, under Diaspora Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett, whose purpose is to address “the weakening of the Jewish foundations of the family unit” among Jews worldwide and “the significant increase in critical discourse against Israel.”
About three months ago a new company, called the Initiative for the Future of the Jewish People, received special, accelerated approval to run the program. The government is to allocate 190 million shekels ($50 million) to the program, while the company is supposed to raise an additional 370 million shekels from Jewish organizations and philanthropists.
Figures who are familiar with the initiative have warned of “autocratic leadership by members of Habayit Hayehudi” and about “turning the complex ties with the Diaspora into a political fiefdom.”
Ministry officials, however, say the program is “a strategic solution to the challenge of young Jews who are becoming distant from their Jewish identity and from the State of Israel.” According to an internal ministry document, “In recent years there has been an ongoing erosion of Jewish identity in various communities worldwide.”
In 2013 and 2014 the Prime Minister’s Office, the Jewish Agency and other agencies drew up plans to increase the connection between Israel and Diaspora Jews, but over the past several months, and in particular since the new government was established, the PMO and the Jewish Agency have been cut out of the loop on the program. The program is headed by Diaspora Affairs Ministry Director General Dvir Kahana, a confidant of Bennet. In a meeting about a month ago, Kahana approved the hiring of the new company to run the initiative.
The annual salary of the person heading the Initiative for the Future of the Jewish People will be 800,000 shekels, and the various senior executives will have a foreign travel budget of about 1 million shekels a year.
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In their letter to Netanyahu, Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky and the chairman of the agency’s board of governors, Charles Ratner, wrote: “We feel obliged to inform you that we cannot continue to participate in the Initiative as currently formulated.”
They noted that while the program was designed to serve as a joint partnership for strategic dialogue and action between Jewish communities throughout the world and the State of Israel,” the current direction and administration of the program contradicted both the spirit of the initiative and the June 2014 cabinet resolution establishing the initiative. Therefore, wrote Sharansky and Ratner, “Any and all meaningful dialogue with the organized Jewish community as represented by the Jewish Federations of North America, Keren Hayesod, the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel has been eliminated. Rather this undertaking has transformed simply into a funding framework for programs to be conducted by a single government Ministry,” they wrote Netanyahu.
“Under these circumstances, we regret to inform you, in consultation and agreement with our constituent partners, that until the program is returned to its original conception and direction, we no longer see this as the joint initiative between the Government of Israel and World Jewry and therefore can no longer see ourselves part of it,” they said.
Sources familiar with the program criticized its aims to fight "the weakening of the Jewish foundations of the family unit” among Jews worldwide and “the significant increase in critical discourse against Israel.” "Will the government now tell Jewish communities around the world how to run the family unit?" a source who until recently worked with a Jewish organization in the U.S. said.
"It smells of condescension. Such an angering stance may lead to a confrontation with large groups," he added.
The Prime Minister’s Office said it received the Agency's letter and that the "issue is being dealt with." The Diaspora Ministry did not issue a response.Advertisement
What do Princess Marie-Olympia of Greece, Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, actress Zoe Kravitz, and socialite Nicky Hilton Rothschild have in common? Not a whole lot until now.
The four women — along with supermodel Carolyn Murphy, actress Thandie Newton, and others — all came together for a new fashion editorial for W magazine's September issue.
The feature spotlights Oscar de la Renta's new creative directors, Laura Kim, 35, and Fernando Garcia, 30, who seem to be fans of these particular famous faces and invited them to model the fashion house's latest collection.
Interesting crowd: Princess Marie-Olympia of Greece (center) poses with Huma Abedin (left) and model Sasha Pivovarova in a fashion feature in the new issue of W
Co-stars: The editorial on de la Renta's creative directors also includes (L to R) Nicky Hilton Rothschild, Carolyn Murphy, de la Renta's stepdaughter Eliza Bolen, and Thandie Newton
Star-studded: The creative directors, Laura Kim (center) and Fernando Garcia (right), pose with Zoe Kravitz
Fashion friends: The unlikely duo both modeled Oscar de la Renta designs
The fashion feature takes a look at the changes that Kim and Garcia are bringing to the Oscar de la Renta brand since signing on in September of 2016, and how they landed such coveted positions.
Together, the design-duo also helms the label Monse, and had previously worked at de la Renta in other roles before succeeding Peter Copping as co-creative directors.
But while Oscar de la Renta has plenty of famous fans — including Karlie Kloss, Selena Gomez, Emma Watson, Sarah Jessica Parker, and W cover star Katy Perry — the new bosses brought in some surprising names for the feature.
Posing on the first page with the designers themselves is Big Little Lies star Zoe Kravitz.
Next, Nicky Hilton — who called the design duo's first Oscar de la Renta collection 'next-level insane' — Carolyn Murphy, and de la Renta's stepdaughter Eliza Bolen pose together in dresses and jumpsuits.
Thandie Newton poses alone in a bright green number, while the final spread features Spanish socialite and former model Naty Abascal, model Sasha Pivovarova, Huma Abedin, and Olympia.
A thrilled Olympia took to Instagram to share the image of herself with Huma and Sasha, writing, 'Oscar Oscar Oscar @wmag September issue.'
In the image, she wears a black suit, and high heeled pumps, while her hair is parted and slicked back. She also has dark red lipstick on her mouth.
Her outfit is completed with the addition of a dazzling choker around her neck, accentuating the low-cut neckline of her black blazer.
Not her first model moment: The 21-year-old often turns up at fashion shows and even walked for Dolce & Gabbana in February and June of this year
Couture: Hillary Clinton aide Huma, meanwhile, wore a custom Oscar de la Renta gown for her wedding in 2015, before Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia took over as creative directors
Sitting beside her, Huma |
caterpillars ingest as they feed on milkweed.[56] By ingesting a large amount of plants in the genus Asclepias, primarily milkweed, monarch caterpillars are able to sequester cardiac glycosides, or more specifically cardenolides, which are steroids that act in heart-arresting ways similar to digitalis.[74] It has been found that monarchs are able to sequester cardenolides most effectively from plants of intermediate cardenolide content rather than those of high or low content.[75] Additional studies have shown that different species of milkweed have different effects on growth, virulence, and transmission of parasites.[76] One species, Asclepias curassavica, appears to reduce the proportion of monarchs infected by parasites. There are two possible explanations for the positive role of A. curassavica on the monarch caterpillar: that it promotes overall monarch health to boost the monarch's immune system; or that chemicals from the plant have a direct negative effect on the parasites.[76] Monarch (left) and viceroy (right) butterflies exhibiting Müllerian mimicry After the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, the toxins shift to different parts of the body. Since many birds attack the wings of the butterfly, having three times the cardiac glycosides in the wings leaves predators with a very foul taste and may prevent them from ever ingesting the body of the butterfly.[74] In order to combat predators that remove the wings only to ingest the abdomen, monarchs keep the most potent cardiac glycosides in their abdomens.[77] Mimicry Edit Monarchs share the defense of noxious taste with the similar-appearing viceroy butterfly in what is perhaps one of the most well-known examples of mimicry. Though long purported to be an example of Batesian mimicry, the viceroy is actually reportedly more unpalatable than the monarch, making this a case of Müllerian mimicry.[78]
Human interaction Edit
Genome Edit
The monarch was the first butterfly to have its genome sequenced.[10]:(p12) The 273-million base pair draft sequence includes a set of 16,866 protein-coding genes. The genome provides researchers insights into migratory behavior, the circadian clock, juvenile hormone pathways and microRNAs that are differentially expressed between summer and migratory monarchs.[105][106][107] More recently, the genetic basis of monarch migration and warning coloration has been described.[108] There is no genetic differentiation between the migratory populations of eastern and western North America.[10]:(p16) Recent research has identified the specific areas in the genome of the monarch that regulate migration. There appears to be no genetic difference between a migrating and nonmigrating monarch but the gene is expressed in migrating monarchs but not expressed in nonmigrating monarchs.[32]
Conservation status Edit
Danaus plexippus, eastern migratory population) in their overwintering areas in Mexico between 1993 and 2018. Area covered by monarchs (, eastern migratory population) in their overwintering areas in Mexico between 1993 and 2018. The monarch butterfly is not currently listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) or protected specifically under U.S. domestic laws.[109] On 14 August 2014, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Center for Food Safety filed a legal petition requesting Endangered Species Act protection for the monarch and its habitat.[10] The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service initiated a status review of the monarch butterfly under the Endangered Species Act with a due date for information submission of 3 March 2015. The number of monarchs overwintering in Mexico has shown a long-term downward trend. Since 1995, coverage numbers have been as high as 18 hectares (44 acres) during the winter of 1996–1997, but on average about 6 hectares (15 acres). Coverage declined to its lowest point to date (0.67 hectares (1.66 acres)) during the winter of 2013–2014, but rebounded to 4.01 hectares (10 acres) in 2015–2016. The average population of monarchs in 2016 was estimated at 200 million. Historically, on average there are 300 million monarchs. The 2016 increase was attributed to favorable breeding conditions in the summer of 2015. However, coverage declined by 27% to 2.91 hectares (7.19 acres) during the winter of 2016–2017, most likely because of a storm that had occurred during March 2016 in the monarchs' overwintering area.[110] A study in 2016 claimed that the long-term trend in the size of the overwintering sites is cause for concern. After a ten-fold drop in the overwintering numbers of the eastern monarch butterfly population over the last decade, this study claimed there was an 11%–57% probability that this population will go quasi-extinct over the next 20 years.[111] According to Xerces Society, the monarch population in California decreased 86 percent in 2018, going from millions of butterflies to tens of thousands of butterflies.[112] In Ontario, Canada, the monarch butterfly is listed as a Species of Special Concern.[113] In fall 2016, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada proposed that the monarch be listed as endangered in Canada, as opposed to its current listing as a "species of concern" in that country. This move, once enacted, would protect critical monarch habitat in Canada, such as major fall accumulation areas in southern Ontario, but it would also have implications for citizen scientists who work with monarchs, and for classroom activities. If the monarch were federally protected in Canada, these activities could be limited, or require federal permits.[114]
Threats Edit
Conservation efforts Edit
See also EditThe 6-foot-3, 215-pound Pavelec often uses the butterfly style and blocks much of the net with his big body. But he also has uncommon agility and quick reflexes for a man of his size; in one motion he can pop up to a standing position from having both knees on the ice.
In many ways, Pavelec is not a conventional goaltender.
The 6-foot-3, 215-pound Pavelec often uses the butterfly style and blocks much of the net with his big body. But he also has uncommon agility and quick reflexes for a man of his size; in one motion he can pop up to a standing position from having both knees on the ice.
A second-round pick (No. 41) by the Atlanta Thrashers in the 2005 NHL Draft, Pavelec has been busy. Over a three-season period from 2011-12 to 2013-14, Pavelec played 169 games, second only to Antti Niemi (175) among goalies.
Pavelec, who played two seasons of junior hockey in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League after being drafted, made his NHL debut with Atlanta on Oct. 20, 2007, in relief of Johan Hedberg, in a 6-2 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning. He won his first NHL start, stopping 30 of 34 shots in a 6-4 win against the Lightning on Nov. 3, 2007.
A full-time NHL player for the first time, Pavelec started 40 games during the 2009-10 season. His rookie season included a 50-save performance in a 3-1 win against the Ottawa Senators on Oct. 31, 2009, and his first NHL shutout, when he stopped 38 shots in a 7-0 win against the Los Angeles Kings on Nov. 13, 2009.
Pavelec was involved in a scary incident on Oct. 8, 2010, when he collapsed less than three minutes into Atlanta's season-opener against the Washington Capitals. Pavelec was taken off the ice on a stretcher and spent three nights in the hospital before tests determined he had a fainting spell. The goalie returned on Oct. 30, 2010, and the next month set a franchise record with six straight wins, from Nov. 19-30, 2010.
The franchise moved to Winnipeg for the 2011-12 season, when Pavelec ranked fifth in the NHL in shots against and saves. In 2013-14, he finished second in the NHL in shots against (1,251) and saves (1,132) and moved into first place on the franchise wins list with 95.
From April 6-9, 2015, Pavelec recorded three straight shutouts to claim the franchise record in that category as well. That run extended his streak to 187:05 without a goal against and capped a 12-game stretch in which Pavelec went 9-2-1 with a.949 save percentage.
The strong finish helped the Jets reach the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the first time since the franchise relocated to Winnipeg. In his first playoff action, Pavelec started all four games of Winnipeg's first-round series against the Anaheim Ducks.
NOTES & TRANSACTIONSEarlier, I pointed out that families headed by white high school dropouts have higher net worths than families headed by black college graduates.
Judging by my emails, this struck some as nearly unbelievable. So, I figured an attempted explanation might be in order.
Sadly, data with which to study why this is the case is limited to, essentially, the Panel Study on Income Dynamics, which has its own limitations (particularly around Hispanics and immigrants). Nonetheless, a number of studies have used the PSID to analyze this question (see, e.g., McKernan+, Gittleman & Wolff 2004, Shapiro+). I have not gone into the PSID data myself and so I can't really offer the kind of analysis those who have can. If you are really interested, I'd read that literature.
With that said, there are certain broad points that should at least help to understand how such a reality is possible.
First, understand that blacks and Hispanics have lower incomes than whites up and down the educational spectrum.
On average, black families at a given level of educational attainment receive incomes that are just 66% of what white families at the same level of educational attainment receive. For Hispanic families, that figure is 79%. Naturally, when education-controlled income disparities like this exist, education-controlled wealth disparities will exist.
Second, understand that even blacks, Hispanics, and whites with the same incomes have dramatically different net worths.
On average, black wealth is 26% of white wealth, even controlling for income. For Hispanics, the figure is 31%. Peruse the studies above to try to tease out why. Note here though that, according to Gittelman and Wolff, this is not because blacks have lower savings rates. Inheritance and in-life wealth transfers also appear, in all of the studies, to play a non-trivial role.
In any case, these two facts alone make the education-controlled wealth disparity more than plausible. Blacks and Hispanics coming out of college receive less income than their white peers and that income translates into less wealth than whites with similar incomes. When education-controlled income is lower and income-controlled wealth is lower, there is only one way for that to wind up: a serious racial wealth gap, even among people with similar education.A Trump sign near an Indiana polling location on Tuesday Scott Olson/Getty Images
Donald Trump’s victory in Indiana came down quick as a guillotine—but even before the election results rolled in, the GOP faithful were jumping ship.
Former John McCain aide Mark Salter declared his allegiance to Hillary Clinton earlier Tuesday.
the GOP is going to nominate for President a guy who reads the National Enquirer and thinks it's on the level. I'm with her. — Mark Salter (@MarkSalter55) May 3, 2016
RedState blogger Ben Howe, who’s promised to phone-bank for Clinton if Trump gets the nomination, followed suit.
Once it became clear that Trump would take Indiana by a landslide, Meghan McCain and Lindsey Graham predicted the party’s altogether demise.
I guess when I said in 2012 that my party was going to evolve or it was going to die - it was easier to choose death. — Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) May 3, 2016
If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it. — Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) May 3, 2016
Now more than ever, members of the #NeverTrump movement have to consider just how far they’re willing to go to see their mission through.
If this is night #NeverTrump folks go from supporting Cruz to pushing an indy candidate, remember the Texas ballot deadline is... next week. — Taniel (@Taniel) May 4, 2016
The Trump Apocalypse may not come to pass, but the Republican Party is already preparing for doom.
Read more Slate coverage of the 2016 campaign.Trimethylamine (TMA) is an organic compound with the formula N(CH 3 ) 3. This colorless, hygroscopic, and flammable tertiary amine has a strong "fishy" odor in low concentrations and an ammonia-like odor at higher concentrations. It is a gas at room temperature but is usually sold in pressurized gas cylinders or as a 40% solution in water. TMA is a nitrogenous base and can be readily protonated to give trimethylammonium cation. Trimethylammonium chloride is a hygroscopic colorless solid prepared from hydrochloric acid. Trimethylamine is a good nucleophile, and this reaction is the basis of most of its applications.
Trimethylamine is a product of decomposition of plants and animals. In humans, it is synthesized exclusively by gut microbiota from dietary nutrients such as choline and carnitine.[5][6] High levels of trimethylamine are associated with the development of fish odor syndrome, which arise from the foul, fishy odor of trimethylamine.[5][6] TMA is the substance mainly responsible for the odor often associated with rotting fish, some infections, bad breath and can be a cause of vaginal odor due to bacterial vaginosis. It is also associated with taking large doses of choline and carnitine.
In 2013, trimethylamine was identified as a potent full agonist of human TAAR5,[7][8][9] a trace amine-associated receptor that is expressed in the olfactory epithelium and functions as an olfactory receptor for tertiary amines.[9][10] One or more additional odorant receptors appear to be involved in trimethylamine olfaction in humans as well.[10]
Production [ edit ]
Trimethylamine is prepared by the reaction of ammonia and methanol employing a catalyst:[11]
3 CH 3 OH + NH 3 → (CH 3 ) 3 N + 3 H 2 O
This reaction coproduces the other methylamines, dimethylamine (CH 3 ) 2 NH and methylamine CH 3 NH 2.
Trimethylamine has also been prepared by a reaction of ammonium chloride and paraformaldehyde,[12] according to the following equation:
9 (CH 2 =O) n + 2n NH 4 Cl → 2n (CH 3 ) 3 N•HCl + 3n H 2 O + 3n CO 2 ↑
Applications [ edit ]
Trimethylamine is used in the synthesis of choline, tetramethylammonium hydroxide, plant growth regulators or herbicides, strongly basic anion exchange resins, dye leveling agents and a number of basic dyes.[11][13] Gas sensors to test for fish freshness detect trimethylamine.
Trimethylaminuria [ edit ]
Trimethylaminuria is an autosomal recessive genetic disorder involving a defect in the function or expression of flavin-containing monooxygenase 3 (FMO3) which results in poor trimethylamine metabolism. Individuals with trimethylaminuria develop a characteristic fish odor—the smell of trimethylamine—in their sweat, urine, and breath after the consumption of choline-rich foods. A condition similar to trimethylaminuria has also been observed in a certain breed of Rhode Island Red chicken that produces eggs with a fishy smell, especially after eating food containing a high proportion of rapeseed.[14][15]
See also [ edit ]
Ammonia, NH 3
Ammonium, NH 4 +
Methylamine, (CH 3 )NH 2
)NH Triethylamine (TEA)The album may or may not be obsolete, but the fact remains: Listeners have long obsessed over individual songs. The Single File is The A.V. Club’s look at the deep cuts, detours, experiments, and anthems that make us reach for replay.
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In 1992, music was mutating. Strange new bands with weird new sounds were beginning to dominate radio and MTV, and strange old bands were finally getting their due. Alternative music was no longer just an alternative. The weirdoes had inherited the earth, or at least the front rack at the record store. During the spring of that year, however, the music-listening population of the world was subjected to a singularly shocking, unprecedented, and downright bizarre phenomenon.
The sound of Morrissey laughing.
“We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful,” the first single from Morrissey’s 1992 album Your Arsenal, doesn’t have a typically sung chorus. It has laughter. Morrissey’s laughter. Morrissey, the man known as The Pope Of Mope, the former frontman of The Smiths—one of cornerstones of alternative rock. Granted, it’s a tear-stained cornerstone. During their brief lifespan from 1982 to ’87, The Smiths had established themselves as the most dour and depressing group imaginable. But unlike doomsayers such as the late Ian Curtis, leader of fellow Manchester legends Joy Division, Morrissey didn’t trudge through the gloom. He twirled through it, wholly comfortable in his existential discomfort.
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By the time Your Arsenal came out, Morrissey had been solo for as long as The Smiths had been together. He already sounded exhausted. His most recent album, 1991’s Kill Uncle, remains one of the least inspired works in his catalog. In other words, by the dawn of ’92, Morrissey didn’t seem to have a lot of friends, and he wasn’t exactly successful. Meanwhile, tons of bands that The Smiths had inspired—or, like James, taken under their wing in the early days—were far surpassing Morrissey on the charts. Madchester, shoegaze, the first blush of what would become Britpop: All these things were suddenly more bankable and relevant than droopy ol’ Morrissey. Not to mention his former Smiths-mate Johnny Marr, who had been playing with everyone from The Pretenders to Talking Heads, or his buddy from back in the day, Michael Stipe, whose group R.E.M. had suddenly become the biggest thing in the world.
Putting the word “uncle” in the title of his latest album probably didn’t help. It just subliminally reinforced the notion that Morrissey was a cranky, avuncular has-been, sitting alone in his lonely room with rain-flattened hair like the protagonists of so many of his soggy songs. It’s likely that Morrissey did, in truth, hate the fact that his friends had become more successful than him. In true Morrissey fashion, he turned that passing twinge of professional jealousy into a song, if only to amuse himself. And amuse him it did.
“Ha, ha, ha-ha-ha / Ha, ha-ha-ha / Ha, ha-ha-ha / Oh, HA-HA-HA-HA!” goes the unsettling chorus to “Friends.” Morrissey’s laugh is like a self-destructing cackle, an unhinged hiccup, a sore-throated eruption of derangement. It’s fucking creepy. And it fits the song perfectly. Written with new recruit Alain Whyte—who, along with fellow guitarist Boz Boorer, formed the glam-meets-rockabilly core of Morrissey’s band that’s remained more or less intact ever since—“Friends” is a sinewy, propulsive track the likes of which Morrissey hadn’t sung since The Smiths’ short-lived, latter-day foray into T. Rex territory (namely “Sheila Take A Bow” and “Is It Really So Strange?”). Having Mick Ronson, David Bowie’s guitar god during the Spiders From Mars days, on board as producer helped hone the fledgling group into a tight, focused whole. That confidence, plus Whyte’s and Boorer’s joyous, ascendant chords, chafe deliciously against Morrissey’s batshit laughter and self-caricatured spite.
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Tell any diehard fan how much you hate Morrissey, and the first defense usually offered is this: Morrissey is way less depressing and way funnier than most people think he is. This is, after all, the goofball who wrote “Vicar In A Tutu,” a Smiths song that bears the couplet, “As Rose collects the money in the canister / Who comes sliding down the bannister?” But it’s not only that Morrissey has funny songs and sad songs. His funny songs can be agonizingly sad, and his sad songs are often fucking hilarious. Those opposing emotions don’t only coexist, they feed and echo off each other. It’s a tangle of mood and theme triangulated by literary license, paradox, and Morrissey’s own acute self-consciousness as both star and shut-in—both sex symbol and sexless schmuck.
“Friends” says it all. “We hate it when our friends become successful / And if they’re Northern, that makes it even worse,” Morrissey half whines, half croons in the song. He’s taking his own cult of personality and identity as an uppity Northerner, turning it inside out, and twisting it into a Möbius strip. Make that a Morrissey strip. “And if we can destroy them / You bet your life we will destroy them / And if we can hurt them, well, we may well / It’s really laughable.” Cue that hideously gleeful chuckle again, one that cuts in all directions at once.
“Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship,” said Morrissey’s hero, Oscar Wilde, “and it is by far the best ending for one.” Morrissey seemed to take that quote to heart in “Friends.” Gambling with a new backing band, new songwriters, a new sound, and even a new tone, the song had to work as both a reconnection with old fans and an introduction to the fresh-faced alt-rock hordes who knew Morrissey only by name and dubious reputation. For all he knew, though, it might fail and be neither. Faced with that unwinnable proposition, he did the smartest thing he could. He laughed his ass off. By, with, and at himself. Leave it to a pathological contrarian like Morrissey to sing a song about a lack of success and spin it into a full-fledged comeback. With his first laugh, Morrissey had the last one.Say you’re Al Franken. Your idol was Sen. Paul Wellstone, a man who exemplified what was right with America and with America’s Democratic system of government. But Paul Wellstone died, and his alter-ego from hell took his seat: a man whose only ideas are those placed in his head by the Bush neocons, who voted with Bush on everything — especially everything Iraq-related — but the surge. And he probably only voted against that because he was looking at re-election and knew the subject of the ongoing occupation, which he facilitated at every turn, might come up.
Bad incumbents through the ages have used the same tactic when they have only a poor record of their own (except for bringing back hockey, but that’s another subject) on which to run: ATTACK! It doesn’t get much worse than this ad from Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman:
Coleman’s going the old, “It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to sound like it is,” one better by keeping his smears so vague it’s hard to even know what the ad is really saying, let alone how to refute it. But it gives people the impression that Al Franken has done some very bad things, especially if your preferred source of news is porky white guys in shirts from three different bowling leagues.
We all know Al Franken had a career before he ran for office. We also know, from listening to him on Air America, that he gets it, and that he could help Congress reclaim its place as a co-equal branch of government.
The funny thing is, until 1996, Norm Coleman was a Democrat. When he was 20, Coleman celebrated his birthday at Woodstock. His college roommate, lawyer Norman Kent, recently took Coleman to task for hypocrisy on his past pot-smoking after Coleman toed the Republican line about the war on drugs.
My friend Norman, Years ago, in a lifetime far away, you did not oppose the legalization of marijuana… Sure, we had to tape the doors shut, burn incense and open the windows…yet we grew up okay, without the help of the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s advice. We grew up to become lawyers. Our other friends, as you go down the list, are doctors, professors, parents, political consultants and professionals. No one ever got cancer from smoking pot or diabetes from using a joint. You never said then that pot was dangerous. What was scary then, and is as frightening now, is when national leaders become voices of hypocrisy, harbingers of the status quo, and protect their own position instead of the public good… How about standing up and saying: “I, Norm Coleman, smoked pot in 1969.” That “I am not a gang member, a drug addict or a criminal.” How about saying: “I was able to responsibly integrate my prior pot use into my life, and still succeed on my own merits.” How about standing up not only for who you are, but who you were? Norm Kent
Those last words, about standing up for who you were, seem especially relevant. Coleman wants Franken to abandon his famous past, which aside from being in show business, consists of a 32-year marriage to his college sweetheart and fathering their two children, Thomasin, a 27-year-old Harvard graduate and, Joe, a 22-year-old Princeton grad.
If Franken wanted to go after Coleman with nods and winks and innuendo and whispers, it wouldn’t be hard. But then he wouldn’t be Al Franken. We know Franken will find an effective way to push forward, and we know it will take money.
Regardless of where you live, achieving the magic number of 60 Democrats in the Senate is vital. Help Al Franken return the seat once occupied by Paul Wellstone to its rightful owners: us. Please donate to Al Franken, the sooner, the better.Bond Math Class
Last week, I mentioned that retail investors have been seduced by a can’t-lose investing strategy that might stop working (and fail spectacularly) right at the worst possible time.
You might have heard that there were three dissents at the FOMC meeting yesterday—a rare occurrence indeed.
We’re getting closer to a genuine tightening of monetary policy—and with every passing day we’re also getting closer to the point where the “easy” trade suddenly becomes hard. (For a counter-intuitive but ultimately more sensible trade, check out the current issue of Street Freak.)
This $5 Trillion Market Is Just Getting Started. Don’t miss out on the ETF revolution. Get going with this must-read report from Jared Dillian.
Bond Math Class
I’ve taken bond math classes out the wazoo. The best of them was in the summer of 2001 at Lehman Brothers. Lehman Brothers wasn’t going to teach a bad bond math class, not at the firm that became synonymous with bond trading itself. I was ready to start whipping ‘em around. Pity I ended up in stocks.
Now, the tables have been turned, and I am the old, wizened professor, dropping some knowledge on the younger generation. I occasionally teach finance to MBA students, and there are a couple of chapters on bonds where the students have to get their calculators out.
Monday’s class was all about duration, which is a concept most of you are hopefully familiar with. I like to say that duration has two definitions:
The weighted average time to maturity of all coupon and principal payments
The sensitivity1 of a bond’s price to changes in interest rates.
It is the second definition that most people know. If you own a bond, you are exposed (positively or negatively) to changes in interest rates. If interest rates go up a percent or two, you want to know what is going to happen to the price of your bond.
Two things we need to know about duration:
Longer-term bonds have more duration
Lower-coupon bonds have more duration
The on-the-run 30-year bond has a coupon of 2.25%, which is about as low as you can get, which means lots of duration. We’ll talk about this bond in a second.
So at the beginning of class, I asked everyone: “Are bonds risky or not?”
They said not.
Made for an interesting class.
Bonds Are Super Risky
There is a thumb rule in bond mathematics:
If interest rates go up one percent, the price of the bond will decline approximately (duration) percent.
It’s a thumb rule, it’s not exact2. So yes, if the duration of a 10-year note is 9, and interest rates rise from 1.6% to 2.6%, the bond will lose approximately 9% of its value.
So rates go up 1% and a bond goes down 9%. Is that risky?
You mean bonds lose value?
That will come as news to most people, because bonds are safe, you always get paid the par value in the end3.
This $5 Trillion Market Is Just Getting Started. Don’t miss out on the ETF revolution. Get going with The 5 ETF Trading Strategies You Should Know About Before Investing, from Jared Dillian.
Lots of people are in long-term government bond funds. Okay, so what is the duration of the on-the-run 30-year bond?
Source: Bloomberg
About 21 and change. So if long-term rates rise from 2.4% to 3.4%, the value of the long bond will decline by…
About 21%.
Are bonds risky? You bet.
What happens if interest rates rise by two percent? Certainly not unheard of.
The price of the bond will decline by 35-40%.
My guess is that people don’t know that their government bond funds could decline by 35-40%.
My guess is that their financial advisors don’t even know that. Most financial advisors have not taken the fancy bond math class at Lehman. They took the Series 7, which doesn’t quite cover it.
Think about this: if people thought that there was a realistic chance that stocks could go down 35-40%, would they invest in stocks? No.
If people thought there was a realistic chance that their bond funds could go down 35-40%, they would probably sleep with one eye open.
Not Just Treasuries
Corporates have duration, too. The math is a little more complicated once you start introducing credit, but yes, a corporate bond is also sensitive to changes in interest rates.
Remember the “taper tantrum” of 2013?
There was some aggressive chatter about rate hikes out of the Fed, and it sent 10-year yields from 1.6% to 3%, in a hurry. Remember what else happened at about the same time? The big Apple bond issue.
Apple issued billions of 10-year paper, one of the biggest bond issues ever, and no sooner was the trade ticket stamped that the bonds went from 100 bid to 90 bid.
And everyone was like: Holy cow, I just lost 10% on Apple bonds. These bonds have interest rate risk!
Interest rates have been going down for so many years, I think people have forgotten that they can go up. And that bad things can happen when they do.
I’ve been pretty noisy about calling for higher interest rates, which has been the wrong call, but I will say this at least: when it happens, it is going to be ugly. People are completely unprepared.
In fact, it could be the biggest trade in decades. Remember 1994?
Rates back up a few percent, Mexico blows up, Orange County blows up, Procter & Gamble blows up—to name a few.
When interest rates go up, stuff blows upTM.
That’s all you need to know.
Are your stocks and bonds at risk from the Fed? In Street Freak, there’s a great contrarian pick that might smooth out the volatility in your portfolio.
I suggest you give it a risk-free try—if you sign up today (or any time before September 30), you’ll save 33% off the regular subscription fee.
1 Some people refer to duration as a measure of bond price volatility, but volatility is something different. It is the sensitivity to changes in interest rates. Small but important semantic difference.
2 And because it’s not exact, people are going to get upset, but the whole point of a thumb rule is to get people to understand a difficult concept more easily. Making people do the math doesn’t help anyone understand anything.
3 So much wrong with this statement.
Jared Dillian
subscribers@mauldineconomics.com"Helen Kelly is fighting for the rights of others to the very end," reads a comment under Life and Death and Cannabis, the trade union leader's new post at The Standard. And yes, she really is.
Kelly is taking cannabis oil to help manage the pain associated with terminal cancer. She knows she is in breach of the criminal law – and she knows she is not alone. She also knows she has the ability to speak frankly about it where others may not:
Since I have been public about it I have received so many very very sad emails from families also wanting access. Children with brain tumours, partners in their last stages of life zonked out on morphine and wanting something less brain numbing, people with elderly parents who are suffering from terrible arthritis and can’t cope with opiates so are basically in pain constantly and unable to move etc. It really has been incredible and quite heart breaking.
There's a reason that "Name Witheld" is the most popular byline on accounts like the letter to The Listener here:
I’ve never been interested in recreational drugs but tried cannabis as a last resort. I am now pain-free for most of the time, have been able to return to work and am again fully enjoying my life. I would like to be able to share my experience with others who suffer from the same condition, but feel unable to for fear of prosecution, and for fear of jeopardising those who have helped me access cannabis.
This situation needs urgent redress. Although more evidence is urgently needed, those of us who have to rely on cannabis for our survival cannot wait for trials to take place. I know it works for me and has saved my life. I have conducted my own trials, carefully documenting the effects of every medication I have tried. Although I’m overjoyed to have my life back, it appals me to have to live in such a complicated and clandestine way.
And this Stuff column by a man who discovered that a very low level of cannabis use eased his inflammatory and arthritic symptoms and allowed him to return to work. It also helped moderate the effects of the prescription drugs he must take to treat his arthritic symptoms. Those drugs will eventually cause his liver and kidneys to fail. In that light, forbidding him to use cannabis because it might be bad for his health seems like a sick joke. He writes:
So although I have stepped out of the shadows to share my story, I am stopping short of telling you who I am. I would lose my job and my livelihood, I would lose everything I have worked so hard to create from the nothing when I was on the disability benefit.
My sense is that these stories are more common than is generally acknowledged. In the past, I've given a friend a pointer on where to access marijuana for a dying father, who had never used it before.
I also know of someone using cannabis oil (competently but illicitly prepared) in a bid to shrink tumours. This is not as far-fetched as it might sound: the evidence that cannabinoids can reverse fast-growing tumours is mounting. Researchers typically caution against self-medication with whole cannabis, but when self-medication is the only choice people have, such cautions may not carry a lot of weight.
Kelly writes:
Many are resorting to illegal supplies and this in itself is so far from satisfactory. They have no idea what the strength of the product is or what it even has in it some of the time. In countries which allow medical cannabis these things are sorted – Doctors are trained on its use and products are tailored to kids, elderly etc etc.
I'm not sure that even in more liberal regimes things are quite that "sorted" – this is new territory for everyone and it sometimes implies a departure from the precautionary principles of drug approval – but the lack of clarity on potency and cannabinoid ratios is a risk factor itself.
Which is why Helen Kelly – who you would think hardly needs the damn grief – has embarked on the process of seeking consent to import and use a cannabis-based product under the Medicines Act. You'll need to read her post to appreciate the full drama that involves, but it culminates in the required consent of the Associate Minister of Health, Peter Dunne.
Dunne is habitually, and often unfairly, pilloried in these matters. Yet in delivering the new National Drug Policy last year, he had to carefully navigate the National government's cynical and entirely political stance on drug law reform to become the first minister to acknowledge that a significant portion of the harm from illicit drugs lies in the laws that make them illicit.
Dunne is also constrained by the official advice he receives. Even when, as was the case in November when Pharmac's Pharmacology Therapeutics Advisory Committee advised against extending the subsidy for Sativex, the advice is frankly misguided. The committee advised against the funding in part because of the risk of "diversion" of Sativex for recreational use. Sativex is an oral spray containing a 50-50 ratio of the two main cannabinoids, THC and CBD – and is thus a poor candidate for getting high. The idea that criminals might seek to misuse it when actual cannabis (which will get you high) is widely available is simply ludicrous. But that's the nature of the environment we're in.
In speaking out, Kelly also has the advantage |
this 360-degree "scene-shot" in order to simulate being inside of this PlayStation VR exclusive from a team of ex-Halo and ex-Infamous developers.
I held up my PlayStation Move – yes, Golem is a “real” game despite not utilizing the DualShock 4, and we’ll let Highwire explain how and why later this month – which was represented as a large pink crystal in my avatar’s hands. I stared into it and suddenly, *poof*, I was inside my first Golem: a six-inch doll on the floor of the hut. If you’ve ever wondered what Honey, I Shrunk the Kids would be like if it were real, then this portion of Golem is probably as close as you’re likely to get in the foreseeable future. This change of perspectives is certainly a strange experience, but also a wondrous one. I wandered around with the headset-based movement system (more on that later this month too), gazing at giant nails that hadn’t been hammered in all the way peeking out of the floorboards. A dead cockroach went from a little thing I’d have never noticed as a full-size human to a giant, disgusting hazard. And at one point, I looked up as the six-inch-tall doll on the floor and saw my injured self in bed. I realized that, including the PSVR helmet on my head, I was currently having an out-of-body experience of an out-of-body experience.
A Bug’s Life
“ I was like a six-inch-tall Lewis or Clark, exploring new lands.
Meanwhile, visible cracks and gaps in the floorboards revealed something strange underneath, and winding around to the area under the bed revealed a path down to the area beneath the hut. I descended into darkness, the crystal in my right hand acting as a flashlight, illuminating any area I pointed it at. Any moderately sized nuisance – a rat or a scorpion – would’ve been a terrifying monstrosity while in the doll’s tiny figure. Not to mention it would’ve been the stuff of nightmares inside a VR headset.
Thankfully, only tiny buzzing gnats and more dead cockroaches and scarabs dotted my path. I soon wound my way out from under the hut and into daylight. I was like a six-inch-tall Lewis or Clark, exploring new lands. But the daylight didn’t last, as I soon ducked into another tunnel, egged on by shiny purple crystals. Inside, walkways criss-crossed, with armies of bugs marching in the distance – far enough away so as not to haunt you, but close enough to give you the willies anyway. Strange rock formations in the shapes of, fittingly enough, golems carved from rock were hewn from certain stones, reminiscent of Han Solo frozen in carbonite.
This journey took my tiny doll self from daylight into darkness and back again, and ended at a very distinct rock golem carving after I crossed a series of, ahem, high wires in the form of narrow wood planks resting atop a chasm. I explored and beheld fascinating sights, but I’ll have to wait for the full game to figure out what this section of Golem means for its story and bigger-picture gameplay.
Welcome to the Rock
Fear not: Golem is no mere walking simulator, and the Move acts as more than just a flashlight. The second chunk of gameplay Highwire loaded me into was a desert arena under the bright midday sun. Instead of a six-inch-tall doll or a four-foot-tall disabled girl, I was now a giant, 20-foot-tall stone giant; a golem in the more aggressive sense of the word.
“ The VR and Move combine to make Golem’s combat a virtual 1:1 experience. Gesticulation equals success.
Lighting was again the graphical effect I noticed most; you’re not supposed to consciously realize the other impressive graphical feat – that the game runs at a smooth 90fps in each eye – because if you did then it would break the immersion. In this case, I could move, swing, or twist the absolutely mammoth, wide-blade sword in my hand using the Move. The sun glinted off of its metal convincingly, and a few large metal rings pierced into one end of it jiggled and jingled intimidatingly as I manipulated the blade. Given my size and armament, I quickly felt empowered to destroy something, and as if on cue, I walked forward down the straight path and into the large round arena, where another massive rock golem similar to me waited to duel.
Above: Click and drag your mouse around this 360-degree "scene-shot" in order to simulate being inside of this PlayStation VR exclusive from a team of ex-Halo and ex-Infamous developers.
Attacking is pretty straightforward – just swing your sword. But you must first block your opponent’s attacks in order to open him up to a counter. Your rival’s strikes can come from over the top, so you’ll need to lift your arm truly above your head. Griesemer told me that many friends who they’ve brought into try Golem make small motions with their hands out of habit, conditioned so after years of a gamepad requiring minimal movements. But the VR and Move combine to make Golem’s combat a virtual 1:1 experience. Gesticulation equals success. The golem can also come at you with a direct sword thrust or from the right or left sides. More advanced golems attack quickly and with more random attack patterns, which is tricky because you have to block the entire sequence in order to unlock a chance to counter.
Eventually, you’ll chop off one of its arms and soon strike it down, sending it satisfyingly flipping to the ground and to its death. I couldn’t help but extend my arm straight out, pointing my sword at the golem’s corpse in a victory taunt.
And don’t worry: we’ll show you gameplay videos of both the doll and golem sections very soon.
A New Frontier
But what about the logistics of VR? Meaning: will you feel motion sickness in a first-person VR game? Vertigo? Will it be physically comfortable on your head and, more specifically, your eyes to spend extended stretches of time in VR? It is these design challenges that Highwire thrives on attacking. After all, Griesemer was one of the key folks responsible for tuning the original Halo’s controls and, by extension, making first-person shooters fun on a gamepad for the very first time (with apologies to GoldenEye and the N64’s single thumbstick). We’ll cover Highwire’s strategy as our IGN First month of coverage continues, and if you’re like me, it will seem obvious when you hear it, but at the same time incredibly smart.
While Highwire hasn’t slapped a release date on Golem just yet – heck, we still don’t even know when PlayStation VR launches or how much it costs – Griesemer made it clear that won’t be a launch title. When you factor that in with the knowledge that Golem has already been in development for two years, it’s clear that Highwire’s decorated team of AAA-game veterans is very serious about taking its time to making a true, story-driven, top-shelf game built specifically for VR. If they live up to their resumes – not to mention the full potential of what I got to see in my two days at their studio – then Golem might be the first must-have game for PlayStation VR, or any other VR platform for that matter.
To keep track of our Golem coverage all month long, please bookmark this page, as it will be updated as each new feature is published.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews and Xbox Guru-in-Chief. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, catch him on Podcast Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.Lucky Slime - Oooh shiny! (not where to find them) [ edit | edit source ]
"Lucky Slimes are strange a variant of Tabby Slimes that seem to have a fascination with shiny objects, particularly newbuck coins. A Lucky Slime gobbles up any coin it can find, giving it a distinct jingling sound as they move about. However, coins don't make for a balanced diet and a Lucky Slime will still greedily devour meat of any kind. In doing so, its body bursts into a shower of newbucks, having little room in its slimy tummy. This burst often sends the lucky slime flying into the air.
Upon detecting a rancher, the Lucky Slime will make a hasty retreat. No known rancher has ever been skillful, or perhaps lucky enough, to capture one of these slippery slimes." Excerpt from Lucky Slimes in Slime Rancher
The Lucky Slime, as stated above cannot be captured and will disappear in about 5-10 seconds after being discovered. They are as rare as a Golden Slime, possibly even more so.
Feeding them meat sends them in the air, giving you about 40-100 newbucks. Not a large amount but you can say you found one.Wawa Profile Blog Joined August 2010 United States 215 Posts #1
Whether watching from the stream with free HF, or just being there as one of the screaming fans.
As an SC2 fan, I am pretty sure that there was at least one moment in that event where you went "OMFGWTFLOL".
Our hands were held tightly bu the best casters our community has to offer as they slowly guide us to what was historic, epic, the standard which other MLG events live up to.
Love'em or hate'em, you just have to appreciate all the hard work the MLG Team has done for that event as they promise us more amazing stuff for future events.
Some of you might conclude that MLG Columbus will not be topped. But let me sway you guys into believing a bit that in a couple of days, MLG will deliver their promise.
_________________________________________________
- The Korean Invasion
MLG Anaheim is set-up to accommodate Seven Top Korean Pro Starcraft 2 players which is the most in MLG history.
In the world of starcraft, Koreans are the one's that are on the top of the skill level around the world.
And the seven that is going to Anaheim are not really push-overs.
We have SlayersMMA(MLG Columbus Champion), SlayersBoxer(The Emperor), IMMVP(2-time GSL Champion), MVPDongRaeGu(GSTL Top Performer), SlayersAlicia, SlayersGanZi, ChoyafOu.
'These Guys Will Show You Awesomeness'
These seven are gonna be the primary targets for the rest of the field.
the will be watched and carefully analyzed by others as they are the most promising to win the whole event.
- The Emperor comes for a Visit
Lim Yo Hwan, the Broodwar legend, the emperor, SlayersBoxer himself is coming over to Anaheim and compete with players almost half his age.
Being placed in the group pool, SlayersBoxer is set to take the main stage at least a couple of times and i am pretty sure that the fans will surely embrace that opportunity to see the Legend himself perform well and do his best.
Notable players such as "EGincontrol" are very excited to get the opportunity to play against the Broodwar Bonjwa as he is, to many SC2 pros, a childhood hero.
'The most powerful Light card for sure!'
-Well Rested and BACK to Dominate! (IdrA)
I am pretty sure everybody still remember the show that Idra put out during MLG Columbus.
Whether it be his notable wins against MC, amazing domination in his group, or the Premature 'GG' that he did during the MMA fight.
Hate him or love him, IdrA definitely brings in the drama, the emotion, the excitement all the fans crave for.
After a few weeks resting and getting away from all the Starcraft 2. The Gracken is back, well rested, and has a clear vision of the goal.
'The Grack Is Back!'
Some people actually don't know but he came in 4th in Columbus and making him the most favorable foreigner to win Anaheim.
IDRA FIGHTING!!!
- EU Send their Finest
For this MLG, there are more notable European Players coming over for this event as they try to take the trophy back outside Korea and across the atlantic.
The notable ones are DignitasNaniwa, Duckload White-Ra, DignitasMerz, EGdeMuslim, and MillToD.
The EU server is said to be the training ground of choice for the pros outside Korea.
How well will they perform on American soil?
'26-0 part 2?'
- More fans than Ever
After only one year of release of Starcraft 2, the popularity of this game has increased drastically.
Since MLG Raleigh 2010(when SC2 was first added to the circuit), the starcraft crowd just exploded in a very short time and just recently, has taken the main stage of the MLG events.
One can only wonder as to how big it will get in a couple more years.
'Dear Halo Fans.... please don't hate... Thank You.'
There is so much hype for this weekend and tons of people have nothing but good comments about it.
With all the things said and done, we have nothing more to do but experience it and decide first-hand if it is indeed the most promising. After everyone experience the awesomeness of the ground-breaking MLG Columbus, people was just so amazed that they already went to a conclusion that nothing else can compare to what happened that weekend.Whether watching from the stream with free HF, or just being there as one of the screaming fans.As an SC2 fan, I am pretty sure that there was at least one moment in that event where you went "OMFGWTFLOL".Our hands were held tightly bu the best casters our community has to offer as they slowly guide us to what was historic, epic, the standard which other MLG events live up to.Love'em or hate'em, you just have to appreciate all the hard work the MLG Team has done for that event as they promise us more amazing stuff for future events.Some of you might conclude that MLG Columbus will not be topped. But let me sway you guys into believing a bit that in a couple of days, MLG will deliver their promise._________________________________________________MLG Anaheim is set-up to accommodate Seven Top Korean Pro Starcraft 2 players which is the most in MLG history.In the world of starcraft, Koreans are the one's that are on the top of the skill level around the world.And the seven that is going to Anaheim are not really push-overs.We have SlayersMMA(MLG Columbus Champion), SlayersBoxer(The Emperor), IMMVP(2-time GSL Champion), MVPDongRaeGu(GSTL Top Performer), SlayersAlicia, SlayersGanZi, ChoyafOu.'These Guys Will Show You Awesomeness'These seven are gonna be the primary targets for the rest of the field.the will be watched and carefully analyzed by others as they are the most promising to win the whole event.Lim Yo Hwan, the Broodwar legend, the emperor, SlayersBoxer himself is coming over to Anaheim and compete with players almost half his age.Being placed in the group pool, SlayersBoxer is set to take the main stage at least a couple of times and i am pretty sure that the fans will surely embrace that opportunity to see the Legend himself perform well and do his best.Notable players such as "EGincontrol" are very excited to get the opportunity to play against the Broodwar Bonjwa as he is, to many SC2 pros, a childhood hero.'The most powerful Light card for sure!'I am pretty sure everybody still remember the show that Idra put out during MLG Columbus.Whether it be his notable wins against MC, amazing domination in his group, or the Premature 'GG' that he did during the MMA fight.Hate him or love him, IdrA definitely brings in the drama, the emotion, the excitement all the fans crave for.After a few weeks resting and getting away from all the Starcraft 2. The Gracken is back, well rested, and has a clear vision of the goal.'The Grack Is Back!'Some people actually don't know but he came in 4th in Columbus and making him the most favorable foreigner to win Anaheim.IDRA FIGHTING!!!For this MLG, there are more notable European Players coming over for this event as they try to take the trophy back outside Korea and across the atlantic.The notable ones are DignitasNaniwa, Duckload White-Ra, DignitasMerz, EGdeMuslim, and MillToD.The EU server is said to be the training ground of choice for the pros outside Korea.How well will they perform on American soil?'26-0 part 2?'After only one year of release of Starcraft 2, the popularity of this game has increased drastically.Since MLG Raleigh 2010(when SC2 was first added to the circuit), the starcraft crowd just exploded in a very short time and just recently, has taken the main stage of the MLG events.One can only wonder as to how big it will get in a couple more years.'Dear Halo Fans.... please don't hate... Thank You.'There is so much hype for this weekend and tons of people have nothing but good comments about it.With all the things said and done, we have nothing more to do but experience it and decide first-hand if it is indeed the most promising. www.youtube.com/wawastarcraft“Destrier,” says the War Robots official site, “is one of the most durable Light robots.” 44,000 points’ worth of durability, to be precise.
This was probably true when Pixonic wrote it, but being tied for third place (alongside the Gepard) in a field of seven bots isn’t exactly something to crow about. Still, the Level 1 Destrier has only 3,000 HP less than best-in-breed Schütze, so if it lags a little it doesn’t lag much.
On the other hand, a Level 12 Zeus deals 14,891 points of damage in a single, thunderous strike. Three of them, say on a Level 7 Fury, will connect for 44,673 points- more than enough to kill that Destrier. There’s a moment when you one-shot a bot… or hell, even just sizzle off a mere 90% of their HP in a blink… that you feel like the vehicle of a vengeful deity.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
It’s the moments after, I suspect, that have a lot more to say about us. For some, I imagine it’s intoxicating. The only thing more fun than melting someone’s bot like that, is melting another one six seconds later. Long ago I often imagined I could hear the cackles of MagGep clubbers in their voxcomms as they lit new-player-me up like Christmastime.
For others, perhaps there’s a twinge of remorse. Perhaps even a little bit more than that.
Power through. Just collect the data and move up as fast as you can.
Except then the match ends, and you see what “powering through” looks like:
This sort of game did satisfy one of the thoughts behind the project- avoiding prolonged clubbing by rising in the ranks as fast as I could. But there was no way I could continue that sort of thing. Besides, on a practical level, the league thresholds are so low in the bottom leagues that I’d risk blowing through an entire level before getting a large enough sample.
Well, what if instead I took the opposite approach? I tried to do the “minimal activity” route and found, intriguingly, that I was still awarded a league point despite coming in at the bottom of the barrel. No beacons, no squadding, just me… dead last… moving up instead of down.
But that experience opened the door to alternate play modes, and I jumped on through. Just because I was on God-mode didn’t mean I needed to play like a God, and if I was able to move up in the standings no matter what I did, well…maybe it was time to get creative.
This was the only hard-and-fast rule I implemented for myself. It was bad enough that my opponents had to chew through the Bots of Legend, so I gave myself a handicap. If they played smart and made beacons a priority, they could triumph on the battlefield even if I was an outsize threat. There are, after all, five beacons on the field, and I could only be in one place at a time. And if my own teammates couldn’t figure out to prioritize captures, having my help was only going to let them prosper in ignorance.
The only beacons I typically captured were incidental ones. Home beacons off the opening deployment, a nearby beacon in a firefight. If I was unopposed, I’d go out of my way to pass around a Red beacon.
Longtime readers may recall my joy of Bronze Tier play, and I was able to recapture that for awhile by sidelining the default hangar and buying a few bots from the store. I plunked down for two Cossacks and two Schützes straightaway, dependable options I enjoyed playing the first time around. For my last slot, I opted for a Vityaz, a bot I’d never played. I ran this setup for a good stretch, until the enemy started to outclass me with solid Mediums and Heavies.
Later, I decided to use my “fifth slot funbot” for another bot/setup I’d never tried before, the long-range Natasha. This much-reviled rig has never fit my style of play, but now that I own a Trebuchet Butch, part of me wished I’d given it more of a look. Being a longstanding knife-fighter, I’m neither comfortable nor competent with that playstyle just yet. This was a second chance at training wheels, and while I didn’t find much to like about Noricums, the Nashorns and Kang-Daes were a lot of fun for a chance of pace.
Godzilla Mode was a riff on the “can only be in one place” theme. In these games, which occurred a little further up the league ladder, I’d come out swinging with my first bot- and only that bot. Once the Reds rallied and took down the giant monster, I’d spawn into the next bot and play much more casually. Put another way, all of my offensive effort was frontloaded, which still put me towards the top of the charts but without being overbearingly so. Indeed, I came to regard not finishing first in damage as an accomplishment, since it was a good indicator of the “natural limits” of a match.
Being a veteran player with a substantial health pool at my disposal, I’d often have plenty of time to get the measure of my opponents- typically while under fire. Whenever I encountered players who showed particular skill and bravery in a David-versus-Goliath clash, well, I frequently made sure they’d have a glorious feelgood moment by vanquishing the big bad. Perhaps that meant firing a little less often, or maybe making myself a little easier of a target, but it had a very “dungeon mastery” feel. As a career DM, I’ve always enjoyed encounters that pushed the heroes to the limit, but let them triumph through ingenuity, skill, or even sometimes a little luck. Those were the ones talked about years later, not “you walk into a room full of ten kobolds.”
Perhaps it was a little scripted, but I guarantee that novice player was fist-pumping as the Lancelot hit the dirt.
On the other hand, those players who showed an irrational obsession with personal safety at the expense of their teammates were priority targets. I remember one player in a Cossack in Dead City particularly well. At the start of the game, he ran up the beacon ramp, capped his team’s beacon, and then wedged himself further in, in nearly full cover. Like a tick, his parasitic play got him a beacon cap and then took him out of the game, leaving his team to fend for themselves.
I noticed him during a particularly intense firefight and sent a few shots his way before being brought down. I spawned into my second bot, and slogged through no-man’s land to get there. I was ascending their home beacon ramp to kill the cowardly Cossack when an enemy respawned and shot me in the back, killing me.
The third bot, though… the third bot had the satisfaction of obliterating the hider. I sent some plasma through the crack he was peeping out of so he knew what was coming, then walked around to the foot of the ramp. And it came. Up, up the ramp I went. He started bullet-hosing me in desperation once I reached his beacon, but justice was swift, terrible- and final.
By the same token, cowardice on my own team wasn’t tolerated either. In one game I noticed a blue Boa puttering around the outer perimeter of Shenzhen, just strolling along away from the front. Feeling for all the world like an Imperial Commissar, I spent the next minute or so bully-bellying the Boa with my Lancelot towards the center of the city. Once there, he got the hint and started firing.
And then there were the silly things to do that just caught me in the moment, like scenic tours behind enemy lines without actually firing. I did that once and ended up in the enemy spawn area in my Thundorkan Lance. There were a couple of Reds there, who stopped shooting as I just sort of walked around taking it all in. They started at me. I looked at them. Peace in our time.
Then another Red respawned, saw me and opened fire. I melted him down, he respawned again (peacefully), and we all just sort of hung out for a bit.
Other times I’d walk right up on someone, but attack others nearby and leave my new “friend” alone. I’d then follow my “friend” around a bit, fighting everyone else for awhile. Once I even stepped in to cover my “friend” from an incoming rocket barrage from my own team, because he was a sliver from death and fighting valiantly.
Things didn’t end with the conclusion of battle, either. I’d often get hosed with fire from my nearby teammates while waiting for the exit screen, but whether it was in celebration of the my perceived role or in protest of the inappropriateness of my appearance, I’ll never know.
Similarly, I’d get a lot of squad requests from former teammates and enemies, but I declined every one. Were they seeing an opportunity to play remora to a shark, or just wanting to give me an earful?
All in all, I probably caused a lot more “WTF?” moments or moments of levity than heartache. Yes, I’d been given the keys to a Ferrari. But that didn’t mean I had to put the pedal to the medal to get to where I wanted to go. As any driver will tell you, sometimes the drive is the destination.
It was all a brief moment in time, for each game I played I’d get closer and closer to the end of the whimsical era of the project. As I ascended the league ranks, the competition grew more challenging and I had to dial back some of the silliness. But being able to stroll around in a Lancelot surrounded by Destriers and the like was a unique experience. Almost like this kind of unique.
And certainly the closest I’ll ever get to the Leaver’s Queue.
For me, the games I’m writing about are a couple weeks in the rearview mirror, but for everyone else all this has a sense of immediacy. The last couple of days have seen a fair amount of outrage from parts of the War Robots community regarding the “Pixo-sponsored clubbing” that Project Bathyscaphe represented. I want to thank everyone who took the time to voice their support or objection, and perhaps the latter especially. I will be the first person to say that I do not make the correct decision all of the time, and I think this classic warning has probably applied to me more than a few times in my life:
Were I to do it again, there are a few things I’d do differently. I’d have asked for a more cross-spectrum hangar, so that I could pace through the leagues as quickly as necessary for timely data, but without tilting things so lopsidedly for the other players. In addition, I would have restructured the articles a bit.
Article 1: “I could have clubbed like a GOD!!!!!!” Article 2: “But I didn’t! Here’s what I did instead”
…makes for a nice split in terms of topic break and word count, but it also caused a lot of upset. That’s on me. In hindsight, I would have started with a lead-in about my “scrapper’s hangar,” and how wonderful it felt to play a Silver Lights in a competitive environment again, then led into a “but let’s walk through the rest of the hangar a moment, shall we?” reveal to show what else was on offer. Lesson learned!
In not doing so, I also did Pixonic a disservice. I do believe, at the end of the day, that they would never have granted this opportunity to someone they thought would abuse it. I’d like to think that their trust was not misplaced, but my choice of article structure obscured that. “Pixo-sponsored clubbing” was a takeaway for some, and while I think that’s the wrong conclusion, it’s hard to blame them for that perception. That’s also on me.
At the end of the day, this wasn’t- and isn’t- about racking up damage, “blasting n00bz,” or griefing people. Never was. Rather, about being able to dive into the lower leagues, observe, and eventually surface. With my “alternate game modes” I’ve had a lot of fun, and the analytical fruits of that will be rolling out very soon.
Thanks for reading!Mice. We crossed Tph2-CreER (Jackson Laboratory, #016584) transgenic mice and Esr1fl/fl mice (30). This cross produced KO mice (those that are homozygous for Esr1fl/fl and also carry the Tph2-CreER transgene) and WT mice (those that are homozygous for Esr1fl/fl, but do not carry the Tph2-CreER transgene). At 8 weeks of age, female KO mice received i.p. injections of tamoxifen (3 mg/mouse, twice, 24 hours apart) to induce Cre activity and therefore delete ERα only in 5-HT neurons. Female WT also received the same tamoxifen injections to rule out any possible effects of tamoxifen itself. Weekly body weight of these mice was monitored from weaning till the end of the study.
In parallel, we also crossed the Rosa26-tdTOMATO allele onto Tph2-CreER mice or Esr1fl/fl Tph2-CreER mice. This cross produced Tph2-CreER Rosa26-tdTOMATO (WT) and Esr1fl/fl Tph2-CreER Rosa26-tdTOMATO (KO) mice. Upon tamoxifen inductions similar to those described above, both mice expressed TOMATO exclusively in 5-HT neurons, and KO mice had Esr1 (ERα) deleted specifically in 5-HT neurons. These mice were used for electrophysiology recordings.
All the breeders have been backcrossed to C57BL/6 background for more than 12 generations. In addition, some C57BL/6 mice were purchased from the mouse facility of Baylor College of Medicine. Mice were housed in a temperature-controlled environment in groups of 2 to 5 at 22ÚC to 24ÚC using a 12-hour light/12-hour dark cycle. The mice were fed standard chow (6.5% fat, #2920; Harlan-Teklad) until training and assessment of binge-like eating behavior. Water was provided ad libitum.
Histology. We used dual immunofluorescence to examine the colocalization of ERα and 5-HT in mouse brain. Briefly, C57BL/6 female mice were perfused with 10% formalin, and brain sections were cut at 25 μm. The sections were incubated at room temperature in primary goat anti–5-HT antibody (1:5,000, #20079; Immunostar) overnight, followed by the secondary donkey anti-goat Alexa Fluor 488 (1:500; #A-11055; Invitrogen) for 1.5 hours. Then, the sections were incubated in the primary rabbit anti-ERα antibody (1:10,000, #06-935; Millipore) overnight, followed by secondary donkey anti-rabbit Alexa Fluor 594 (1:500; #A-21207; Invitrogen) for 1.5 hours. Slides were coverslipped with DAPI-containing mounting media (H1500; Vector Laboratories). Fluorescence images were analyzed using a Leica DM5500 fluorescence microscope with OptiGrid structured illumination configuration.
Similarly, we performed immunofluorescence for 5-HT in Tph2-CreER Rosa26-tdTOMATO mice to confirm colocalization of TOMATO and 5-HT. Briefly, mice (after tamoxifen inductions) were perfused with 10% formalin, and brain sections were cut at 25 μm. The sections were incubated at room temperature in primary goat anti–5-HT antibody (1:5000, #20079; Immunostar) overnight, followed by the secondary donkey anti-goat Alexa Fluor 488 (1:500, #A-11055; Invitrogen) for 1.5 hours. Slides were coverslipped with DAPI-containing mounting media (H1500; Vector Laboratories) and analyzed using a Leica DM5500 fluorescence microscope with OptiGrid structured illumination configuration. TOMATO signals were observed directly with a red fluorescence channel. As a negative control, TOMATO signals were also examined in Tph2-CreER Rosa26-tdTOMATO mice without tamoxifen induction.
We also performed immunohistochemistry for ERα in WT and KO mice to validate selective deletion of ERα in 5-HT neurons. Briefly, mice (after tamoxifen inductions) were perfused with 10% formalin, and brain sections were cut at 25 μm. The sections were incubated at room temperature in the primary rabbit anti-ERα antibody (1:20,000; Upstate) overnight followed by biotinylated anti-rabbit secondary antibody (1:1,000; Vector) for 2 hours. Sections were then incubated in the avidin-biotin complex (1:500, ABC; Vector Elite Kit) and incubated in 0.04% 3, 3′-diaminobenzidine and 0.01% hydrogen peroxide. After dehydration through graded ethanol, the slides were then immersed in xylene and coverslipped. Images were analyzed using a brightfield Leica microscope.
Training and assessment of binge-like eating behavior. We used the published protocol (29) to train and assess binge-like eating behavior in mice. Briefly, mice were randomly assigned into “intermittent” or “continuous” group. “Intermittent” mice were exposed to both regular chow pellets (6.5% fat, #2920; Harlan) and HFD pellets (40% fat, TD.95217; Harlan) for 48 hours (from Monday 11:00 am to Wednesday 11:00 am) and then exposed to only chow for the rest of the week. On the binge assessment day (Monday of the 2nd week), HFD was given back to cages at 11:00 am, and HFD and chow intake were measured for 2.5 hours (from 11:00 am to 1:30 pm). The “continuous” group was exposed to chow and HFD for the entire study, and HFD and chow intake were measured for 2.5 hours at the same time as in the “intermittent” group. Mice were housed in their original home cages for the entire training and study period. These cages (width: 7.25 inch, length: 11.5 inch, height: 5 inch; # RC71U-UD; Alternative Design) were made of polysulfone, with a gridded metal top holding a water bottle and pellet diets. A metal board was vertically inserted into the food holder to separate chow and HFD pellets.
Binge-like eating behavior in OVXV and OVXE mice. Female littermates were anesthetized with isoflurane. As previously described (42, 43), bilateral OVX was performed, followed by s.c. implantations of a pellet containing 17β-estradiol (0.5 μg/d for 60 days, OVXE) or containing vehicle (OVXV). These pellets were purchased from Innovative Research of America. After a 7-day recovery, mice were subjected to the intermittent or continuous (as control) exposure to HFD for 1 week in order to induce binge-like eating behavior. Two weeks after the surgery, binge-like eating behavior was assessed as detailed above. Body weight and food intake were monitored every other day during the entire study period. Body composition was determined using quantitative magnetic resonance on the same day when binge-like behavior was assessed. After assessment of binge-like eating behavior, mice were deeply anesthetized with isoflurane, and blood was collected through cardiac aspiration. Plasma was obtained by centrifugation, and plasma orexin A was measured with a mouse orexin A ELISA kit (MBS815052; MyBioSource).
Effects of GLP-1–estrogen on binge-like eating behavior in OVX female mice. First, to determine whether stable GLP-1–estrogen delivers bioactive estrogens into mouse DRN, we examined effects of GLP-1–estrogen on expression of Trim25 (a known estrogen target) in the DRN. To this end, female C57BL/6 mice (12 weeks of age) received OVX surgery as described above. After a 7-day recovery, these mice received s.c. injections of GLP-1 (4 μg/kg) or GLP-1–estrogen (4 μg/kg). Two hours after injections, mice were sacrificed and the DRN was quickly microdissected and stored at –80ÚC. |
upcoming The Zookeeper’s Wife, has been praised for its gender-inclusive set by its star, Jessica Chastain. Disney previously worked with Caro, a New Zealand native, on the 2015 cross-country drama McFarland, USA, for which she lived in central California for nearly a year to immerse herself in the Mexican-American community there.
Disney also considered other women for its woman-warrior project, including Wonder Woman’s Patty Jenkins and Michelle MacLaren (Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones). Caro’s hiring likely takes her out of the running for Captain Marvel, the studio’s first female-fronted superhero movie. THR reported last August that she was on the short list of directors for that film, along with Homeland’s Lesli Linka Glatter and Lorene Scafaria, who helmed 2012’s Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.
Disney and producers Chris Bender, Jason Reed and Jake Weiner are taking pains to assure fans that Mulan will be culturally authentic. The studio had initially sought an Asian director for the project, meeting with Ang Lee (who passed, citing scheduling) and Rogue One star Jiang Wen, a hit director in his native China. Sony, which is developing a rival live-action film about the Chinese legend, also hoped to put an Asian director at the helm, but ultimately hired television veteran Alex Graves.
In addition to extensive conversations with Chinese cultural consultants and working closely with Disney’s own China-based team, the studio is bringing on Hong Kong-based super-producer Bill Kong as executive producer. Kong produced the most successful Chinese films to cross over — Hero, House of Flying Daggers and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for which he received an Oscar nomination — as well as many of China’s biggest hits, including Monster Hunt, Wolf Totem and Journey to the West.
Last fall, controversy briefly arose when reports surfaced that the original spec that Disney purchased, written by Lauren Hynek and Elizabeth Martin, featured non-Chinese characters, including a white male lead. Disney quickly responded that Mulan and all primary characters in its movie, which has been rewritten by Jurassic World’s Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, will remain Chinese. The studio is focusing its casting search in mainland China for the main roles, including the legendary woman warrior herself.
Caro is repped by UTA, Artists House and Lichter Grossman.
Rebecca Ford and Borys Kit contributed to this story.Losing a major client is never easy, but it’s even harder when it happens due to something that’s out of your control.
It’s not that we don’t trust you, your client says one day over the phone. We just don’t trust your government.
That may sound familiar to anyone who followed Huawei’s troubles in the U.S. But this isn’t the case of a Chinese company losing American business. Clients in Europe, Asia and elsewhere are saying “no thank you” to American-made products for fear that they have flaws that government and other hackers can infiltrate, said Brough Turner, founder and chief technology office of netBlazr, a broadband company based in Watertown, Mass.
“It’s hard enough out there,” said Turner. He said that revelations that the National Security Agency can hack into the hardware of Cisco — and the resulting tumble the company saw in overseas demand — have been magnified for smaller companies. And these startups often don’t have the cushion of cash that major companies do to weather this storm, he said.
Hoping that lawmakers could be swayed by their financial concerns, Turner and executives from ThoughtWorks and Reddit hit the Hill this week to lobby lawmakers to support the USA FREEDOM Act, which would take steps to curb government surveillance programs and give companies more say about what kind of surveillance their products are used for.
The bill isn’t perfect but does move in the right direction, said Daniel Goodwin, chief financial officer of Thoughtworks, the software firm where Internet activist Aaron Swartz worked at the time of his death last year. The bill moves to end bulk collection of data under section 215 of the Patriot Act and to install a special citizen’s advocate in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The bill would allow companies to report an estimate of how many FISA letters they receive, how many orders they comply with and how many accounts or users are affected by those requests.
Executives at major tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple have already said they want those changes. Companies that offer cloud services have also been vocal about the hit they’ve taken — 10 percent of foreign companies cancelled projects with U.S. providers as of July, according to the Cloud Security Alliance. But with so much focus on startups as an engine for the U.S. economy, these executives wanted to let lawmakers know how difficult the landscape has become.
“There’s a general erosion of slide of public trust; it affects all U.S. companies,” said Erik Martin, general manager at Reddit.
“Any Internet business is a global business,” said Matthew Simons, director of social and economic justice at ThoughtWorks. “Saying that surveillance isn’t in the U.S. doesn’t really help us. In fact, it makes some of our overseas clients feel insulted,” he said.
And while Turner, Goodwin, Martin and Simons all feel strongly that the current programs violate civil liberties, they said that their more business-focused approach has gotten them a more receptive response on the Hill. On Monday and Tuesday, the men met with staffers from eight offices on both sides of the aisle and in both houses of Congress.
In most cases, they said, lawmakers were open to their concerns, but also said that they wanted to hear what President Obama has to say on Friday, when he is slated to give a speech on NSA reform.
The surveillance, Simons noted, has shattered what little dialogue there had been between the intelligence and hacker communities. And that’s a problem the tech industry will have to deal with for a long time, Goodwin added.
“When companies can’t recruit top tech people, that makes us less secure,” he said.This morning I checked redditgifts to see if my giftee had responded to my message yet, and I was so surprised to see that my Santa had already shipped my gift! I went into this knowing that there was a possibility I wouldn't even receive anything myself, and I even almost expected to get shafted. I joined because of how much I love getting someone that perfect gift, and stalking a stranger to do that seemed like so much fun.
The past couple years have been rough and I couldn't even afford to get family gifts. It really put a damper on the holiday season not being able to give back and I felt a lot of guilt over it. Last Christmas, people of Reddit are the ones who provided gifts for my child. This year I finally landed a job in my field and I am financially able to partake on the giving side of Christmas. I was so caught up in the excitement of finding out who my match was, researching his interests, and making purchases that I didn't even think about someone doing the same for me!
My Santa was so thoughtful and took the time to look at what I wrote in my profile and I think even may have looked at my Pinterest. One of the great things about my new job is that I can also afford to get a place of my own for myself and my son. I mentioned my big move that is happening after Christmas, and they bought some really nice cutting boards I can use for my kitchen. This would have been enough, but I also received cute labels that I can use for a diy project I have in mind.
So after not expecting anything at all, I get not one or two gifts, but also a third gift! I joked in my profile that I would like to get into photography, but have settled as an iPhone mommarazi. My Santa took that comment and went with it, getting me a lens for my phone! I can't wait to play with it and see what it can do!
To my Santa: thank you, thank you, thank you! I am so in awe that someone took the time and made the effort to get me such a nice gift. I hope you have a wonderful holiday and that you get the same treatment from your Santa!Canberra politics often seems beyond satire. So it’s perhaps not surprising that Working Dog’s TV show Utopia has more than once foreshadowed reality in its hilarious depictions of life in a federal authority.
Rob Sitch, Utopia’s co-writer and star, says he’s had no need to draw on covert leaks and insights from bureaucrats for material. “90+% of what we find is sitting in front of everybody. It’s on the front pages.” And he’s had plenty of feedback from insiders to confirm the program hits the spot.
Sitch, who relishes political satire, originally studied medicine before becoming one of Australia’s best-loved creatives and performers. Asked about his jump from doctoring to the world of entertainment, he tells The Conversation it was “a hobby that got out of hand”.
Twenty years on from directing the iconic film The Castle, Sitch bemoans the trend in Hollywood that has seen it become too reactive to demographics and economics. He says the government should consider a boost for our own film industry. “Something gets added to the culture when an Australian film pops out.”Armenian volunteers receive uniforms and weapons at a military commissariat to join the self-defense army of Nagorno-Karabakh in Yerevan, Armenia, on April 3. Now Armenia and Russia are working to establish of a single air defense system in the Caucasus region. Photo by Hayk Baghdasaryan/EPA/Photolure
The Armenian parliament has ratified an agreement between Moscow and Yerevan on the establishment of a single air defense system in the Caucasus region. On Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin asked the Russian State Duma to also approve the agreement, which is aimed at improving security along Russia's southern border.
The agreement is concluded for a period of five years with the option to extend it for another five years.
Experts and military analysts regard the agreement as beneficial to both parties, particularly because it allows increased monitoring of Turkey.
Benefits to Armenia
"Under this agreement, we shall be able, when carrying our regional air defense tasks, to use Russian fourth-generation multi-role jet fighters, S-300 systems, their anti-missile and radar capabilities for aerial reconnaissance," Armenian Defense Minister Seyran Ohanyan told the country's public television station Armenia 1.
Armenia already hosts Russia'a 102nd Military Base in Gyumri. The base is the home of the 988th Surface-to-Air Missile Regiment, which is equipped with an S-300V missile system as well as the relevant aircraft detection, tracking and missile guidance radars. Tank, motor-rifle and artillery units are also based there.
There are three MiG-29 squadrons deployed in the region, which if necessary can intercept enemy aircraft and, together with surface-to-air missile units, provide Armenia with effective air defense.
The Russian units will support Yerevan's own substantial air defense capabilities, which include Soviet-made SAM systems such as the S-125 Neva with a range of up to 12 miles, the Krug with a range of 27 miles, the newer and more modern S-300PS surface-to-air missile systems with a range of 93 miles and the short-range missile systems Osa-AKM, Shilka, Strela-10 and Igla.
Once joined with the Russian air defense system, the Armenian Air Defense Troops will have access to all the information available to Russian Southern Military District units and the country's air and missile defense troops.
However, the air defense above Nagorno-Karabakh will remain the remit of the Armenian Defense Ministry; Russian air defense systems will not be involved there.
Benefits for Russia
"Russia and Armenia do not have common airspace, they are separated by Georgia. The joining together of their air defense systems will allow Moscow to create an additional 'air defense umbrella' beyond its borders," said former deputy air defense commander of the Russian Ground Troops, Ret. Lt. Gen Alexander Luzan.
He added that the new agreement will be an additional check on Turkey, which is both the strongest military power in the region and has the backing of NATO. "We know from experience what Ankara may do even without Brussels' approval or contrary to its wishes. Whereas, a joint Russian-Armenian air defense system will become a serious warning to it," Luzan said, noting that the 102nd Military Base had already acted as a deterrent to Turkish moves in the region.
Armenia is also on the frontline of air and missile defense for the Collective Security Treaty Organization. The new Armenia-Russia agreement will act in cooperation with other agreements already in place between CSTO countries, including a joint air defense system of the Western region (Belarus-Russia) and a joint air defense system of the Central Asian region (Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia).
"The establishment of a joint CSTO air defense system is a strategically important decision. Furthermore, Russia, Armenia, Belarus and other CSTO countries are creating a single radar field, which should ensure air defense against threats posed by NATO member states, and Turkey in particular," said Ret. Lt. Gen Norat Ter-Grigoryants, a former deputy chief of staff of the USSR Ground Troops and one of the founders of the Armenian Armed Forces.
Viktor Litovkin is a military observer for the TASS news agency. This article originally appeared at Russia Beyond the Headlines.PUERTO PRINCESA CITY, Palawan, Philippines—The Philippine Navy announced on Friday it will send an aircraft to Ayungin Shoal in the disputed Spratlys before Christmas to air-drop gifts and donations pooled by volunteer groups for soldiers stationed on a shipwreck to guard territory claimed by the Philippines.
The air drop has so far been the main method used by the Philippine military in Palawan to resupply the small contingent of soldiers deployed in Ayungin Shoal, which is also being claimed by China and several other countries.
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Naval officials said because there is no more scheduled supply run to the Kalayaan Island Group in December, they would organize the air drop operation solely to bring the gifts to the soldiers.
“We don’t often use this method of resupply anymore because it poses a greater risk both to the airmen and the people who are the recipients, but we want to value the efforts of these groups,” said naval pilot Lt. Herbert Estabillo.
The gift packages were donated by former cadets and solicited from various social networking sites, primarily Facebook. The donations include food, personal sanitation kits, batteries, flashlights, reading materials and personal letters.
“These packages will be sent through air drop by pilots and crew of the Naval Air Group, Philippine Navy,” Estabillo added.
The donations include items raised by the Cadet Alumni Organization of the UP Military Science and Tactics Department and two Facebook groups, #pagasaKIG and #Timawa Donation Group.
“Through this kind of initiative the three organizations hope to encourage other private organizations to support Philippine soldiers detailed at the KIG,” Estabillo said.
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MOST READ0:33 Intro. [Recording date: February 25, 2015.] Russ: Our topic today is whether we should have a monetary constitution, a set of rules governing government's role in supplying money, along with what those rules might be. We're recording this episode in front of a live audience at the Cato Institute and in honor of a new book that Larry has co-edited with Viktor J. Vanberg, Ekkehard A. Köhler, Renewing the Search for a Monetary Constitution. Larry, welcome back to EconTalk. Guest: Thanks, Russ. Good to be here. Russ: Now, this book is the result of a symposium organized by Liberty Fund in honor of a book written 50 years ago, In Search of a Monetary Constitution, which was edited by Leland Yeager. So a lot of what we are going to be talking about today is what we've learned in the last 50 years about money and government's role in money. But I want to start with the basics. What do you mean by a'monetary constitution'? Guest: Well, that's one of the issues we debate in the volume. But you can think of a monetary constitution as a set of rules that govern the creation of money. In particular by the government. So, you can either think of it as a set of prescriptions that say what the government may not do to interfere with the monetary system. Or you can think of it as empowering the government. And then of course you can combine the two: the government is empowered to do such and such but not go beyond that. So, there are provisions about money in the U.S. Constitution. So, that's one of the topics we discuss in the book. But there continues to be debate about what they mean. And most of our discussion in the volume is about whether they are adequate: whether we've ended up with the kind of monetary system that the Framers wanted or that we should want. And we're not limited to the United States. Many of the contributors are from Europe, so we discuss the Constitution of the European Central Bank as well. Russ: Well, you mention that the Constitution deals with money. It deals with other things, too, by the way. Most of which we banish and neglect. So it wouldn't be unusual that there'd be something similar with money. But let me start with a basic question which a lot of economists in seeing such a volume would ask--not me, but others would: What would we want a monetary constitution for? The Fed's doing a great job. Saved us from the Great Recession. We had the Great Moderation, this wonderful period of success that was stewarded by these geniuses as the great steering wheel of the ship of the economy. Guest: Well, I think we found out in the financial crisis that the Great Moderation was hollower than we realized at the time. In a way, the timing of this volume is similar to the timing of the 1962 volume in that, it's true it's being published in a period of low inflation. Inflation has been between 1 and 2% in the last few years; and in the early 1960s it was between 1 and 2%. But as we've seen in the intervening 50 years, it didn't stay there. And we had all kinds of monetary troubles in the last 50 years. And the idea that the Fed had finally figured it out and we don't need to tell them what to do any more because they've got it completely figured out, I think was revealed to be much too optimistic. Russ: I'm sympathetic to that view but let's--I want to push back a little bit. So, clearly the period from 1962-1982 was not so good, toward the last part, very high inflation-- Guest: Double-digit inflation. Russ: Double-digit nominal interest rates as a result. Then there came this alleged golden era where they "figured it out". And couldn't you argue that, okay, things went bad in 2007-2008, but that wasn't the Fed's fault. That was the fault of an aggressive housing policy, exuberant animal spirits. And the Fed actually intervened and did a great job once they were called on to save things? Unlike the Great Depression, say, where Milton Friedman, Anna Schwartz, others have said that they failed their mission at that time. But now, Ben Bernanke, being a student of Milton, he knew what to do and look how well it turned out. Broad brush enough for you? Guest: Yeah, well, where do I begin? Russ: We've got an hour. Guest: Okay. Well, I think the Fed did a little better than it did in the early 1930s, in the sense that we didn't have so drastic a collapse in the economy. Of course, a lot of things have changed that make the economy better diversified. But, we did have the sort of careening from 4.5% inflation down to -2% inflation and then back up. And then of course we had all the financial troubles. It's true that housing policy had a lot to do--has a lot to do--with explaining why it was a housing bubble and not some other kind of bubble. But if you see people behaving exuberantly, and not just a few people but you see that it's widespread, you have to ask yourself: What's the common signal to which they are referring? To which they are reacting? If you see everybody at the party beginning to act a little crazy, you have to ask: Who spiked the punch bowl? And my view is that the Fed had a lot to do with it. They made the funds available that went into the housing investment, well, the housing purchases, driving up the prices of houses, making mortgages cheaper than they otherwise would have been, making mortgages available in greater quantity to people who were less creditworthy than in previous experience. So, I think it's the interaction of the bad housing policy and the bad monetary policy that spiked the punch bowl, that made this overinvestment boom in housing possible. If you just look at the price level, you wouldn't have seen anything going on. But I think that's part of the problem with the way that the Fed has been running policy. They take moderate inflation as a license to do whatever they like with interest rates and with financial policy. Russ: So I also add to the mix the bailing out of creditors in the preceding decades to this, which I think emboldened the drinkers at the punch bowl to spend a lot of other people's money and in irresponsible and imprudent ways. But let's put that to the side for the moment. Let's just look at the last 5 years. So, let's be agnostic on whether the Fed is the cause of the drop in output, the high unemployment rate that we dealt with. What kind of marks do you give the Fed for its behavior in the last 6 years when the economy slowly recovered, and many would say--again, I'm not one of them, but many economists would give them very high marks for averting a crisis, injecting liquidity into the system and making sure that the economy recovered? Do you agree with that? Guest: I actually have more complaints about the Fed's credit policies than I do about its monetary policies in the last few years. So, they've kept monetary policy on a kind of even keel. I think interest rates probably should be higher. I think they are continuing to keep us in this ultra-low interest-rate regime much longer than is justified. And that may come back to bite us. Russ: I think that's an excellent point. I think one view is, it's too early to tell. Guest: Yeah. Russ: It's like when they said we'd get a lot of our money back from the bailout of the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) and I'm thinking, 'Yeah, what about the long-run cost that you've ignored?' But, go ahead. Guest: Yeah. So, the real problem in the last few years, and during the financial crisis and thereafter has been the sort of lack of constraint, a lack of limitation on the Fed to the rule of law. I mean, they've sort of been making stuff up as they go along, bailing people out, continuing that kind of policy. And creating a very uncertain environment as to who is going to be saved and who isn't. And whether we can count on the market--we can no longer count on the market to discipline banks that pursue imprudent policies. Especially the systematically important banks. Russ: Yeah. I think that's a disastrous thing for democracy. And capitalism.
9:45 Russ: Let's put the Fed aside now and let's look at some alternatives that are discussed in the book. Let's start with a broad question: What's special about money? And you raised this question in your introduction to the book, a very nice essay that explores many of the issues we're talking about today. And I recommend it to our readers, as well as the rest of the volume. But you start off with a very basic question, which is: What's the government--I mean, the government's really involved with money. Guest: Has been for a long time. Russ: Has been for a long time. We understand why sovereigns like sovereigns. They're into that. So, what's the theoretical case, if any, for why government should be involved in the supply of money? Guest: It's actually hard to pin down what is the case, because most economists who even see this as a question--why does government provide money?--tend to sort of zip by it in a couple of paragraphs. Russ: Like, why is the sky blue? It's just a reality; we move on. Guest: Well, so it's obviously: everybody uses the same money, therefore it's something the government has to provide. But if you sort of dig down into the technical question of whether money has the characteristics of a public good--the characteristics of being my consumption of it doesn't diminish your consumption of it, like when I tune in the radio it doesn't diminish the amount of radio you can tune it--that doesn't apply to money. The money in my pocket is not in your pocket. Russ: You're using the 'public good' here as a technical term that economists use for special--it doesn't mean just 'a good thing.' Guest: No. It doesn't mean 'a good thing for the public.' It means a good that the market has trouble providing because you can't sort out who is getting the benefits in what degree, and you can't exclude people from enjoying it even if they don't pay. So, the market does well with goods where you can make the user pay, otherwise you don't get it. And then you have an incentive to supply it because you get paid for supplying it. So the claim is that money is different from that. But it's hard to see it. I mean, as I said, the money in my pocket is not in yours. So banking has been private for a long time. Russ: It could be, though. Guest: Well. Before that, coins. Same story. The coins in my pocket are not in your pocket. If you ask, Why did government get onto this track of monopolizing the production of money, you have to go back to the early monarchs and kings who monopolized the mints. But it wasn't always so. As far as we know, the earliest mints were private merchants who were sort of certifying the weight and the purity of the pieces of metal they were trading with. And if you ask, why would government take that business over--and we've got lots of historical examples of private mints, even in the 19th century before they were outlawed. In the California Gold Rush there were a dozen private mints. Why would government take that over? It's like asking why does government run buses? There are sort of two possible explanations. One is there is a market failure to produce efficiently the good in question. And the other is that it's somehow in the government's interest, most likely there's a fiscal motive. And if you look into the question of whether governments have improved the quality of coins when they've been in charge of issuing silver and gold coins, the answer is, 'No.' They've notoriously debased the coins. Whereas the private mints actually had a pretty good track record. Because their business depended on the coins being regarded as reliable. Whereas if you have a monopoly and you have a law that says people have to bring their silver to you for coinage and are not allowed to take it anywhere else, you can debase it without losing all your customers. So, just on the evidence it seems like the fiscal motive was at work, and-- Russ: 'Fiscal motive' makes it sound pretty high falutin'. Guest: Phrasing relatively[?]. Yeah. Russ: It means exploiting the opportunity to control the currency to make more profit than they otherwise would. Guest: Make a profit. That's right. And in the Middle Ages and during the wartimes sometimes two-thirds of the sovereign's revenue came from the Mint. So, if you want to be less high-falutin', they asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, and he said, 'That's where the money is.' Russ: Yeah. Guest: Why do you control the Mint? Because that's where you can make a lot of money doing that. You can call in the old coins, take half the silver out, issue new coins, and now you've got half the money supply; replace everybody's coin with half as much silver. Now you've got half the silver to spend. If you move on to more modern money, it was banks that introduced checking accounts, that introduced paper money in the form of bank notes that were redeemable for gold or silver. And governments eventually monopolized the issue of paper currency. They haven't monopolized, at least in the United States, the issue of checking accounts. In some developing countries the only checking account you can get is in a government-owned bank. So--and they use that as a source of revenue. Russ: I have to mention a couple of things. I find it amusing when people say, 'Well, there is private issuing of money--they just exploited and make a profit.' Of course, the government has done that for centuries. Guest: Yeah. Russ: You might like to think it was confined to monarchs. But of course in democracies, that tendency has apparently been a problem as well.
15:24 Russ: We've done better recently relative to the historical record. And we'll come back to that. I just want to make one other point about public goods, though, because I think it's so important: this temptation to say, 'Well, we know from theory that x can't exist.' Famous example is: Lighthouses can't be provided because it's a public good. And Ronald Coase pointed out that communities of sailors got together and found a way to provide a lighthouse anyway. And I remember, oh, maybe 20 years ago, papers being written that said we had to have government control of taxis because it would be inefficient; too many cabs would come in; all the cab drivers would be driven out of the market; they wouldn't make enough to stay in business. Yet somehow Uber, Lyft, and others are thriving. Not in the way that the theorists imagined, of course. But in a different way. That we weren't as economists clever enough to imagine. So, I think we should always be careful when we say, 'Government has to do x'. Having said that, James Buchanan argues that it's efficient for government to provide money. So, what is his argument and what are your thoughts on that? Guest: I want to react to something you said a minute ago, which is, when private people produce money they also exploit the profit opportunity. Well, but as long as they are under competition, it's not that they earn monopoly profits. It's that the public gets a better product. So, Buchanan--I don't know if this is going to be one of his last publications. Of course, he died shortly after our conference. Well, 9 months after our conference. This may be one of his last papers. Buchanan makes the case the monetary constitution should empower the government to produce money, and direct it to stabilize the purchasing power of money. So when he says 'inefficient' what he seems to mean is, you're not going to get the kind of money you want unless you write down the set of rules saying this is the kind of money we want, and direct the Central Bank to produce money that has that characteristic. So, he draws a distinction between money and other goods--which we were talking about a minute ago--and says, money is different in that, with other goods we just provide a legal framework and let the market sort out what the qualities of goods are going to be and who produces them and what the prices are. But in the case of money, we want to specify the characteristics in terms of the behavior, the purchasing power of money, because the most important thing is predictability. And predictability means either 0 inflation or an easily predictable rate of inflation. I think he's kind of jumping the gun, here. There are theoretical arguments that the public may prefer money that actually pays a positive rate of return. Milton Friedman's famous Optimum Quantity of Money argument is that if you had the government acting and issuing un-backed paper money, if you had it acting like a competitive firm, they would have to pay a competitive rate or return on this IOU they are issuing. So, it should appreciate. Or, in terms of the price level, the price level should be gradually falling. That's sort of looking at it from the point of view of a monetary consumer. So, it depends on what kind of money consumers want. And I think Buchanan's preference makes sense but it may not be everybody's preference. And we shouldn't short-circuit the market process of discovering exactly what kind of features people want in their money. Given a choice between paper money that's manipulated in a certain way or that is supposed to be manipulated in a certain way, and a commodity money, people may prefer a commodity money even though gold does not have a perfectly constant purchasing power. Under the classical gold standard, there were years of +2% inflation and years of -2% inflation. Although on average it had pretty close to a 0% rate of inflation.
19:42 Russ: So, let me bring it back to his constitutional idea. You could argue--it would be foolish, but you could argue--wouldn't it be better if Americans only had one religion? We could all be together, in one big community. And yet we've decided, Constitutionally, that that's a bad thing for the government to try to create. And so, in that case it's very clear that there's a bunch of people who want no religion. There's a bunch of people who want a religion other than what the central religion would be. So, going back to your version of Buchanan's argument: Okay, maybe Buchanan's wrong; maybe people want lots of money--different kinds of money. But I want to think about the constitutional issue in a slightly different way. Which is, we basically say to the government with respect to religion, 'Hands off. Don't get involved.' What's the argument for that in the monetary constitution? What's the monetary analogy? We see its virtues with respect to the press, with religion. One of the challenges I think you have of convincing people I think who are skeptical about the virtues of a hands-off policy, is that, 'Well, we've never had that, and that scares me. So I think I'll stick with the devil I'm used to.' But make the case for why that particular proscribed role for a constitution would be a good idea. Guest: So, I don't want to make the argument that, if we left it to the market everybody could have their own kind of money. Well, they could, but everybody would have their own kind of money and you'd have, you know, hundreds of different competing monetary standards in the same economy. I don't expect that. All the historical evidence says there are reasons of convenience to converge on a common monetary standard. But the question is: Which monetary standard should it be? What that would mean for a monetary constitution, a sort of hands-off policy, would be, have the usual rule-of-law, property rights, contract enforcement--have those kind of things apply to monetary contracts; have the ordinary rules of business law apply to banks; but don't have special discriminatory laws that hamper banks or that favor certain banks. You know, for a long time we weakened the U.S. banking system by restricting banks, say, from branching across state lines. In recent years we've switched-- Russ: We've fixed that. [?] of them, really. Guest: We've switched to weakening the banking system by giving them privileges. Russ: Yeah. Guest: So that they have less incentive to behave prudently. So, if the government had never interfered--and I have evidence on this in the chapter where I contributed to the volume because my chapter is on the history of free banking and the theory of free banking--we can look at systems that had the most minimal government intervention. There's no case of zero. But the systems where the intervention was the least were the most stable. And had the most success. Had the most innovation in banking. Had the most competition, of course, in banking. Provided the best services at the best prices to their customers. Russ: Why did they end, if they were so good? Guest: I think largely for fiscal reasons. So, the system I've written the most about is in Scotland, roughly from 1720-1845. But in 1845, the British government, because Scotland was part of the United Kingdom now, decided to sort of amalgamate all the banking rules between the rest of the United Kingdom and Scotland, which up till then had had a sort of separate set of banking rules. Basically for the benefit of the Bank of England, which was the monopolist in London, that was lending money to the British government. So, the wider the circulation of Bank of England Notes, the more it can lend to the government. And there seems to have been some concern about Scotland being a kind of embarrassing example of how the government doesn't need to intervene in the banking system. But anyway, if you look at that case, if you look at other cases, I think the pattern is pretty clear that the least restricted systems are the ones that performed best from the point of view of the average user of money. And those were systems that were on gold or silver standards. And there doesn't seem to have been any great dissatisfaction with that. There were proposals by some economists to try to have a system that was even more stable in purchasing power. But in retrospect, the variations in the purchasing power of the dollar under the classical gold standard were trivial compared to what it's been under the post-gold-standard period, the fiat dollar standard. And Buchanan talks about predictability as an important feature of money; and I agree more predictability is desirable. But if you look at the--one practical fall-out from the shift to a fiat dollar is that the predictability of the purchasing power of the dollar has gone down. It's true that in the last few years, inflation has been fairly low and steady. But nobody can count on that continuing. And so nobody's willing to buy 50-year bonds under today's monetary standard, the way they were under the gold standard, because they can't predict what the dollar is going to be worth 20, 30, 50 years from now. Russ: Explain what 'fiat money' is. Guest: So, fiat money is money that is not backed by gold or silver or any commodity. It's just issued by the decree--'fiat' is a technical term meaning a decree--by the decree of the government. So the government says, |
kind of revolutionary fervor and apply it toward our own struggles, we would undoubtedly be in a better place.
Defense Distributed is another great example of direct action that should be an inspiration. Their creation of tools like The Liberator, Ghost Gunner, and Dark Wallet have changed the game for us not only in the abstract but also quite literally in the real world. They are actively expanding freedom and shaping the discourse surrounding topics of the firearm, privacy, and free speech.
Peaceful Streets Project and other cop-watch groups like them are on the front lines in our struggle to grow awareness of police brutality. They hold criminal cops accountable by documenting their interactions with the public and encourage people to form community defense to lesson their dependency on the state. Groups like these are exciting and make a difference in radically overt ways.
There are also other organizations that do great work and are less risky. Groups like Food Not Bombs regularly provide free food for underprivileged people and are a great example of solving social ills through grassroots efforts. The Food is Free Project, an organization with similar goals, has no official political affiliation but is nonetheless succeeding abundantly in their efforts to provide food and build community by erecting gardens in peoples front lawns, while promoting a sharing culture in neighborhoods across Texas.
Work with existing groups, create your own, or work alone. Fortunately for us, there is no one size fits all when it comes to creating another world from the ground up. In addition to the methods used by the organizations mentioned previously, I’ve created an incomplete list of practical tactics outside of the parliamentary world that I see as worthy of consideration. Note that not all of these tactics are equal. They should be debated and other ideas should be added:
* Practicing counter-economics, self-sufficiency, and encrypting communication
* Using Bitcoin, experimenting in gift, barter, and other enterprises like LETS
* Developing and distributing disruptive technology, including sustainable online dark markets and hacking projects
* Constructing intentional communities, forming cadres, affinity groups, or underground societies of trusted friends and family
* Forming grassroots, non-state unionization under corporate hegemony
* Publishing subversive literature anonymously
* Organizing prison outreach and strikes
* Creating autonomous alternatives for schools, healthcare, arbitration, emergency services, and defense
We do not need faith in mass philosophical conversion in order to be successful. We need only to create incentives for people to join our efforts. Non-radicals will likely adopt different ways of living, despite its political implications, if it shows to be beneficial or superior to what the state and corporate capitalism offers them. Education is important in all phases of the revolution and the most useful type of education will happen through the building of alternatives. The possibilities are abundant and a revolution requires action – so pick your poison and organize. How much do we want anarchy, and what are we willing to do to make it happen?Previous proposals have relied on leaseholders accepting long construction periods when they could not ply their trade. For good reason, this has been unacceptable. However, the plan announced last week for a new $250 million enterprise a few hundred metres along the shoreline means the existing market can remain in business until the new one opens. The new site, the details of which are yet to emerge, promises to be twice the size, with levels under the waterline and access over Bridge Road to Wentworth Park. If the reality lives up to the promise, it will be a masterstroke by Premier Mike Baird and Planning Minister Rob Stokes. However, as residents of this city know, state governments have a habit of failing to deliver on planning matters. We are hopeful, but remain sceptical.
That said, it seems that NSW planning bureaucracies are adopting an agility in their approach that has been missing until now. The Herald welcomes this. The first plans for the new International Convention Centre at Darling Harbour were criticised by stakeholders. They said it lacked adequate space for it to be a truly world-class destination. The then premier Barry O'Farrell engaged with those stakeholders and plans were improved. Critics, including the chief executive of the Exhibition and Event Association of Australasia, Joyce DiMascio, were heard and they welcomed a government that displayed a willingness to engage. The result was an improved outcome for industry and the community. Such an approach to planning stands in stark contrast to some undertaken by previous state governments, Labor and Coalition. The debacles of the Lane Cove and Cross City tunnel projects were in part caused by inflexible approaches to involving the private sector in building infrastructure.
The Herald hopes the Baird government has learnt from past mistakes and is applying, dare we say it, innovative thinking to future planning conundrums. There is a very live example in the CBD. The lord mayor, Clover Moore, has expressed dismay in the way the city light rail project is being delivered. While the Herald does not support the council's tactics in apparently threatening to withhold $47 million in funding if its concerns are not met, the council's message – delivered with the backing of key retailers – needs to be heard and practically addressed. While the Fish Market proposal seems an elegant solution, it is some orders of magnitude below the big planning challenge facing the government. That test will come with Parramatta Road, a 20-kilometre stretch of bitumen where planning dreams go to die. Last week, the Baird government released $31 billion development plans that aim to revitalise the much-maligned corridor. It is predicated on the assumption that 50,000 cars a day will be diverted from the city's clogged arterial road when the WestConnex project is completed.
While the Herald has long expressed qualified support for WestConnex, we are wary of predictions for its transformative powers for Parramatta Road. William Street was meant to become our city's Champs Elysee with the opening of the Cross City Tunnel. Last time we looked, it was still William Street. A study commissioned last year by the City of Sydney said that far from relieving Parramatta Road of its burden, WestConnex would result in traffic eventually increasing above current rates as motorists avoided high tolls and turned local streets into rat-runs. There are further road bumps to come. Prospective private sector partners are baulking at the modest requirement that 5 per cent of the 27,000 planned new homes should be affordable housing. However, the Baird government is looking to engage the private sector in a way that will allow investors to have realistic expectations. It is funding the M4 widening before seeking investment for the rest of WestConnex.
This will allow prospective partners to see what traffic rates will be, instead of investing on the basis of unrealistic projections, as happened with the Cross City Tunnel. By considering imaginative ways to solve problems, the Baird government has an opportunity to set Parramatta Road on the right course. Central to this is realising that no such plan can be "final". As our city grows, our planning approach will need to grow with it. We wish Mr Baird all the best in this endeavour. His government will need all its newly found planning agility to execute these most challenging of plans.As incomes fall and retail prices rise, Greeks have found an ingenious way to pay three times less than they usually would for potatoes.
The craze, which some are already starting to call the “Potato Revolution,” began in the northern town of Katerini two weeks ago. A group of local activists set up a website to allow people to order potatoes directly from local farmers, and then pick them up in a parking lot on the weekends. Their project was an instant hit. In the past two weeks, they’ve already sold 100 tons of potatoes, and inspired agricultural students in Thessaloniki to launch a similar program. Dozens more cities across Greece are planning to follow suit.
Since the farmers sell the potatoes for a higher price than they would be able to sell them to distributors – but for less than what supermarkets charge customers – both the farmers and their customers win.
Every little bit helps for crisis-hit Greeks. Austerity measures have led to pensions and salaries being repeatedly slashed, as well as to a steep rise in unemployment – one in five Greeks are now jobless. On top of this, the government has raised taxes in a bid to curb its debt.
“We thought, why not cut out the middleman?”
Elias Tsolakidis is a member of the Pieria Volunteer Action Team, a group of volunteers who launched the potato project in Katerini.Saturday, 5 November
Lewis Hamilton has made his voice-acting debut with the release of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. His character, Hamilton, is an engineer aboard the Retribution, one of the United Nations Space Alliance's (UNSA) last remaining warships after a devastating attack.
Max Verstappen believes that the FIA - the sport's governing body - should use the off-season to review their rules and regulations after what he described as "double standards" in Mexico. The Red Bull driver was penalised for cutting a corner, but winner Hamilton was not punished for a similar offence.(Grand Prix Times)
Reigning drivers' champion Hamilton has said that his own Formula One history - where he has won and lost a championship at the last race - has taught him not to give up on the 2016 title.(Eurosport)
Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone has told German media that claims he is about to be replaced by Ross Brawn are 'utter nonsense'. (Autoweek)
McLaren driver Fernando Alonso has named Red Bull's Daniel Ricciardo as F1's best current driver. (F1 Today)
Valtteri Bottas is certain he has made the right decision to stay for a fifth season at Williams in 2017, despite being linked with a move to Renault. (ESPN).
Friday, 4 November
Sir Frank Williams, seen here with Bernie Ecclestone at the 1981 Austrian GP, has been involved in F1 for more than 40 years
Formula 1 team boss Sir Frank Williams has left hospital and is "pretty much" back to his old self after contracting pneumonia, according to his daughter and deputy team principal Claire. (Autosport)
Lance Stroll's arrival in F1 with Williams will be a big boost for his home Canadian Grand Prix. Organisers are close to a new deal to keep the Montreal race on the calendar, promoter Francois Dumontier said on Thursday. (Reuters)
Toro Rosso's Carlos Sainz has called for Formula 1 to eliminate the "lottery" surrounding whether drivers get penalties during grands prix. (Autosport)
Former F1 driver Mark Webber says the fear of being involved in another major accident, like the one he suffered in sportscar racing at Interlagos in 2014, played a part in his decision to retire at the end of 2016. (Motorsport.com)
Brazilian driver Felipe Nasr hopes his home Formula One race next week will finally give Swiss-based Sauber something to cheer about. (Reuters)
McLaren's Fernando Alonso posted a picture on Instagram showing off the beautiful backdrop to his training ride.
Thursday, 3 November
Lewis Hamilton's victory in Mexico leaves him 19 points behind team-mate Nico Rosberg with two races to go
Lewis Hamilton celebrated his victory in the Mexican Grand Prix - a win which keeps his title hopes alive - by playing with a tiger during a break in Mexico City. He posted a video of the moment on Instagram.
Formula 1's commercial chief Bernie Ecclestone reckons Ross Brawn would be better suited to a role inside governing body the FIA, rather than with F1's new owner Liberty Media. (Eurosport)
Force India have admitted that Brazilian Felipe Nasr is on their shortlist of drivers to partner Sergio Perez in 2017. (Sportsmole)
A Renault official has played down suggestions that this week's launch of a special 'Kevin Magnussen edition' of the Renault Clio road car means he will partner Nico Hulkenberg in their driving team next year.(Grandprix.com)
The future of the Malaysia Grand Prix is set to be decided during a meeting later this month, with race officials said to be considering axing the 17-year-old race at Sepang. (F1 Today)
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner says there will be less left to the interpretation of F1 stewards if run-off areas were replaced by gravel traps. (F1i.com)
Williams is set to name its 2016 car the FW40 to mark 40 years of racing in F1. (ESPN)
Tuesday, 1 November
Ross Brawn (right) left Mercedes in 2013, having previously been with a number of teams including Ferrari
Ross Brawn has already signed a contract to succeed Bernie Ecclestone as Formula 1 chief. (Auto Bild Motorsport, via Grandprix.com)
Sebastian Vettel's expletive-laden radio rants betray his frustration at Ferrari's form, according to both his former Red Bull team-mate Daniel Ricciardo and predecessor Fernando Alonso. (Reuters)
Vettel's outburst against F1 race director Charlie Whiting during the Mexican Grand Prix is being looked into by governing body the FIA. (Motorsport.com)
Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff says Max Verstappen's collision with Nico Rosberg on the first lap in Mexico is "not what should happen" in F1. (Eurosport)
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner says there is an argument for a gravel trap in Mexico to stop drivers cutting corners. (Fox Sports)
Former F1 driver Juan Pablo Montoya has accepted Penske's offer of an Indianapolis 500-only deal for 2017, and will not race in IndyCar full-time. (Autosport)
Williams driver Valtteri Bottas took a chance to sample what Mexico had to offer away from the track...
Monday, 31 October
Ferrari team principal Maurizio Arrivabene was "surprised" by the penalty that cost Sebastian Vettel a podium place at Sunday's Mexico Grand Prix. (Autosport)
Vettel "cannot understand the fuss" over his expletive-laden message to F1 race director Charlie Whiting during his battle with Red Bull pair Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo in Mexico. (Autosport)
However, the four-time world champion went to apologise to Whiting after the race had finished. (Motorsport.com)
Mercedes came close to bringing Lewis Hamilton in from the lead of Sunday's race for an emergency pit-stop because of flat-spotted tyres. The Englishman went on to win the race. (Sky Sports)
McLaren driver Fernando Alonso believes his race was "compromised" by "strange" racing by compatriot Carlos Sainz in his Toro Rosso.(ESPN)
Lewis Hamilton is 19 points adrift of team-mate Nico Rosberg in the title race, with two races remaining
Subscribe to the BBC Sport newsletter to get our pick of news, features and video sent to your inbox.What are the top three cartoons ever created? Hopefully you answered in the following order: 1) Futurama 2) King of the Hill 3) Dragon Ball Z series. Aside from being one of the greatest cartoons ever created, what do these cartoons have in common?
Simple, these shows exhibit great examples of friendship. Whether it’s Krillin and Goku in Dragon Ball Z, Fry and Bender in Futurama, or Boomhauer, Bill, Hank, and Dale in King of the Hill, you can learn from these cartoon characters.
Today we will focus on King of the Hill and how we can build a rock solid friendship. What makes Hank, Dale, Boomhauer, and Bill a great example of friendship?
1) Well, they have been friends since elementary school and despite all the troubles they have experienced, they have overcame the problems, whether big or small, because their friendship was worth more to them. For example, during their years in high school, Boomhauer, an individual who loved his cars, had his car stolen. Boomhauer was led to believe that his 1965 Ford Mustang nicknamed “Ms. Sally” was stolen by some “Yankees” for twenty years. But little did Boomhauer know, it was his three friends that stole it and lost it during their high school years. The lost of Ms. Sally had devastated Boomhauer as a teen, but imagine how he felt after finding out it was his friends. Boomhauer could have ended their friendship, which his friends would understand, but he did not. After some brief time and some thinking on Boomhauer’s part, Boomhauer realized the importance of their friendship. It is never easy to let such big events in life go especially when it involves trust, but Boomhauer did it because he knew that materialistic things of this world are not greater than friendship. This example of overcoming adversity to keep a friendship is much harder to apply in real life, but it shows that it is possible. And plus, what you will realize is that years after the incident you would have developed a greater bond like Hank, Dale, Boomhauer, and Bill did. It is not a guarantee. It takes effort.
2) These friends all have issues, but they do not let their issues prevent them from treating each other with respect. For example, Hank was born with a narrow urethra, a flat butt, and has had various constipation issues. Boomhauer has a speech impediment. Bill has an eating disorder and is sometimes depressed. And lastly, Dale is a conspiracy theorist and is naive to his wife’s infidelities, despite its obvious nature. Some of these issues could be joking points for each friend, but they take their privacy and situations seriously and determine how to respond to each others’ difficulties based off what is in the best interest of their friends. Personally, I would have told my friend about his cheating spouse, but sometimes it’s best to stay out of situations that wouldn’t bring greater satisfaction to that particular individual. Hank, Boomhauer, Dale, and Bill are all very calculating in how they go about responding to their friends. We should do the same. Never let your friends personal issues prevent you from treating them with respect and sincerity. It’s a two way road when it comes to respect so limit the jokes when it comes to personal issues that are out of their hands.
3) Hank, Bill, Boomhauer, and Dale all make each other better with their unique traits. Instead of replicating what their friends do, they are themselves and help their friends improve. They love beer, “mmhmm,” but they make sure to be themselves. Their uniqueness make their friendship fun and exciting. Out of the group of individuals, Hank is the serious one, kind of reminds me of myself, and Hank demonstrates what hard work can do for you; hardwork can lead to loving “propane and propane accessories” and may allow you to purchase a midsized home, so your loving wife and child can live in and enjoy. Bill, despite his depression, is very caring. He just seems to love to please his friends. Do not over please your friends in real life some may take advantage, some will not and will return the favor. Boomhauer is a lady’s man and shows us that despite disabilities such as speech impediments, it’s how we treat people that really matters.
And Dale is always finding new ways to start and make conversations lively though jokes, and shows us that despite a child not being ours, we should treat them just like they are ours.
Yes, some cartoons seem a little too extreme and do not add any value to life but certain shows such as King of the Hill, Futurama, and Dragon Ball Z when analyzed have take aways that can benefit all of us.
AdvertisementsThe Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900–1917, by David W. Southern, Wheeling, W.V.: Harlan Davidson, 240 pages, $15.95
The Progressive movement swept America from roughly the early 1890s through the early 1920s, producing a broad popular consensus that government should be the primary agent of social change. To that end, legions of idealistic young crusaders, operating at the local, state, and federal levels, seized and wielded sweeping new powers and enacted a mountain of new legislation, including minimum wage and maximum hour laws, antitrust statutes, restrictions on the sale and consumption of alcohol, appropriations for hundreds of miles of roads and highways, assistance to new immigrants and the poor, women’s suffrage, and electoral reform, among much else.
Today many on the liberal left would like to revive that movement and its aura of social justice. Journalist Bill Moyers, speaking at a conference sponsored by the left-wing Campaign for America’s Future, described Progressivism as “one of the country’s great traditions.” Progressives, he told the crowd, “exalted and extended the original American Revolution. They spelled out new terms of partnership between the people and their rulers. And they kindled a flame that lit some of the most prosperous decades in modern history.”
Yet the Progressive Era was also a time of vicious, state-sponsored racism. In fact, from the standpoint of African-American history, the Progressive Era qualifies as arguably the single worst period since Emancipation. The wholesale disfranchisement of Southern black voters occurred during these years, as did the rise and triumph of Jim Crow. Furthermore, as the Westminster College historian David W. Southern notes in his recent book, The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900–1917, the very worst of it—disfranchisement, segregation, race baiting, lynching—“went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism.” Racism was the norm, not the exception, among the very crusaders romanticized by today’s activist left.
At the heart of Southern’s flawed but useful study is a deceptively simple question: How did reformers infused with lofty ideals embrace such abominable bigotry? His answer begins with the race-based pseudoscience that dominated educated opinion at the turn of the 20th century. “At college,” Southern notes, “budding progressives not only read exposés of capitalistic barons and attacks on laissez-faire economics by muckraking journalists, they also read racist tracts that drew on the latest anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology, eugenics, and medical science.”
Popular titles included Charles Carroll’s The Negro a Beast (1900) and R.W. Shufeldt’s The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization (1907). One bestseller, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), discussed the concept of “race suicide,” the theory that inferior races were out-breeding their betters. President Theodore Roosevelt was one of many Progressives captivated by this notion: He opposed voting rights for African-American men, which were guaranteed by the 15th amendment, on the grounds that the black race was still in its adolescence.
Such thinking, which emphasized “expert” opinion and advocated sweeping governmental power, fit perfectly within the Progressive worldview, which favored a large, active government that engaged in technocratic, paternalistic planning. As for reconciling white supremacy with egalitarian democracy, keep in mind that when a racist Progressive championed “the working man,” “the common man,” or “the people,” he typically prefixed the silent adjective white.
For a good illustration, consider Carter Glass of Virginia. Glass was a Progressive state and U.S. senator and, as chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, one of the major architects of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of his state’s massive effort to disfranchise black voters. “Discrimination! Why that is exactly what we propose,” he declared to one journalist. “To remove every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.”
Then there was political scientist John R. Commons, an adviser to the Progressive Wisconsin governor and senator Robert M. LaFollette and a member of Theodore Roosevelt’s Immigration Commission. Commons, the author of Races and Immigrants in America (1907), criticized immigration on both protectionist grounds (he believed immigrants depressed wages and weakened labor unions) and racist ones (he wrote that the so-called tropical races were “indolent and fickle”).
Woodrow Wilson, whose Progressive presidential legacy includes the Federal Reserve System, a federal loan program for farmers, and an eight-hour workday for railroad employees, segregated the federal bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. “I have recently spent several days in Washington,” the black leader Booker T. Washington wrote during Wilson’s first term, “and I have never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.”
Perhaps the most notorious figure of the era was Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman, a leading Southern Progressive and inveterate white supremacist. As senator from South Carolina from 1895 to 1918, Tillman stumped for “Free Silver,” the economic panacea of the agrarian populist (and future secretary of state) William Jennings Bryan, whom Tillman repeatedly supported for president. “Pitchfork” Tillman favored such Progressive staples as antitrust laws, railroad regulations, and public education, but felt the latter was fit only for whites. “When you educate a negro,” he brayed, “you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.”
Nor did African Americans always fare better among those radicals situated entirely to the left of the Progressives. Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, though personally sympathetic to blacks, declared during his 1912 campaign for the presidency, “We have nothing special to offer the Negro.” Other leading radicals offered even less. Writing in the Socialist Democratic Herald, Victor Berger, the leader of the party’s right wing, declared that “there can be no doubt that the negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race—that the Caucasian and even the Mongolian have the start on them in civilization by many years.” The celebrated left-wing novelist Jack London, covering the 1908 heavyweight title bout between black challenger Jack Johnson and white boxing champ Tommy Burns, filled his New York Herald story with lurid ethnic caricatures and incessant race baiting. “Though he was a committed socialist,” observed Jack Johnson biographer Geoffrey C. Ward, London’s “solidarity with the working class did not extend to black people.”
As Southern thoroughly documents, these examples just begin to scratch the surface. Progressivism was infested with the most repugnant strains of racism. But was there something more, something inherent in Progressivism itself that facilitated the era’s harsh treatment of blacks? According to Southern, who repeatedly maintains that racism derailed “the great promise” of Progressivism, the answer is no. “The ideas of race and color were powerful, controlling elements in progressive social and political thinking,” he argues. “And this fixation on race explains how democratic reform and racism went hand-in-hand.”
That is surely correct, but is it the whole story? As the legal scholar Richard Epstein has noted, “the sad but simple truth is that the Jim Crow resegregation of America depended on a conception of constitutional law that gave property rights short shrift, and showed broad deference to state action under the police power.” Progressivism itself, in other words, granted the state vast new authority to manage all walks of American life while at the same time weakening traditional checks on government power, including property rights and liberty of contract. Such a mixture was ripe for the racist abuse that occurred.
Take the Supreme Court’s notorious decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a case that has rightly come to symbolize the South’s Jim Crow regime. In Plessy, the Court considered a Louisiana statute forbidding railroads from selling first-class tickets to blacks, a clear violation of economic liberty. In its 7–1 ruling, the Court upheld segregation in public accommodations so long as “separate but equal” facilities were provided for each race, setting off an orgy of legislation throughout the old Confederacy. South Carolina, for example, segregated trains two years after Plessy. Streetcars followed in 1905, train depots and restaurants in 1906, textile plants in 1915–16, circuses in 1917, pool halls in 1924, and beaches in 1934.
No doubt many of those businesses would have excluded or mistreated black customers whatever the law. But in a market free from Jim Crow regulations, other businesses would have welcomed blacks, or at least black dollars, forcing racist enterprises to bear the full cost of excluding or mistreating all those potential paying customers. (This was one of the chief reasons the segregationists pushed for those laws in the first place.) The state, in the eloquent words of the historian C. Vann Woodward, granted “free rein and the majesty of the law to mass aggressions that might otherwise have been curbed, blunted, or deflected.”
Furthermore, this tangled web of regulations, ordinances, codes, and controls was spun during the heyday of Progressivism, precisely when such official actions were least likely to receive any meaningful scrutiny. Southern, despite his otherwise close attention to the many permutations of race and racism, fails to recognize this major defect in the Progressive worldview.
A similar failure handicaps his treatment of one of the era’s rare victories for African Americans. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a Louisville ordinance segregating residential housing blocks by race. The case involved a voluntary contract between a white seller and a black buyer for a housing lot located in a majority-white neighborhood. Under the law, the new black owner could not live on the property he had just purchased.WASHINGTON—To fill their top spot on the House Judiciary Committee, Democrats had a choice between experts in two critical policy arenas: a constitutional law ace with firsthand experience battling U.S. President Donald Trump, and an architect of sweeping immigration legislation. By a wide margin, they chose the constitutional law expert. Why? To ready themselves for a battle with Trump that could end with impeachment proceedings.
U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, centre left, was chosen on Thursday to lead the Democrats' House Judiciary Committee. ( Alex Wong / GETTY IMAGES )
The selection of Jerrold Nadler as the ranking member on Judiciary was the clearest sign yet of how seriously House Democrats consider the possibility of a full-blown constitutional showdown with Trump. Read the latest news on U.S. President Donald Trump You wouldn’t know it from how many of them talk. When it comes to the I-word, most Democrats have walked a tightrope — with even Nadler hesitant to mention impeachment in interviews before votes were cast Wednesday.
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Leaders have cautioned the rank and file not to push for impeachment because the public might view it as an overreach. The House’s few remaining moderate Democrats from swing districts have regularly warned the party’s liberal flank against making the 2018 midterm elections about Trump or the investigations into his presidential campaign. “Look, Robert S. Mueller III is on the case,” said Cheri Bustos from a western Illinois district that swung to back Trump last year. “We’ve got to let him do what he’s going to go, and let the facts go wherever they’re going to go. In the end, the truth comes out, but I don’t think we need to rush anything more than that.” Bustos had a one-word reply when asked what issues Democrats need to focus on in the next 11 months: “Jobs.” Yet Nadler anchored his candidacy for his new position, vacated with the resignation of John Conyers Jr., on the 13 years he has spent either as chairman or ranking member of the panel’s Constitution subcommittee and, more recently, its courts subcommittee. He also politely reminded Democrats in recent days of his efforts, beginning in the mid-1980s and continuing into last decade, to impede Trump’s efforts to develop portions of New York’s Upper West Side, which Nadler has represented in the New York state Assembly, and subsequently the House, for more than 40 years.
Nadler won a secret ballot 118 to 72, demonstrating that this caucus wants to be ready to clash with Trump if it vaults into the majority after next year’s midterm elections. “There is nobody better prepared, if the president messes around with the Constitution, to handle it than Jerry Nadler,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said after the vote.
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A confidant of Nadler’s since the 1970s, Schumer did not have a vote in the race, but he echoed the sentiment of many House Democrats. It was not meant as a slight to the importance of immigration, an issue that Nadler’s opponent, Zoe Lofgren, had argued was the party’s main focus. And these internal elections for leadership posts and top committee slots often turn largely on personal relationships that lawmakers build over decades in office. This race was no different. Nadler had the backing of most, if not all, of New York’s 18 Democratic lawmakers, as well as many members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). The CBC has long held that seniority (Nadler was elected in 1992 and Lofgren in 1994) should be the most important trait in these posts rather than such qualities as the ability to raise money. That’s because many of its members come from poorer, urban districts and do not have the wealthy donor base of some of their colleagues. Yet Lofgren hails from a state with 39 Democrats, and with roughly 80 females casting ballots in the Democratic leadership races, she was considered a strong challenger for a post Conyers vacated amid sexual harassment allegations. One Democratic handicapper familiar with recent internal races expected Nadler to win by about 15 votes. Instead, he won by more than double that margin. What changed the calculus? “The constitutional argument,” Gerald E. Connolly said in explaining the broad support for Nadler. Democrats, he said, must “prepare for the coming storm.” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi downplayed any division within her caucus, suggesting that the race was spirited but helpful in highlighting key issues. “It was a good, healthy race,” said Pelosi, who stayed neutral. “I thought they both made a very good showing.” Read more: Analysis | Daniel Dale: Trump gets his first big legislative victory. It could still end up a political defeat How Donald Trump’s proposed immigration changes will tear families apart Trump rules out firing Mueller as Russia probe studies transition records Schumer said he first met Nadler when he “a West Side kid, one of the leaders of the West Side political movement.” The Brooklyn Democrat won his first assembly race in 1974, and Nadler won his two years later. After a failed 1985 mayoral bid, Nadler won his House seat in 1992 and became a force on the Judiciary Committee, particularly as a top defender in 1998 of then-president Bill Clinton during his impeachment hearings. “History and the precedents alike show that impeachment is not a punishment for crimes but a means to protect our constitutional system,” he said then, in his opening statement during the committee’s proceedings. “And it was certainly not meant to be a means to punish a president for personal wrongdoing not related to his office.” A fairly doctrinaire liberal, Nadler represents a district where Trump received just 19 per cent of the vote last year. He refused to attend Trump’s inauguration, saying that he was “legally elected” despite allegations of Russian interference. Instead, Nadler said then, Trump’s actions inflaming racial tensions made him “not legitimate” as president. By May, after the firing of James Comey as FBI director, Nadler told CNN that there might be a “very strong case” for obstruction of justice charges against Trump. Democrats are careful to say that Nadler will not push too far or too fast on any impeachment proceedings. “He doesn’t rush to judgment about anything, very deliberative,” said Joseph Crowley, a friend of more than 25 years. Such cautious statements aside, it’s hard not to conclude that Nadler was given his new job for a singular reason. “It’s something I think he was made for,” Crowley said. “He’s at the right place at the right time and when we need him most.”
Read more about:Remember that slow dissolution of Scheana Marie and Katie Maloney's friendship last season on Vanderpump Rules? Well, the time apart between seasons did nothing to bring them closer together.
In this sneak peek of the upcoming season six premiere, exclusive to E! News, Sheana's putting her foot down with her former friend, leading to one very awkward conversation at—where else—Sur involving "rage texts about not rage texting" and a rescinded birthday party invitation. All while Ariana Madix looks on, uncomfortably.
"So, I mean, obviously you know it's my birthday," Scheana says after Katie walks up to the bar as she's being talked about. "And I'm having a party Friday, but I think I don't want you there because I don't want drama at my birthday. There are a lot of things that have been unsaid, and with, like, texting and 'I'm not rage-texting you, but here's all these rage texts.'"The public is being deceived and misled by the alcohol industry over links to deadly diseases – in an industry scandal scientists compare to denials made by Tobacco companies in recent history.
Drinkers are unaware of the frighteningly real risks facing them, according to the authors of a study suggesting the associated risks of alcohol have been “distorted or misrepresented” in nine out of 10 websites and publications funded by the alcohol lobby.
Researchers have claimed about four percent of new cancer cases annually in the UK can be traced back to alcohol consumption – which is now an established risk.
Read more
Campaigns which encourage drinkers to be “aware” of their intake do not go far enough to highlight the dangers, academics claim.
Some marketers have been accused of denying any cancer link with alcohol products, seriously endangering and misleading drinkers.
The study by London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and Sweden's Karolinska Institutet looked at websites and how they discussed health risks.
Published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Review, the study found in 2016, 30 companies downplayed the risk.
“The most common approach involves presenting the relationship between alcohol and cancer as highly complex, with the implication or statement that there is no evidence of a consistent or independent link,” the report reveals.
“Others include denying that any relationship exists or claiming inaccurately that there is no risk for light or ‘moderate’ drinking, as well discussing a wide range of real and potential risk factors, thus presenting alcohol as just one risk among many.”
The study also said some industry publications went as far as denying there was any danger at all for light or moderate drinking.
Alcohol can increase the risk of breast and bowel cancers, yet links were commonly omitted or misrepresented, the experts said.
Lead author Mark Petticrew, professor of public health, said the industry actively attempts to offer other explanations for the cause of breast cancer, instead of alcohol.
“Existing evidence of strategies employed by the alcohol industry suggests that this may not be a matter of simple error. This has obvious parallels with the global tobacco industry’s decades-long campaign to mislead the public about the risk of cancer |
serves four functions: first, it imposes an additional cost on the Duelist, which dramatically closes the gap when measured in terms of change in damage output per Step spent (a maxed out Duelist now does between 12 and 24 Wounds per round). Second, it creates a natural limit on the number of Maneuvers per sequence (no more than 5). Third, it prevents a fully maximized Duelist, as a character cannot have a 5 in both Finesse and Panache. Fourth, it encourages the Duelist to do something other than attack with any “leftover” Raises; currently the economy skews a Raise’s value dramatically toward attacking.
Using this method produces a range of possible slopes. A Duelist with a Panache of 2 has a slope of 2.5 (topping out at 24 Wounds by Weaponry 10) while a Duelist with Panache 5 has a slope of 3.85 (topping out at 34 Wounds at Weaponry 10).
Summation
I’ll begin with two statements that I believe to be objectively true.
1. Forty four Wounds per Action Sequence is a lot: that’s 2 Mythic Villains and some mooks. Put another way, if the Villain is a Duelist, that’s 2 characters with room to spare.
2. That said, a Duelist should beat non-duelist with equal stats in a swordfight and regularly beat non-duelists with superior stats.
The key word in statement 2 is “regularly;” regardless of where we draw the line, I believe it is rational and natural to believe that, at some point, a grizzled veteran should be able to take out a green Duelist. Everyone loves those moments in film, when the scrappy hero manages to hold his own against the technically superior and infuriatingly smug villain (Malcom Reynolds vs The Operative comes to mind).
Right now, that simply can’t happen and the moment the players realize that, it is going to suck the wind out of any combat involving a Duelist. The tense showdown with the mastermind’s ruthless enforcer becomes a time to get drinks and chat while the party Duelist makes more attacks than the rest of the party has actions, or wonder where they will miraculously wake up after another total party wipe.
That’s not a game I want to run or play.This article examines the Seyllin Incident in light of the information revealed in the chronicle Inheritance and proposes a number of theories which relate to the potential origin of the Talocans, the Drifters and the possible conflicts that may have occurred deep in the past of the EVE timeline. It also proposes a possible theory for the final event of the Prophecy of Macaper in the light of these theories. Much of the information in here is speculation as there is little evidence available for the events described but I have tried to back up my theories with the available evidence and provided sources where possible. Note that this article assumes the reader is familiar with the published EVE lore from the Chronicles, Novels, Short Stories and Lore articles.
Seyllin Incident
The generally accepted history of the Seyllin Incident is summarized below:
A Thukker tribe vessel detonated Isogen-5 stockpile in T-IPZB to prevent the Blood Raiders escaping with the Battleship containing the Terran superweapon used by Jamyl Sarum at the battle of Mekhios.
Quantum entangled stockpiles of Isogen-5 detonated across the cluster and in Anoikis (note that the stockpiles were hidden in those system in space, presumably cloaked).
The detonation caused the stars in those systems to release a radiation burst and then stellar mass ejection consistent with a supernova.
The Cassandra probe in Seyllin detected an explosion and reported that the star’s magnetic field was aligned with the source of the explosion.
The radiation burst hit Seyllin I causing massive devastation and knocking the fluid routers offline.
Several hours later the plasma wave of the stellar mass ejection hit and destroyed the planet.
Some interesting points to note are that the “rogue” drones were harvesting Isogen-5 in T-IPZB and storing it in the station at the heart of their hive and that the station itself is clearly identified as Terran in “The Empyrean Age”. The behavior of the rogue drones and the fact that they were harvesting the Isogen-5 at all does bring into question whether or not they were truly rogue drones or simply drones that had been performing a task with no counter instructions for thousands of years.
Re-examining the events of the incident in light of the revelations in the chronicle Inheritance reveals some interesting possibilities.
The entangled Isogen-5 also existed in the construct around the star in W477-P. The Inheritance chronicle details how a number of gates around the sun simultaneously exploded at the time of the Seyllin Incident. The energy was directed into the star which then in turn released a large stellar mass ejection which destroyed the gates in those sections. There were no Jove in system at the time and the information was captured by Jovian probes. What the probes monitoring this do not tell us is whether or not those gates were active at the time that they were hit by the stellar mass ejection.
It is possible that two advanced civilizations stockpiled Isogen-5 that were accidentally entangled but that seems unlikely. Much more likely is that the stockpiles were deliberately linked to the structure in W477-P. If this is the case then the stockpiles in Seyllin and the other systems affected in the detonation could well have been inside a cloaked station or structure, similar to the station in T-IPZB, containing a wormhole gate linked to the Dyson Swarm construct in W477-P (and in fact the Isogen-5 would likely have been part of the gate mechanism). If this theory is true then the events of the Seyllin incident may well be different from what has been accepted until now:
A Thukker tribe vessel detonated Isogen-5 stockpile in T-IPZB to prevent the Blood Raiders escaping with the Battleship containing the Terran superweapon used by Jamyl Sarum at the battle of Mekhios.
Quantum entangled stockpiles of Isogen-5 in cloaked stations/structures detonated across the cluster, destroying the stations/structures but opening the wormhole gates to W477-P.
At the same time the gates in W477-P detonated releasing a blast of energy into the unstable star which in turn released a stellar mass ejection back at the gates, destroying them but funneling part of the mass ejection and the accompanying radiation burst through the wormholes to the systems at the other ends.
The Cassandra probe in Seyllin detected an explosion and read the magnetic field of the W477-P star through the open wormhole, a possibility the probe software has no capability to understand and so it reported that the magnetic field of the star it is monitoring is somehow at the explosion point.
The radiation burst hit Seyllin I causing massive devastation and knocking the fluid routers offline.
Several hours later the plasma wave of the stellar mass ejection hit and destroyed the planet.
It is entirely possible that the Seyllin star did not actually produce the radiation and shockwave that destroyed the planet (nor any of the other affected star system’s stars). The source of the radiation and stellar mass ejection may well have been the star in W477-P.
This theory has some intriguing implications as it would associate a Terran station with the Dyson Swarm construct around the star of W477-P. Whilst the Inheritance chronicle makes it clear that the Talocan race is responsible for the construction of the Dyson Swarm and indeed much of Anoikis, it doesn’t really help explain the origins of the Talocans. To explore the potential origins of the Talocan and their relationship with Terran stations we need to go back to the beginning of the timeline and look at the collapse of the EVE Gate.
The Collapse of the EVE Gate
We have very little information around the collapse of the EVE Gate save that it was a catastrophic event that lead to the failure of most of the Terran colonies within the New Eden cluster until the rise of the current Empires. The exception of course are the three Jove Empires for whom we can trace the ancestry of back in time to the collapse of the gate and a brief mention of a few other ancient races. What isn’t really made clear is exactly what occurred when the gate collapsed and how it impacted the colonies. The remains of the gate are emitting very intense tachyon radiation which prevents most vessels from approaching. There are also references in the lore to a shockwave at the time of the collapse, destroying ships in system with the EVE Gate.
The interaction of large energy shockwaves with stargates was detailed in Inheritance with regard to the devastation unleashed upon the Jovian Empire. If the collapse of the EVE Gate generated a significant shockwave then it is plausible that it propagated through the existing stargates, damaging or destroying them in the process, and caused devastation across the settled systems in New Eden. The lack of self-sufficiency is generally described as the cause of the failure of most of the colonies after the gate collapsed. Many of the colonies reverted to primitive technology. The destruction of large portions of the existing stargate network would help explain why this was so devastating.
The speech from Grious in “Templar One” describes how at the time of the collapse there were few active stargates and limited fuel for warp drives available (note that the fuel is Isogen based) but it is not really clear if this was the case prior to the collapse. He also describes the seven motherships containing the Enheduanni and the Architects that had recently arrived through the gate and did not have fuel for their warp drives. The ships are described as each containing the resources necessary to construct a stargate and colony. These resources could have provided significant relief to the populated systems of New Eden yet the decision was made to continue to the existing Jove colony in Utopia.
The Jove were the least technologically advanced race in the cluster and lived in a single system at the time and whilst an argument could be made that they needed the resources to survive like anyone else it is seems unreasonable to send all seven ships there given the unfolding catastrophe, especially given the distance between the New Eden and Utopia systems and the number of alternate destinations along the way. It is certainly possible that the legendary Jovian factionalism led them to ignore the devastation unfolding in the rest of the cluster. If however the newly arrived ships witnessed the effects of the collapse of the gate and a devastating shockwave propagating through the gate network they may well have reasoned that the Jove, isolated from the gate network, were the most likely survivors. In this scenario with a failure of the gate network and interstellar communication, the decision to head to Utopia makes much more sense.
It is important to note here that stargates were in existence in the cluster. Likely the first few constructed would have required oversight from researchers and scientists but the ships heading to Jove space would likely have contained mostly engineers and some specialized technicians. This is important as the time dilation research techniques of the Architects were not really perfected until the second Jove Empire. This means that the first Jovian Empire consisted of the least technologically developed civilization in the cluster, backed up by engineers and technicians.
Within the New Eden cluster there would have been all manner of different groups involved in the colonization efforts. From the attempt to stabilize the EVE Gate prior to its collapse we can be fairly certain that the cluster contained scientists well versed in wormhole physics. The Terran station stockpiling Isogen-5 in “The Empyrean Age” is cleared noted to predate the collapse of the gate. It is plausible that there were Terran scientists studying the Isogen-5, especially given that Isogen was the fuel source for the warp drives of the time. With the collapse of the EVE Gate, civilization across the cluster began to fail but this still would have taken time. There would have been a period of decades if not centuries of decline. In that timeframe, it is reasonable to assume that there would still have been groups with access to space travel and the Terran stations around the cluster.
Whilst the long term goal of most groups in the cluster would have eventually turned wholly to survival, initially the goal of the scientists, especially those versed in wormhole physics, would have most likely been to re-open the EVE Gate or failing that to attempt to re-create an new wormhole back to Terra. The scale of this undertaking would have been phenomenal but to a culture willing to travel across the universe to colonize an entire cluster through a wormhole it certainly is within the realm of possibility. With civilization failing around them, the scientists would have been desperate to accomplish their task. It is plausible that the goal of re-opening the EVE Gate became the single driving focus of their lives. Experimentation into wormhole generation could quite conceivably have opened up access to Anoikis.
Under an apocalyptic scenario where survival is at stake humanity inevitably shows both its best and its worst. It is almost certain that factions would have arisen that sought to take the dwindling resources of others for themselves. Scientists who had failed to re-open the gate for decades would have become a target for both those seeking resources and those just wishing to lash out in anger. With potential threats against their work and the stations they lived upon it is entirely likely that a faction dedicated to finding a way to re-open the EVE Gate may have moved themselves into Anoikis to escape the factionalism and violence that would have occurred as resources became more and more scarce.
This theoretical scenario describes the creation of a faction with a desperate imperative to increase their knowledge and understanding of wormhole physics in an attempt to accomplish a feat most would consider impossible. This is certainly a conceivable origin for the Talocan race, a group of Terran survivors primarily consisting of scientists with a cultural drive to manipulate the very fabric of the universe itself. Their entire culture over generations would have been devoted to research into the creation and manipulation of wormholes. During this time the Architects were in cryostasis headed for Utopia and given the fact that the Talocans would have started from researchers and scientists and had such a significant drive to research and innovate it explains why the Talocans would have such a high level of technology compared to the Jovians.
The Great Work
The Inheritance chronicle revealed the construction of the Dyson Swarm around the star of W477-P. In it Veniel also revealed that the Jove suspected the existence of several other such constructs and that all of the wormholes in Anoikis were artificial. Assuming the motive to attempt to either re-open the EVE Gate or create an artificial wormhole capable of reaching back to Terra, it is logical that the Dyson Swarms were indeed part of this work and were constructed potentially in part to power the work.
The other side of wormhole generation is of course the difficulty in directing the wormhole. Stargates work by utilizing “areas of natural gravitational resonance” in space to open a wormhole to another gate which receives the wormhole using fluid router technology to synchronize the connection, as described in some of the old lore articles. Several starships can generate artificial wormholes with either Jump Drives or Jump Bridges. These wormholes must be targeted at a cynosural field transmitting via FTL communications to the capital ship, i.e. a fleet channel. The wormhole generation technology demonstrated by Veniel in Inheritance seemed to not require a target beacon but did require travel to a specific point in space to minimize energy cost. The Sansha Incursion fleets similarly are able to open wormholes without target beacons, however there is no clear evidence that the Sansha wormholes are actually targeted and they may in fact open to a random location in the cluster as defined by the gravitation fields at the time.
The Dyson Swarm construct around W477-P is clearly defined in Inheritance as having wormhole generation gates. It is possible that these existed solely for the purpose of transporting energy from the star to a destination point but there is also the possibility that they are far more than that.
The Seyllin Incident resulted in the opening of wormholes across the New Eden cluster, many of which led to Anoikis. The prevailing theory is that the Isogen-5 detonations weakened the fabric of space enough for the wormholes to open but if that was the case then they would primarily be opening around the systems where the detonations occurred. Additionally in Inheritance it is revealed that the wormholes in Anoikis are artificial. There is no known difference between the wormholes in Anoikis and the wormholes in New Eden so it is reasonable to assume that the wormholes in New Eden are artificial too. So why did they start appearing? The answer may lie in how an artificial wormhole can be opened between two points without either of them having a device to generate the wormholes. The existing wormhole system in Anoikis may be artificial but it is also completely impractical as it stands in the systems that can be accessed today. Randomly generated wormholes with unknown exit points would be a logistical nightmare for a major faction to utilize for daily travel (as any wormhole group can probably attest). It stands to reason that the Talocans were able to direct the wormholes to open to specific systems and that until the events of the Seyllin Incident they were prevented from opening to the New Eden cluster.
The gates in the Dyson Swarm may well have been the mechanism used to control the destinations for the artificially generated wormholes. As a very simple analogy, think about blowing bubbles with detergent and a bubble wand. When a large bubble is formed, by filling the wand with more detergent it can be pressed to the bubble and used to stretch and guide it without it breaking. In a similar (if far more scientific manner) I propose that in Anoikis, in a system we have not yet seen, is one or more devices that generate wormholes. The gates around the Dyson Swarms are used to interact with these wormholes to guide them into specific alignments. The Isogen-5 may actually be part of the guiding mechanism rather than a source of power due to its potentially natural quantum entanglement, in part replacing the need for a fluid router. The destruction of a large number of gates during the Isogen-5 explosion destroyed the mechanisms that directed a number of wormholes and they began opening randomly to the New Eden cluster and Anoikis. The stellar event at W477-P destroyed more gates which in turn led to more of the wormholes opening in an unguided fashion between systems in Anoikis and the New Eden cluster.
The stockpiled Isogen-5, linked to specific gates in the Dyson Swarm may well have been placed in those specific systems to make use of the gravitation forces of those specific stars in an attempt to create a mechanism to re-open the EVE Gate. Indeed the unstable star in W477-P may have been chosen specifically for its instability with an intent to trigger a nova or supernova as part of the mechanism.
The Talocans, Sleepers and Drifters
From the information that we have on the Talocan race, we know that they constructed the Dyson Swarms, artificial wormholes and at least one structure in the New Eden cluster, the Devil’s Dig Site. We also know of a large number of sites in Anoikis with Talocan structures and vessels, some of which are also inhabited by Sleepers. Finally, we have evidence of a quarantine in Talocan sites in Anoikis enforced with deadly force by drones. These facts can be interpreted in several different ways to deduce the fate of the Talocans and the origins of the Drifters.
Theory 1: Conflict
A potential answer to the mystery of the disappearance of the Talocans is that they made an attempt to test their mechanism to re-open the EVE Gate and it resulted in a conflict. It is highly likely that the mechanism would have taken a significant amount of time to develop to a point where testing is possible. By that time the first Jove Empire would have been well underway. I postulate that the test of the mechanism was performed in part in the New Eden cluster and it resulted in a significant loss of life to Jovians. Given the potential for need for artificial novas or supernovas it is conceivable that a test of the mechanism killed a colony of Jove. This would have likely led to the Jove going to war against the Talocans. With the Talocan focus on research and wormhole technology it is very likely they had little in the way of a military force. Despite this, their technology was well ahead of the Jove technology at the time.
With superior technology the Talocans would have inflicted devastating casualties, especially if they were able to utilize wormholes in an offensive manner. Faced with such a foe, the Jove may well have attempted to unleash a biological weapon upon the Talocans (potentially even the Kyonoke plague). This could have resulted in the Talocans retreating to Anoikis and the first Jove Empire to collapsing from a combination of infighting over the usage of such a weapon and the casualties suffered in the war. With a biological weapon running rampant through their race the Talocans would have been desperate. Quarantines would have been attempted but if sufficient members of their race were exposed before they realized what had occurred then their fate would have all but been sealed. For a race devoted for thousands of years to undertaking the re-opening of the EVE Gate, failure like this would have been unthinkable.
With little other options, some members of the Talocan race may well have taken the drastic steps of cybernetically re-animating the corpses of those who had already succumbed to the virus and downloading their consciousness into implants in these bodies – the first Drifters. Such a drastic measure would not have been without consequences and although we cannot know for sure it is possible that this either altered their mindset enough that the “survivors” completely switched focus from continuing the great work to protecting what they had already built or that it wiped out their best researchers. Thousands of years later, a change in focus from the great work to its defense well explain significantly differing ships and technology with a focus upon weapons improvements rather than wormhole physics.
A war against the Talocans would potentially explain the end of the first Jove Empire and the release of a biological weapon to wipe out an entire race could well explain why they are so reticent to discuss the cause of the fall of the first empire. It is quite plausible that the second Jove Empire rose under the guidance of those who had led them to victory in their war potentially with many of the Jove not knowing the details of their victory. Studying the remains of any Talocan ships may have helped the Jove to unlock wormhole generation technology over the course of many years allowing them access to Anoikis where they discovered the remains of the Talocan structures and at least one of the Dyson Swarms. Towards the end of the second Jove Empire it is plausible that in an attempt to discover the fate of the Talocans, the Jovians may well have exposed themselves to a mutated form of the virus thus leading to the infamous Jovian Disease. The revelation that this was a mutant form of a bioweapon the Architects themselves unleashed would likely have caused massive factional unrest in the Jovian Empire. This then could have resulted in the Architects and Enheduanni leaving for Anoikis to establish the sleeper collectives.
If these events did occur as described it is likely that the inner systems of Anoikis would have been locked out of the wormhole network by the Talocans/Drifters. The sleepers would not have begun to settle in Anoikis for quite some time after the conflict. The Drifters would likely have become aware of the sleepers but possibly considered them little threat. It is possible that the Drifters became more tolerant of the sleepers over time, to the point where in the modern era they attack those that attack the sleepers. Another less pleasant possibility is that the Drifters do not wish the sleepers awakened as they are seeking revenge upon them in the virtual construct where they could be tormented almost indefinitely.
The novel “Templar One” reveals a great deal of information about the Jove, Sleepers and the Other. Combined with the short story “Theodicy”, there is a good background of information on the Enheduanni and their ongoing conflict with the Jove. We know that the Jove had accessed the Dyson Swarm constructs in W477-P and knew of the sleepers. We can infer that much of the information that Grious presents about the Other was gathered from this source. That information cannot be fully trusted however. Grious mentions several times the ability of the Enheduanni to manipulate others and the conflict between them and Jove. It is fairly unlikely that the Enheduanni were unaware of the Jovians accessing their information networks via the constructs in W477-P. Given their talent for manipulation, the information the Jove recovered about the source of the Other may well have been designed to steer their actions towards locating it. It is entirely possible that the sapient artificial lifeforms did not arise naturally within the construct as explained and were instead uploaded into the sleeper virtual construct by the Drifters in order to torment them as revenge for the devastation of their race. If this is the case then the Drifters attacking capsuleers raiding sleeper sites may well be a case of preventing the Sleepers from being removed from their punishment.
Theory 2: Infection
An alternate theory for the downfall of the Talocans and the origins of the Drifters comes from an analysis of the Dyson Swarm itself and several other interesting facts from the lore of New Eden. The construction of the Dyson Swarm would have required a great deal of effort. It is likely that the Talocans were relatively few in number given the events leading to their civilisation rising and their focus. It is also likely that they made use of drone technology to assist in the construction of their endeavours. The drones that were harvesting Isogen-5 at T-IPZB were working around a Terran station implying that they may have been Terran in origin. It is clearly stated in “Inheritance” that the Dyson Swarm contained many computer systems but operation of the gates was clearly firewalled from them and required manual activation.
The scientific research and calculations required for the great works of the Talocans would have been an immense undertaking. Given the potential pressures to accomplish these tasks as swiftly as possible and the likely overwhelming focus they would have received as the central objective for their entire civilisation it is entirely possible that the Talocans utilised significant AI resources to attempt to advance their technology. The fact that the primary mechanisms of the Dyson Swarm were firewalled from the computer systems throughout the mechanism indicate that there was a significant level of distrust by the Talocans.
At some point whether through accident or an ill conceived experiment, one or more of the artificial intelligences was able to download into a physical body and thus were created the first Drifters. It is entirely possible that the Talocan race was wiped out by their own creations, a sentient race of artificial intelligences that used the Talocan bodies as hosts for their own consciousnesses are needed.
An interesting point to consider that adds weight to this possibility comes in examining the Drifters throughout New Eden. Travel to many different systems in New Eden that contain an active wormhole to one of the Drifter systems and you will come across Artemis Tyrannos. This may be the usual limitation of a videogame where a “unique” NPC can be found in multiple locations simultaneously, or it may be a deliberate occurrence that highlights an important fact – that Drifters violate the law adhered to by all other cultures of one mind, one body. There may indeed be dozens or even hundreds of simultaneous bodies of the unique individual Artemis Tyrannos as it may have downloaded copies of its consciousness into multiple bodies as required. Given this possibility, Drifter civilisation may actually be composed of a handful of unique individual sentient artificial intelligences with thousands or millions of bodies between them.
Similar to the previous conflict theory, the origins of the sentient intelligences within the Sleeper constructs are likely differ from the believed origins as explained by Grious. Under this theory it is likely that either the Drifters deliberately inserted intelligences into the construct or that other intelligences from the quarantined Talocan sites were inadvertently introduced by the Sleepers when investigating the Talocan sites. If the latter was the case then the actions of the Drifters in destroying the Other may have been in part the actions to eliminate a potential rival intelligence.
A Note on Rogue Drones
Rogue Drones have been observed throughout New Eden, usually acting in a predictable manner of destroying nearby technology and constructing Drone Hives. The accepted theory is that they are the result of drone experimentation that introduced too much intelligence but their origins may actually be somewhat different. The actions of the Rogue Drones throughout the SOE Epic Arc and their ability to interact with and open wormholes raises some interesting questions as to their origins and capabilities. They were also seen to interact with or be controlled by Dagan.
The drones observed in the novel “The Empyrean Age” are seen to be harvesting Isogen-5 from a star and storing it in a station that is clearly described as a Terran station. Later when the SOE, Blood Raiders, and Thukkers engage in the events that trigger the Seyllin Incident, the drones are described as Rogue Drones and their station as an overgrown Drone Hive. In between these events, the Other had interacted with these drones in some manner, resulting in the successful obtainment of Isogen-5 for the Terran superweapon and later the safe storage of the Abaddon battleship. Despite their description as Rogue Drones and their actions in converting the station into a Drone Hive, the drones were still harvesting Isogen-5 and safeguarding the Abaddon battleship, behavior unlike that observed in other Rogue Drones. It is entirely possible that Rogue Drones are not actually rogue at all and are simply following a different set of programmed instructions that have been deliberately introduced to them by the artificial sapient constructs such as the Other.
The Prophecy of Macaper
The prophecy of Macaper foretells a series of events of the apocalypse. The events are described in a cryptic manner that are often only deciphered after the fact. The final event is the “return of the dark light from the heart of the mother”. There is a potential interpretation to this which is plausibly quite close to occurring within the current EVE timeline.
The Talocan structure in the Otitoh system explored by archaeologists is often referred to as a temple. It was the first Talocan structure identified and contained a significant amount of information that helped advance the technologies of the empires. Unfortunately it may well have contained information about the goals of the Talocan race and their driving cultural imperative.
The single greatest threat to the New Eden cluster is not the Drifters. It is not the awakened Sleepers, the Kyonoke plague or any other ancient civilization. The greatest threat to the New Eden cluster is the Sisters of Eve. The Sisters are renowned for their charitable work and assistance across the cluster, but there have been examples of darker factions within the organization. To understand why the Sisters of Eve are such a threat one needs to return to the oldest lore articles about the organization. The Sisters of Eve blend science and religion. The core of their organization is a deeply religious group who believe the EVE Gate is a “relic of God” which holds the key to the universe. Their primary purpose is to unlock it to bring “everlasting peace under God’s guidance and guardianship”. Their organization blends science and religion with the goal of re-opening the EVE Gate, a familiar desire in light of the theories about the Talocans.
It is entirely possible that the founders of the religion deciphered information in the Talocan archeological site that lead them to the belief that the re-opening of the EVE Gate was a religious tenet of the Talocans, one which they adopted. An alternative possibility is that the religion of the Sisters of Eve is the remnants of the passed down beliefs and teachings of a group of Talocans that essentially went native with one or more of the primitive races in the cluster to escape either the conflict of a war with the Jove or the intelligences taking over their race (depending upon which of the theories is correct, if either).
The Sisters of Eve have consistently displayed an advanced knowledge of wormhole physics and they actively predicted the opening of the wormholes across the New Eden cluster after the Seyllin Incident, before they actually opened. The presence of their stations in Thera implies that they were able to access systems in Anoikis that were inaccessible to anyone else. The presence of their flotillas deep in Drifter systems indicates again a dangerous amount of knowledge of the region and implies they are searching for something as they do not appear to actually attack the Drifters. It is highly likely the Sisters will continue to direct the capsuleers to engage the Drifters so that they can penetrate the deeper systems of Anoikis. The new phase of Project Discovery is likely part of the ongoing search for the core Drifter/Talocan worlds within Anoikis, most likely to allow the SOE to attempt to travel there utilising whatever technology allowed them to access Thera ahead of the opening of the wormholes used by capsuleers. It is highly likely that the SOE have the ability to open wormholes themselves in a manner similar to the Jove.
If the Sisters of Eve locate the Talocan constructs designed to open the EVE Gate the consequences will likely be severe. The blend of science and religion has served them well enough thus far but it is a dangerous combination and inevitably there will come a point where science is unable to supply the answers and faith takes its place. The Talocans never activated their construct to re-open the EVE Gate successfully and since it was built parts of the mechanism have been damaged due to the Isogen-5 explosion and the damage from the supernova in W477-P. Should the Sisters of Eve attempt to repair and activate the construct it is likely that it will fail. The problem is how it will fail.
Should the Talocan construct be activated it is possible that the EVE Gate would partially re-open then collapse again. If a significant amount of energy is being directed into the gate to open it then that would potentially result in a massive shockwave when it collapsed. The “dark light from the heart of the mother” may well refer to a massive shockwave of energy from the EVE Gate. The shockwave would likely spread out through the gate network, burning out stargates and fluid routers across the cluster. Gates would be destroyed or damaged leaving most systems isolated. The loss of interstellar communications would be crippling for the empires. At a stroke the power of the great empires would be shattered forever. Groups of jump capable capsuleer vessels would be the only ships able to travel initially to most systems. Construction of replacement stargates would be impossible for the empires without the assistance of the capsuleers. Populations of entire worlds would live or die depending upon the actions of the capsuleers and their willingness to deliver necessary supplies.
This scenario presents a fairly bleak post-apocalyptic EVE universe which is plausible with regard to the stated theories. It would present a mechanism for rebooting the game into an EVE where the empires are virtually powerless and capsuleers create stargates and control the known universe.
Conclusion
The theories postulated throughout this article cannot be definitively proven given the lack of information we have on much of the time periods. The idea of a conflict between the Talocans and Jove may not have occurred and there may have been no AI takeover of the Talocans. The Drifters could indeed have a very different origin from either of those proposed here. The theories around the wormhole generation mechanism and the Seyllin Incident however do align better with the known facts than many of the current theories in my opinion. As with any speculation around EVE lore, much of this may have to be re-addressed when CCP next release a chronicle but based upon the information currently available the theories postulated in this article are all plausible.In a pair of interviews given ahead of her upcoming visit to Australia, author and activist Naomi Klein branded Prime Minister Tony Abbott as a "climate villain" and said that Canadians and Australians can relate because they are both run by governments bent on destroying the planet.
"In Canada I can’t tell where the oil industry ends and the government begins and in Australia the same is true when it comes to coal," she told Guardian Australia in an interview published Sunday.
Klein will be making her first trip to Australia in 14 years to speak at the Melbourne Writers Festival on August 29 and 30 before headlining Sydney's Festival of Dangerous Ideas on September 5.
Both the governments of Australia and Canada have been lambasted by environmentalists for being distinctly pro-fossil fuel amid ever-increasing awareness about the dangers of carbon emissions. With the upcoming Canadian elections, Klein says there is hope that things will change in her country. "If that happens, Australia will be isolated as a climate villain," she said.
She added that Abbott's climate record is "particularly shocking" given that "Australia is very much on the frontline of climate change. Also, being a Pacific nation, your closest neighbours are facing a truly existential threat. So I find it even more shocking that Australia is a hotbed of climate denial."
Her comments come just one week after Abbott unveiled his plan to reduce carbon emissions 26-28 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels, which many blasted as being insufficient to reach the 2°C warming threshold.
Klein further expanded on this idea in an interview with Australia's Fairfax Media published Monday, providing a glimpse of the themes she expects to touch upon during her speaking trip.
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Climate denial, she said, is pervasive in English-speaking countries such as Australia, Canada, the U.S. and the UK because of a "colonial settler mentality."
"Countries founded on a powerful frontier mentality have this idea of limitless nature than can be endlessly extracted," she said. "Climate change is threatening to that because there are limits and you have to respect those limits. Where that frontier narrative is strongest is where denialism is strongest."
In her recently published book This Changes Everything, Klein connects the pending climate crisis with the failures of Neoliberalism and argues that governments have fundamentally failed to deal with these global issues, leaving it up to grassroots movements to demand real action.
In her interview with Fairfax, Klein spoke to these connections:
The argument that I am making is that we are facing multiple, overlapping crises and they have their roots in the same system, the same logic. We are facing an equality crisis and that inequality very sharply followed racial lines. We have an unemployment crisis. We have a really unstable economic system, that is getting more and more unstable and I think everybody is waiting for |
, woody yeast-heavy attic air, we headed back down to earth. We finished off our visit with a glass of Fou’Foune, Cantillon’s apricot lambic, named after, well, I’ll let you Google it yourself. Two-hundred grams of hand-pitted fruits go into each liter of this golden elixir; it’s my favorite of the Cantillon brews. We were promised Zwanze as well and were not disappointed: the 2012 rhubarb brew was still available in dusty, emerald-green bottles.
If you have a chance to visit the Cantillon brewery, do. Not only will you experience the magic of one of the world’s rarest beers, you’ll be supporting its continued existence. All the money you’ll save on buying your stock of lambic on-site will surely pay for the round-trip ticket to Brussels.
A final bit of wisdom from the lambics: Le temps ne respecte pas ce qui se fait sans lui,” or “Time does not respect that which is done without it.”
Cantillon Fun Facts
All organic grains
2 tons of grain: 35% raw wheat, 65% malted barley
1000L of water: chlorine left to dissipate overnight before using
Aged, dried hops: at least 3 years old!
Price of 75cl bottle of kriek at the brewery: 5€
Price of a glass of gueuze: 2€
Brasserie Cantillon
56 rue Gheude
1070 Brussels
Tel.: +32 2 521.49.28
http://www.cantillon.be
Open Monday to Friday from 9am till 5pm, Saturday from 10am to 5pm. Closed on Sundays and public holidays.Photo by Matt and Angie Stockel
Four months ago, Jon Taffer came to town and rescued a bar in Tower Grove East.
This weekend, you can finally see everything that went down — the Bar Rescue episode that features Van Goghz Martini Bar & Bistro's transformation into Crafted (3200 Shenandoah Ave., 314-865-3345) will air on Sunday.
The episode, which premieres March 13 at 8 p.m. CST, is titled "Dragon Lady." According to the SPIKE TV description, "An apathetic owner would rather vape in the corner than engage with customers at her own bar. Can Taffer turn the situation around before the entire business goes up in smoke?"(Lest you wonder about that vaping action — keep in mind this was filmed in November, before the smoking ban went into effect.)Crafted, which now features cocktails served in coffee presses, is reportedly utterly transformed — and the word on the street these days is quite good. ButVan Goghz/Crafted wasn't the only bar Taffer attempted to rescue during his time in St. Louis. As we previously reported, he also helped revamp O'Kelley's (on the edge of downtown) into a new baseball/World's Fair themed bar called Pasttimes on Fourth and City Bistro (on Gravois) into the Beechwood. The latter makeover earned less than stellar marks from our correspondent No word yet on when the other two St. Louis-based episodes will air, but we'll keep you posted when we know more.Welcome to the 2016 edition of “Top Shelf Prospects”. As we go through the Summer of 2016 I will be featuring a team-by-team look at the top prospects in the NHL. I will follow the order of the first round of the NHL draft (as if there were no trades). You can find all the articles here. Since we had an extensive NHL Draft preview, I will not be reviewing the players who were drafted this year. There have been no games since then, and my reports on them will not have changed.
What I will be doing is linking you to those articles, as well as taking a look at prospects that were acquired before this year’s draft; their progress, and their chances of making the 2016-17 roster. I will also bring you one sleeper pick – a player who was either drafted in the 4th-round or later; or an undrafted free agent signing who I pick as my darkhorse to make the NHL. The cut-off for what is or isn’t a prospect is typically about 50 NHL games played or being 25 years old. These are not hard or fast rules though, and I may make some exceptions depending on the circumstances.
TSP: Pittsburgh Penguins Prospects
After a busy off-season, and a big trade for Phil Kessel, the Penguins started last season slowly. General manager Jim Rutherford was not happy, and fired coach Mike Johnston. He hired Mike Sullivan in his place. He also traded David Perron for Carl Hagelin and Rob Scuderi for Trevor Daley. The wheeling and deadling clearly worked, as the Penguins were one of the hottest teams in the NHL over the second half of the season. They would also win the ultimate prize, taking home the franchise’s fourth Stanley Cup. Captain Sidney Crosby, much maligned during the poor start, won the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP.
Draft Picks: Filip Gustavsson, Kasper Bjorkqvist, Connor Hall, Ryan Jones, Niclas Almari, Joe Masonius
Graduates: Derrick Pouliot, Brian Dumoulin, Tom Kuhnhackl, Bryan Rust, Connor Sheary,
TSP: Pittsburgh Penguins Prospects
Top Prospect: Matt Murray
Goalie — shoots Left — Catches Left
Born May 25, 1994 — Thunder Bay, ONT
Height 6’4″ — Weight 178 lbs [193 cm / 81 kg]
Drafted by the Pittsburgh Penguins in round 3, #83 overall at the 2012 NHL Entry Draft
How to recap Matt Murray’s 2015-16 season. It probably is not necessary to say too much here. The world saw Murray as he led the Penguins to the Stanley Cup, as the team’s top goalie after Marc-Andre Fleury suffered a concussion. For a rookie goalie, there is no more perfect scenario.
Talent Analysis
Murray’ legs are extremely quick and he shuts down the bottom of the net well. He has very good reflexes and he shuts down the five hole rapidly and effectively, avoiding a major problem area for most tall goaltenders. He takes away the top of the net with a strong glove and blocker. Murray has strong rebound control. He has improved this aspect of his game each year. He is strong positionally and comes far out of his net to cut down angles and reduce the amount of net that the shooter has to look at. Murray is almost always square to the shooter and recovers quickly to square up again on rebounds. His side to side movements are very good, but not quite great, this is one area where he still has room to improve in future years.
Like many young goalies today Murray loves to come out of his net and handle the puck. However his skills in this aspect are average. His skating, even for a goaltender isn’t great and this can get him caught at times. He also needs a little bit of work on his puckhandling and passing. He is better than most goalies, but not amongst the elite in this area.
Murray’s mental game is very good. He bounces back nicely from a bad goal or a bad game and doesn’t allow those things to linger. Murray is extremely confident in his net and at his best when he is coming far out of his net to challenge shooters. He showed that he does not falter, no matter how big the moment.
Outlook
Fleury will look to reclaim the starting position, but the reality is that Murray is the Penguins goalie of the future. The Penguins will likely try to move Fleury rather than losing him for nothing in the expansion draft. Murray and Fluery might be in a time share to start the year, but it will be his team before long.
Right Wing — shoots Right
Born Mar 17 1997 — Amsterdam, Netherlands
Height 6’0″ — Weight 180 lbs [183 cm / 82 kg]
Drafted by the Pittsburgh Penguins in round 2, #46 overall at the 2015 NHL Entry Draft
Daniel Sprong surprised many when he made the Penguins roster out of training camp. He played in 18 games. Sprong struggled to get regular ice time. He scored just two goals. Eventually he was returned to his QMJHL club, the Charlottetown Islanders. He put up 46 points in 33 games, and a further 15 points in 12 playoff games after returning to junior.
Skating
Sprong has great speed and outstanding acceleration coming off the wing. His ability to change speeds while carrying the puck can help him to blow past a flat-footed defender. He also has very good agility, and edge work, and can slip by a a defender with quick cuts. Add to this his stick handling ability, and you have a player who can be a threat to go coast to coast at any time.
Defenders must respect his speed, and when they back off he can use the open space to unleash his deadly shot. When working down low, he must get stronger and be better at taking a hit going forward. This is specifically true of his lower body, where some more muscle would help him be more powerful and better balanced to be stronger on the puck.
Offensive Game
Sprong is a pure sniper. He has a bullet wrist shot with a deadly release. He is dangerous every time he touches the puck, and loves to shoot. In fact there are times when he might get too focused on taking the shot instead of looking for a teammate. Don’t get the wrong impression though, Sprong also has excellent passing ability and can thread the needle and play the role of playmaker if a linemate has an opportunity. He just needs to work on doing it a little more often.
Sprong has excellent stick handling ability and the soft hands to get the puck past defenders or to finish plays in tight. He shows effort in the corners, but Sprong must get stronger to win board battles. He has high hockey IQ and the ability to find open spots in the defence to set himself up to unleash that wrist shot or a strong one-timer.
Defensive Game
Defensively Strong’s game is a little up and down. There are times where he shows good instincts, and strong positional play. He helps on the backcheck and supports the defence. However he doesn’t always bring this consistent effort every night. If his Charlottetown Islanders are down a goal or two, he feels that he needs to do it all offensively and start to cheat, looking for a long breakout pass and not always get back hard in the defensive zone.
Outlook
Sprong should return to the Islanders for one more season. He needs time at the junior and AHL levels to work on his game. The Penguins rushed him last year, but likely won’t do that again.
#3 Prospect: Jake Guentzel
Center — shoots Left
Born Oct 6 1994 — Woodbury, MN
Height 5’10” — Weight 175 lbs [178 cm / 79 kg]
Drafted by the Pittsburgh Penguins in round 3, #77 overall at the 2013 NHL Entry Draft
Guentzel finished a strong junior season with the University of Nebraska-Omaha before signing and entry level deal with the Penguins. He scored 19 goals and 46 points in 35 NCAA games. After joining Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, he put up six points in 11 regular season games, and 14 points in 10 playoff games.
Skating
Guentzel is a very good skater. He has excellent speed, and excellent acceleration. He can hit his top speed in just a few quick strides. Guentzel takes defencemen wide, and can speed up and cut to thet net. He also has very good agility and edge work.
Offensive Game
Guentzel can handle the puck and make plays at top speed. Combined with his skating, this makes him extremely dangerous off the rush. He has excellent vision and passing skills, and can change speeds to open up a passing lane to a teammate. Guentzel is a smart playmaker with high hockey IQ. While more of a set-up man, Guentzel can score with an accurate shot and decent release.
Defensive Game
Guentzel works hard in his own end and is a willing backchecker. However, he needs to get stronger. He can be overpowered by big power forwards, and has trouble containing them off the cycle.
Outlook
Guentzel will be asked to lead the Wilkes-Barre offence this season, as he continues to develop his game. He could see a call-up in case of injury, but will likely not be a full-time NHLer before 2017-18.
Centre — Shoots Right NC
Born Mar 23 1994 — Boden, Sweden
Height 6’3″ — Weight 209 lbs [191 cm/95 kg]
Drafted by the Pittsburgh Penguins in round 3, 81st overall in the 2012 NHL Draft
Sundqvist played his first full season in North America last year. He scored five goals and 17 points with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton in the AHL. He also played in 18 NHL games scoring his first career goal. Sundqvist even got in a couple of playoff games.
Skating
Sundqvist has decent overall speed, but could stand to work on his first step quickness and his acceleration. His agility could also be a bit better. Its not that these areas are bad, its just that they won’t really stand out at the NHL level. One area that is above average is his strength and balance on his skates. This allows him to win battles on the boards or drive to the net.
Offensive Game
Sundqvist will likely top out as a bottom six player. His offensive game just is not there. He has decent skills, but nothing really stands out. Sundqvist has decent vision and passing skills. His balance and puck protection allow him to extend plays in the cycle game and wait for a teammate to get open. Sundqivst controls the puck down below the circles and uses his long reach and his big body to shield the puck from defenders. He has a decent shot, it is accurate and has an adequate release.
Defensive Game
Sundqvist is a well developped two-way player and can be used to kill penalties. His long reach and excellent positioning help him to cut down passing lanes in the defensive zone. He is very good at reading the play and anticipating plays. Sundqvist may need to get better in the faceoff circle to be a true shutdown centre, though this is something that can be improved with hard work.
Outlook
Sundqvist will battle for a fourth line role on the Penguins this season. With the team recently re-signing Matt Cullen, and most of the other bottom six players returning, there may not be a spot for him. He likely will have to bide his time for an injury. Sundqvist is close to NHL ready, and would be in the NHL if he was part of a number of other teams.
#5 Prospect: Tristan Jarry
Goalie — shoots Left
Born Apr 29 1995 — Delta, BC
Height 6’2″ — Weight 185 lbs [188 cm /84 kg]
Drafted by the Pittsburgh Penguins in round 2, #44 overall at the 2013 NHL Entry Draft
After an outstanding junior career, Tristan Jarry joined the pro ranks last season. He was the back-up to Matt Murray, but got plenty of playing time when Murray was up with the Penguins. His season was up and down, with some good moments that showed his potential. However he also struggled at times and finished with a.905 save percentage.
Talent Analysis
Jarry plays a very athletic, butterfly style. His technique is good and he gets in and out of the butterfly very quickly and does not leave large gaps between his legs or between his arms and body. Jarry has quick legs throwing out his pads to take away the bottom of the net. His glove hand is excellent and takes away the top corners. He moves around the crease well, with good puck tracking and the ability to go post to post with ease. His backwards skating is also solid which should allow him to challenge shooters off the rush. While having solid technique, Jarry is also very instinctive and more than just a “puck blocker” as he has great reflexes and can make the odd diving save that wouldn’t expect him to be able to get to.
Jarry likes to leave the crease and play the puck. He can often be found roaming and acts like a third defenceman. He is often successful at doing so and able to ease the pressure on his defence, or able to throw the long breakout pass when the other team gets caught on a change.
He’s a bit of a project and will take time to be ready for the NHL due to the fact he must get more experience in the net. He can stand to work on his rebound control, as well as his tendency to play a little deep in his crease. He needs to get better at cutting down angles and reducing the amount of space a shooter can see.
Outlook
Jarry is a bit of a long-term project. He spends the season in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton again this year.
#6 Prospect: Teddy Blueger
Center — shoots Left
Born Aug 15 1994 — Riga, Latvia
Height 6’0″ — Weight 185 lbs [183 cm / 84 kg]
Drafted by the Pittsburgh Penguins in round 2, #52 overall at the 2012 NHL Entry Draft
Teddy Blueger finished his college career with a strong senior season, scoring career highs across the board. He put up 11 goals and 35 points in 41 games. When the season ended he signed with the Penguins, and got in 20 combined regular season and playoff games. Blueger struggled, picking up just one assist.
Skating
Blueger has good lower body strength. This allows him to be strong on the puck and to win battles on the boards. His speed is decent, but could use work on his first step quickness and his acceleration. His agility is also decent, but not great.
Offensive Game
Blueger creates his offense off the forecheck. He looks to create turnovers, and pressure defencemen. He also does very well at winning battles along the boards. Once he gets the puck, he looks to set up a teammate and has good vision and passing skills. Blueger has a decent wrist shot, but his release is a little slow and limits his effectiveness as a result.
Defensive Game
The best aspect of Blueger’s game is his work in his own end of the ice. He is willing to play his gritty and physical style in his own end of the rink. Blueger back checks extremely well and works to contain the cycle game. He has become and effective penalty killer. He also has worked at developing in the face-off circle.
Outlook
Blueger will spend the year in the AHL, where he will look to find a bit more offense. His career path likely puts his ceiling as a bottom six NHLer, however a little bit more scoring in his game is still gonna be needed before he can take such a role.
Sleeper Prospect: Dominick Simon
Center — shoots Right
Born Aug 8 1994 — Prague, Czech Rep.
Height 5’11” — Weight 175 lbs [180 cm / 79 kg]
Drafted by the Pittsburgh Penguins in round 5, #137 overall at the 2015 NHL Entry Draft
After being passed over in three NHL Drafts, the Penguins selected Dominik Simon in the 2015 Draft. The pick paid immediate dividends with Simon having an excellent season in the AHL. He scored 25 goals and 48 points in 68 games as a rookie. He got a short call-up to the Penguins, playing three games and getting his first career point.
Skating
Simon is a good skater. His top end speed is decent, however he excels when it comes to first step quickness and acceleration. He also has very good agility and edge work. This makes him tough for defenders to handle one-on-one. Simon can work on improving his balance and being stronger on the puck.
Offensive Game
Simon is an extremely good stickhandler. He has soft hands and a wide variety of moves that he uses to beat defenders one-on-one. He protects the puck well, and uses his shiftiness and moves to open up an opportunity to take the puck to the net; to make a pass to a teammate; or to get off a shot on net. His wrist shot has decent power, but an excellent release. It can fool goaltenders, and be on them before they know it.
He is a better play maker than scorer though with very good vision and passing skills. Simon also is a smart player, who has a very high hockey IQ and makes smart plays with and without the puck. Despite his smaller stature, Simon is not afraid to fight for the puck down low, and in the corners. He gets to the tough areas of the ice and scores points.
Defensive Game
Simon is strong defensively in the AHL. He backchecks effectively and supports the defense down low. His hockey IQ translates into his own end as he reads the play well and cuts down passing and shooting lanes. When he creates a turnover, he moves it up the ice quickly, creating offense in transition.
Outlook
Simon looks set for another year in the AHL. He is progressing nicely and may push for a spot on the Penguins in 2017, but the team has plenty of competition up front.
System Outlook
The Penguins are very deep in goal. To go along with Murray and Jarry, the Penguins surprisingly used their first draft pick on Filip Gustavsson this year. Given the riches they already have, this pick is extremely curious. The defence features free agent signees Lukas Bengtsson, Ethan Prow, and newly drafted Connor Hall are the most notable players in a group that has graduated a number of players in the last couple of years. Up front there is also a lack of depth. Kasper Björkqvist, Anthony Angello, Josh Archibald, and the newly signed Thomas Di Pauli are darkhorses to make the NHL.
Main Photo:Microsoft is building a cloud-based service codenamed "Arcadia" to stream apps and video games, reports ZDNet.
Arcadia is based on Microsoft's cloud computing infrastructure, Azure, and is being developed by a streaming technology team within the company's Operating Systems Group, according to ZDNet. The service is said to replace "Rio," the codename for the game-streaming technology that Microsoft demonstrated during an internal company meeting last September.
The Verge reported at the time that the Rio demo streamed Halo 4 to a Windows Phone device with an Xbox 360 controller attached, and to a low-end computer running Windows. Microsoft had said previously that it was looking into using Azure-based technology to provide backward compatibility on Xbox One, similar to the way Sony's Gaikai-based PlayStation Now works.
Citing an anonymous source, ZDNet reports that Microsoft considered using Arcadia to stream apps as well. A potential use case would give Windows and Windows Phone users the ability to run Android apps and games via streaming, a possibility Microsoft's Operating Systems Group had been exploring for some time. But Microsoft has shelved that idea for now, according to ZDNet.
ZDNet began investigating Arcadia when it was pointed to a Microsoft Careers job posting for a senior software engineer that mentions the codename. The listing specifically calls out the "Arcadia team" within the Operating Systems Group, but is otherwise vague. Qualifications listed on the page include "non-MS platform (Android, iOS) experience" as a "plus," which could signal cross-platform uses for Arcadia.
The name itself comes from the Halo universe: Arcadia is a Unified Earth Government colony that appeared in Halo Wars, according to Halo Nation. That wouldn't be a first for Microsoft, which soft-launched a Siri competitor called Cortana earlier this year on Windows Phone and Windows 8.1.Apple is set to bring Apple Pay, its mobile wallet service, to China using a partnership with China UnionPay. @KhaosT on Twitter found references to the credit card type in iOS 8 code and now MarketWatch is corroborating with sources that a deal is in the works.
Apple announced Apple Pay as a US only service, coming to iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in October with a software update. A deal with UnionPay would obviously mean Apple wants to bring the feature to Chinese iOS customers soon.
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@bzamayo Apple seems also in discussion with China UnionPay for Pay pic.twitter.com/uLgWRqBwMP — Khaos Tian (@KhaosT) September 10, 2014
The code snippet clearly shows support for China Union Pay credit card has been in the works for a while. Marketwatch’s report confirms a deal is underway. Apple Pay is also destined to work on the Apple Watch, in some form, when that product launches in early 2015. It appears the device will use skin contact as evidence of identity.'Poltergeist' that mysteriously trashed couple's home turns out to be meth addict who was hiding under the bed with a knife
A Seattle couple returned to their apartment late on Wednesday night to find the home completely trashed.
Lotion had been smeared on their doorknobs, a can of paint had been poured in the toilet, the junk mail ripped open, and the soles of 20 pairs of shoes removed.
They called the police, who came to investigate, but nothing had been stolen, leading them to wonder whether something supernatural had occurred.
However it wasn't until after the cops - who were equally as baffled - had left after 45 minutes that Brian and Bridget O'Neill made the truly distressing discovery.
'We didn’t feel threatened, but we were somewhat disturbed,' Brian, 38, told Vocativ.
Trashed: A married couple in Seattle who started to wonder whether a ghost was responsible for the mysterious and unexplained trashing of their apartment eventually found a wild-eyed woman under the bed
The home had been vandalized in baffling ways - such as electronic products loaded on top of the bed - but nothing was stolen and police found no fingerprints
'It was a really weird experience.'
Electronics from all over the University District condo had been piled on the bed.
The police had found the purse of a 27-year-old woman, and the Bridget, 32, found a woman's shoes.
As the pair began to clean up the mess, Brian moved the bed slightly to pick up a bracelet on the floor.
He then heard something underneath the mattress.
'It was a noise coming from something alive,' he said.
'It sounded like a dying possum or raccoon.
'I had only heard wounded animals make that kind of noise before.'
The bed stands only one four from the ground, and the woman had been underneath it for at least two hours
When the noise got louder, becoming a scratching sound, the couple left the apartment and called the police again.
Officers went inside and came out minutes later.
They were escorting a 'lanky, wild-eyed woman', Vocativ reported.
The woman had been under the bed - which stands only about a foot from the ground - for at least two hours.
'When I saw that it was a woman, my reality suddenly kind of shifted,' Brian said.
'My wife pretty much collapsed on the stairwell.'
The woman, who authorities did not identify, told cops that she had been on a'meth rampage' for several days, according to the police report.
Brian O’Neill says she stood about 5-foot-7 and weighed maybe 90 pounds.
Brian and Bridget O'Neill say the now feel sorry for the woman responsible, who admitted to having been on a'meth rampage' for days Evidence: A police report obtained by Vocativ shows that a knife was found under the bed, a hypodermic needle in the linen and strands of hair throughout the house
'I thought it was one of the skinniest people I have ever seen,' he said.
After the woman was arrested, the O'Neill's found a hypodermic in their bedsheets and locks of the woman's around the house.
Under the bed was a knife, which she had used to try and deconstruct the box springs.
'Honestly, I feel kind of bad for her,' Bridget said.
'This woman was so tiny and not together, it’s hard to be mad.Another glimpse of 'Tape Deck Heart' courtesy of Frank Turner & The Sleeping Souls live!
Watch the clip below to see Frank Turner & The Sleeping Souls perform 'Oh Brother' live at The Church Studios in Crouch End.
The song is taken from Frank's brand new album 'Tape Deck Heart', out in the UK on April 22!
Frank, it's new album time, do the nerves ever get easier when it comes to releasing new music?
Says the singer: "It's always a slightly nerve-wracking time. There's something quite isolated about making a record; the circle of me, the band and the producer work our arses off on the sound, but you can quite often come out the other side wondering if what you did is actually any good. I don't wander round convinced of my own greatness, so yeah there's a concern there. I suppose as I get older I care a little less what people think about what I do, but there's still a pretty strong seam of concern there, haha."
The songs on 'Tape Deck Heart' feel very candid, did you have some stark realisations or moments of clarity in the lead up to writing this record?
"I suppose that's one way of putting it. I wanted to make a record that was very raw and personal, not least because that seemed like the counterintuitive thing to do right now - I think at this level of success, or whatever, a lot of people withdraw, get protective, genericise a little and often lose something in the process. I wanted to write something really exposed, cutting. It also helps that I was going through a reasonably difficult time in my personal life, and my music is, as always, a form of catharsis among other things."
What are you savouring every moment of and what are you taking for granted at present?
"I'm trying to savour every moment of having a music career that's still (as far as I can tell) on the up slope after five albums. That's unusual, and I hope my luck holds for a little while longer. I probably take a bunch of stuff for granted but if I think about it and identify it I'll get all paranoid about how I shouldn't take it for granted, so I should probably let that sleeping dog lie."
How do you set goals after the last two years of your creative life? How ridiculously high is your aim these days?
"I think the best way of putting it is to say I'm curious as I proceed. I like to push at the doors in front of me to see if they're open; if they are, let's go! If not, well, let's find other doors. That's a complicated way of saying that I'm curious to see how far all this could go, but I'm not a burning jealous ball of ambition or anything. Who knows?"
Frank is on the road this week supporting the release of 'Tape Deck Heart' as he knows best. The dates are as follows:
APRIL
17 - MANCHESTER Academy
18 - GLASGOW Academy
19 - LEEDS University
21 - BRISTOL Academy
24 - BIRMINGHAM Academy
25 - LONDON ForumKENT COUNTY, MI -- A Comstock Park woman faces criminal charges after police say she admitted to creating false Facebook accounts with her ex-boyfriend's personal information to make it appear that his new girlfriend was threatening her. Cheryl Nelson, 52, is charged with false report of a felony and unlawful posting of a message. Nelson, over the course of a year between November 2011 and last October, made at least eight criminal complaints to the Kent County Sheriff's Department, saying she had been the victim of stalking, harassment, assault and home invasion. On Aug. 12, 2012, Kent County Sheriff's Detective Jason Russo handled a complaint in which Nelson alleged that her ex-boyfriend, Kevin Haarsma, and his girlfriend had left several threatening letters taped onto the front of her home, according to a probable cause affidavit for Nelson's arrest. After that day, Nelson made additional calls to police alleging more letters had been left, Russo wrote in court records. During Russo's investigation, an Ottawa County Sheriff's detective took a complaint from Haarsma, regarding threats and stalking behavior displayed by Nelson. The Ottawa detective served a search warrant on her home for computer equipment. "Nelson made (an) admission that she had been falsely reporting crimes because she was not able to let go of her relationship with Kevin," Russo wrote. "Evidence shows that Nelson used her computer to set up false Facebook accounts using Kevin Haarsma's personal information... Nelson used this account to make it appear that she was being stalked and harassed by Kevin's new girlfriend by posting threatening messages." Nelson was previously charged with fraudulent use of checks in the state of Florida. Prosecutors have agreed not to charge her as a habitual offender if she will plead as charged to the two criminal counts. Nelson waived a probable cause hearing this week and will be able to consider the deal before trial in Kent County Circuit Court.Hollis Johnson/Business Insider Shortly before Christmas, Consumer Reports, one of the most-trusted product review groups for over 80 years, said that Apple's lastest MacBook Pro had seriously inconsistent battery life, which meant that it couldn't give the computer its coveted "recommended" rating.
But Apple said that it didn't understand the battery life test Consumer Reports used, and Apple's head of marketing Phil Schiller said it would work with Consumer Reports to "understand their battery tests."
On Thursday, Consumer Reports said that after Apple fixed a bug, it could now give the MacBook Pro a "recommended" rating.
In fact, after applying Apple's bug fix, Consumer Reports said it found the new MacBook Pro models get great battery life:
The three MacBook Pros in our labs include two 13-inch models, one with Apple's new Touch Bar and one without the Touch Bar; and a 15-inch model. (All 15-inch MacBook Pros come with the Touch Bar.) The new average battery-life results are, in order, 15.75 hours, 18.75 hours, and 17.25 hours.
Consumer Reports continues to insist that its testing issues were caused by a specific Apple bug that it uncovered.
But in a statement provided to Business Insider earlier this week, Apple said that Consumer Reports' testing did "not reflect real-world usage." Apple said that Consumer Reports used a "hidden Safari setting" in its testing that consumers don't typically turn on.
Regardless of the spat, Apple's newest laptop is now one of the laptops that Consumer Reports can recommend to its readers.
The bug that Consumer Reports discovered was fixed in a recent beta version of MacOS, and will be rolled out to users in the coming weeks.The World of Data Scientists
The nature of work and business in today’s super-connected world means that every second of every day, the world produces an astonishing amount of data. Consider some of these statistics; every minute, Facebook users share nearly 2.5 million pieces of content, YouTube users upload over 72 hours of content, Apple users download nearly 50 000 apps and 200 million emails are sent. That’s every single minute. IBM estimated that we produce over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day and that growth shows no signs of slowing down.
More than ever, we need people and systems to make sense of all that data and it’s no surprise that data science has become one of the hottest spaces in the tech industry. But with the growth has also come confusion about what people really do and who you should be hiring when you need a data scientist.
DataCamp created a very handy infographic recently that breaks the industry down, and we’re going to attempt to simplify it even further for you today.
Data Scientist
At the top of the pecking order is the Data Scientist, a highly-skilled operator who can currently command a salary around $120 000 per annum. These people are attractive to companies like Google, Microsoft and Adobe due to their ability to clean, massage and organize big data. They are skilled storytellers, able to create predictive models and use maths, stats and machine learning to extract value from the reams of data presented to them.
Data Architects
Working closely with the Data Scientists are the Data Architects. They’re often hired to “create blueprints for data management systems to integrate, centralize, protect and maintain data sources.” They’re skilled in languages like SQL, XML, Hive and Spark and bring their talents to data warehousing, data modeling and systems development. Data Architects command salaries of around $100 000 p/a.
Data Engineers
Supporting the Scientists and Architects are the Data Engineers who develop, construct, test and maintain the architecture which produces the volumes of data needed in multi-national corporations such as Spotify, Facebook and Amazon. They have the mindset of an all-purpose everyman and their skills revolve around Data API’s, data warehousing solutions and modelling. Annual salaries average around $95 000 for the engineers.
Tying this talented trio together in an incredibly value role are the data and analytics managers who are responsible for “managing teams of data analysts and data scientists’’. Generally, they are fluent in languages such as Python, SQL, Java etc but are valued more for their leadership and project management skills and interpersonal communications. Great managers are valued as highly as data scientists and earn roughly the same packages as the scientists.
The Modern Day Statisticians
Statisticians are generally known as the ‘’historic leaders of data”, and in this day and age, a statistician will collect, analyze and interpret qualitative as well as quantitative data with statistical theories and methods. The mindset required is logical and enthusiastic about data and data mining and are skilled in cloud tools as well. A great statistician will earn in the region of $75 000 annually.
These figures in the world of data science are ably supported by the database administrator, the business analyst and the data analyst who each earn on average $65 000 a year. The analyst is an intuitive data junkie who loves to solve problems and figure things out while the business analyst has learned how to provide a bridge between the IT department and the business units, so that they can best advise how to put this data to work in the interests of whatever company they are working for. Databases can be vulnerable places and the administrator should be on top of backups and security while making sure that the database is available when the relevant stakeholders need to use it. A |
states, "Poundbury, the Prince of Wales’s traditionalist village in Dorset, has long been mocked as a feudal Disneyland. But a growing and diverse community suggests it's getting a lot of things right."[8]
Gallery [ edit ]
A row of shops called, affectionately, The Whistling Witch 2008
The new Dorset Fire and Rescue Service HQ/Fire station nears completion September 2008. In 2016 Dorset Fire and Rescue Service merged with Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service. This meant that the new services H/Q moved to Salisbury and the Dorset building became support offices and Dorchester Community Fire Station. [28]
Brownsword Hall in Poundbury, designed by architect John Simpson and based on earlier traditional designs, particularly one in Tetbury
Dorset Cereals Factory
Apartment block
See also [ edit ]
Fairford Leys – a similar project located on the edge of Aylesbury
Poundbury Hill – an Iron Age hill fort near Poundbury
References [ edit ]Imperial Oil Ltd. has unveiled plans for a $2-billion oil sands project that it says will harness new technology to cut costs and lower carbon emissions, a sign that the industry's biggest players are making plans to revive growth despite sputtering crude prices.
Imperial, which this week sold about 500 retail gas stations in a $2.8-billion deal, said on Friday that it has filed an application with the Alberta Energy Regulator for a new steam-driven oil sands plant located near its existing operations in Cold Lake, Alta.
The project would pump about 50,000 barrels of bitumen per day from the Grand Rapids area. Construction could start as early as 2019, with first oil in 2022, assuming timely regulatory approvals and "favourable" market conditions, the company said without elaborating.
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Imperial, an affiliate of U.S. giant Exxon Mobil Corp., is seeking approvals for a new oil sands project as competitors retrench to cope with the sharp plunge in crude prices that has rendered new bitumen projects uneconomic.
It marks the first major commercial test for a technology touted by executives as a tool for curbing the industry's emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases, while at the same time lowering overall development costs.
The technique involves mixing solvents – butane, condensate and other petroleum liquids – with steam at well sites, lowering the amount of energy it takes to loosen underground seams of bitumen buried too deep to mine.
Imperial says it has piloted the technology at its Cold Lake operations since 2010. Its studies show a 25-per-cent reduction in carbon intensity compared to existing projects with no solvents, although some experts have questioned such claims. A similar reduction in water-use intensity is expected, the company said.
Imperial is also studying whether to use solvents at its proposed Aspen project, a steam-driven development estimated to cost as much as $7-billion. No decisions have been made to build that project, which could ultimately pump 135,000 barrels per day.
The company's application for a new project could throw cold water on speculation that it is building a war chest for a big acquisition following the sale of its retail gas outlets, RBC Dominion Securities Inc. analyst Greg Pardy said in a note.A brother and sister have been arrested after police seized $24million in cash and drugs from a Miami home.
Luis Hernandez-Gonzalez, 44, and Salma Hernandez, 32, were both taken into custody on Wednesday after police found the huge haul of cash in their Florida property.
The money, that was believed to have been made peddling marijuana, was divided into $100 bills and stashed in orange heat-sealed buckets with Home Depot labels.
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Miami police have seized a record $24million in cash from a drugs raid. Officers have said it is their biggest bust in history
The money, that was believed to have been made peddling marijuana, was divided into $100 bills and stashed in orange heat-sealed buckets. They were hidden in a secret compartment
Luis Hernandez-Gonzalez, 44, and Salma Hernandez, 32, were both taken into custody after a police found the huge haul of cash
The hidden room - where the drugs, guns and cash were stashed - was guarded by a hallway statuette of St. Lazarus, a Catholic saint popular in Cuba, according to the Miami Herald.
Police say it is their biggest drug bust in history.
They also found marijuana, seeds and $180,000 in cash a safe.
Hernandez-Gonzalez owns The Blossom Experience, a store that sells lights and gardening equipment.
But authorities believe that was a front for his growing drug trade.
Cops believe he was involved in a drug ring that trafficked marijuana to Tennessee. In June, 11 Cuban nationals were arrested in the state for their alleged involvement in the drugs trade.
Hernandez-Gonzalez is being held on more than $10million bond, according to jail records.
He is now facing charges including money laundering, marijuana trafficking and possession of a firearm while committing a felony.
Cops also found machine guns resting on the piles of cash during the massive operation
Prosecutors in Miami released pictures of investigators sorting the buckets as they counted the cash
Gonzalez was held on $12,500 bail for conspiracy and drug-related charges.
Miami-Dade prosecutor Adam Korn said: 'For a man with $20million in his walls, an elevated bond is clearly necessary.'
Hernandez-Gonzalez's attorney Frank Gaviria insists his client runs a legal business.
The DEA are believed to have first began targeting Hernandez-Gonzalez back in 2010.
He was investigated after discussing his marijuana trade with an informant.
On its website, Blossom Experience boats that it is a 'unmatched service and support for their indoor gardening needs.'
In Tennessee, investigators seized more than 300 marijuana plants, at least five guns and more than $140,000 in cash.
Ringleaders Luis Rego, 32, and Pedro Martin, 28, hail from Miami.
Home Depot stickers were seen on the containers that were hidden inside the wall of the home
Officers tore down the walls of the home to find the orange buckets next to plumbing
An automatic weapon is seen on top of a pile of cash inside one of the bedrooms of the homeEvery day, no matter where we are, we interact with the weather. Some days it is beautiful and sunny, while other times it is dangerous. Climatology or climate science is the study of climate, scientifically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of time. [i] Climatologists/Climate Scientist study both the nature of climates – local, regional or global – and the natural or human-induced factors that cause climates to change. [ii] Due to the ever growing concern of climate change, and the unpredictable nature of weather, it is important for climatologist to use computer technology to track this information. Fortunately the advancement in technology within the last 50 years have allowed Climatologist to truly get a better look at what our present and future hold in terms of weather and the climate change issues. Because of the increase use of technology in climate science, there is an increase for people with a background and understanding of computer science and STEM.
The type of computer science and STEM skills needed in climate science varies depending on the job and location. To the instruments being placed in thousands of locations, from NOAA/NASA satellites in our orbits monitoring the weather, to buoys in the oceans monitoring sea levels, to Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) in Antarctica studying ice core activities, there is an endless need for people to engineer, create calculations, program software (you can even check out a NOAA guideline for their developers), understand data collected, troubleshoot, and advance this technology.
And on a related blog post on of the American Meteorological Society website, they talked about the importance of computer programmer in meteorology. “Meteorology programmers are a growing trend in today’s meteorology job world. Whether it is programming using Python, C++, Objective C, or PHP, the “new” graduate in meteorology in today’s economic climate should probably have these skills under their belt. When I spoke to a few of them…they mentioned if someone is a M.S. or Ph.D. with programming skills, they would like to talk with you.”[iii] (Curious about the difference in Meteorology and Climatology? Visit here!)
Interested in some of the research going on? Check out a few of these pages that share a lot of the information they are finding and technology they are using to track our climates.
Have a Computer Science career that you’re interested in knowing more about or one that you would like to share with us? If so, send us an email at socialmedia@robomatter.com and we may choose it for a future blog!
Works Cited:
[i] Climate Prediction Center. Climate Glossary. Retrieved on November 23, 2006.
[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatology
[iii] http://blog.ametsoc.org/news/is-meteorology-turning-into-computer-science/
Image Sources:Think that you know the world’s best tennis players inside and out? It’s time to put your knowledge to the test. Can you identify them by their playing arm alone?
RELATED: There are loads more tennis quizzes here
It's pretty simple: tell us which tennis player owns this arm? Photo: Getty Images Rafael Nadal Jo-Wilfried Tsonga Nicolas Almagro Nick Kyrgios Correct! Wrong! - Photo: Getty Images Angelique Kerber Eugenie Bouchard Maria Sharapova Karolina Pliskova Correct! Wrong! - Photo: Getty Images Kei Nishikori Novak Djokovic Tomas Berdych Benoit Paire Correct! Wrong! - Photo: Getty Images Venus Williams Taylor Townsend Serena Williams Sloane Stephens Correct! Wrong! - Photo: Getty Images Milos Raonic Stan Wawrinka Nick Kyrgios Janko Tipsarevic Correct! Wrong! - Photo: Getty Images Grigor Dimitrov Dominic Thiem Kei Nishikori Andy Murray Correct! Wrong! - Photo: Getty Images Simona Halep Dominika Cibulkova Angelique Kerber Sam Stosur Correct! Wrong! - Photo: Getty Images Marin Cilic Roger Federer Alexander Zverev Milos Raonic Correct! Wrong! - Photo: Getty Images Angelique Kerber Karolina Pliskova Caroline Wozniacki Johanna Konta Correct! Wrong! - Photo: Getty Images Kei Nishikori Albert Ramos-Vinolas Tomas Berdych David Goffin Correct! Wrong! - Share the quiz to show your results! Facebook Facebook Just tell us who you are to view your results! Show my results >> Whose arm is that?! You got %%score%% of %%total%% right Share your results Facebook Facebook ↺ PLAY AGAIN!Last year, McDonald’s began testing their Shakin’ Flavor Seasoning in St. Louis and in parts of California. It was originally offered with French fries, but was later an option with Chicken McNuggets. How the Shakin’ Flavor Seasoning works is explained in the image above.
French fry seasoning packets aren’t new to McDonald’s, they’re a popular item in the Asian market. Here in the U.S., the seasoning packets originally came in three flavors — Garlic Parmesan, Spicy Buffalo, and Zesty Ranch. But McDonald’s has also been testing a Chipotle BBQ flavor.
Testing has been going on for almost a year, but there hasn’t been any news of plans to roll out McDonald’s Shakin’ Flavor Seasoning nationwide.
If you’ve tried any of the flavors, share your thoughts in the comments.
(Thanks for the photo Benjamin!)Flux: A New Approach to System Intuition
Netflix Technology Blog Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 30, 2015
First level of Flux
On the Traffic and Chaos Teams at Netflix, our mission requires that we have a holistic understanding of our complex microservice architecture. At any given time, we may be called upon to move the request traffic of many millions of customers from one side of the planet to the other. More frequently, we want to understand in real time what effect a variable is having on a subset of request traffic during a Chaos Experiment. We require a tool that can give us this holistic understanding of traffic as it flows through our complex, distributed system.
The two use cases have some common requirements. We need:
Realtime data.
Data on the volume, latency, and health of requests.
Insight into traffic at the network edge.
The ability to drill into IPC traffic.
Dependency information about the microservices as requests travel through the system.
So far, these requirements are rather standard fare for a network monitoring dashboard. Aside from the actual amount of traffic that Netflix handles, you might find a tool at that accomplishes the above at any undifferentiated online service.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
In general, we assume that if anything is best represented numerically, then we don’t need to visualize it. If the best representation is a numerical one, then a visualization could only obscure a quantifiable piece of information that can be measured, compared, and acted upon. Anything that we can wrap in alerts or some threshold boundary should kick off some automated process. No point in ruining a perfectly good system by introducing a human into the mix.
Instead of numerical information, we want a tool that surfaces relevant information to a human, for situations that would be too onerous to create a heuristic. These situations require an intuition that we can’t codify.
If we want to be able to intuit decisions about the holistic state of the system, then we are going to need a tool that gives us an intuitive understanding of the system. The network monitoring dashboards that we are familiar with won’t suffice. The current industry tools present data and charts, but we want a something that will let us feel the traffic and the state of the system.
In trying to explain this requirement for a visceral, gut-level understanding of the system, we came up with a metaphor that helps illustrate the point. It’s absurd, but explanatory.
Let’s call it the “Pain Suit.”
Imagine a suit that is wired with tens of thousands of electrodes. Electrode bundles correspond to microservices within Netflix. When a Site Reliability Engineer is on call, they have to wear this suit. As a microservice experiences failures, the corresponding electrodes cause a painful sensation. We call this the “Pain Suit.”
Now imagine that you are wearing the Pain Suit for a few short days. You wake up one morning and feel a pain in your shoulder. “Of course,” you think. “Microservice X is misbehaving again.” It would not take you long to get a visceral sense of the holistic state of the system. Very quickly, you would have an intuitive understanding of the entire service, without having any numerical facts about any events or explicit alerts.
It is our contention that this kind of understanding, this mechanical proprioception, is not only the most efficient way for us to instantly have a holistic understanding, it is also the best way to surface relevant information in a vast amount of data to a human decision maker. Furthermore, we contend that even brief exposure to this type of interaction with the system leads to insights that are not easily attained in any other way.
Of course, we haven’t built a pain suit. [Not yet. ;-)]
Instead, we decided to take advantage of the brain’s ability to process massive amounts of visual information in multiple dimensions, in parallel, visually. We call this tool Flux.
In the home screen of Flux, we get a representation of all traffic coming into Netflix from the Internet, and being directed to one of our three AWS Regions. Below is a video capture of this first screen in Flux during a simulation of a Regional failover:
The circle in the center represents the Internet. The moving dots represent requests coming in to our service from the Internet. The three Regions are represented by the three peripheral circles. Requests are normally represented in the bluish-white color, but errors and fallbacks are indicated by other colors such as red.
In this simulation, you can see request errors building up in the region in the upper left [victim region] for the first twenty seconds or so. The cause of the errors could be anything, but the relevant effect is that we can quickly see that bad things are happening in the victim region.
Around twenty seconds into the video, we decide to initiate a traffic failover. For the following 20 seconds, the requests going to the victim region are redirected to the upper right region [savior region] via an internal proxy layer. We take this step so that we can programmatically control how much traffic is redirected to the savior region while we scale it up. In this situation we don’t have enough extra capacity running hot to instantly fail over, so scaling up takes some time.
The inter-region traffic from victim to savior increases while the savior region scales up. At that point, we switch DNS to point to the savior region. For about 10 seconds you see traffic to the victim region die down as DNS propagates. At this point, about 56 seconds in, nearly all of the victim region’s traffic is now pointing to the savior region. We hold the traffic there for about 10 seconds while we ‘fix’ the victim region, and then we revert the process.
The victim region has been fixed, and we end the demo with traffic more-or-less evenly distributed. You may have noticed that in this demonstration we only performed a 1:1 mapping of victim to savior region traffic. We will speak to more sophisticated failover strategies in future posts.
Results
Even before Flux v1.0 was up and running, when it was still in Alpha on a laptop, it found an issue in our production system. As we were testing real data, Justin noticed a stream that was discolored in one region. “Hey, what’s that?” led to a short investigation which revealed that our proxy layer had not scaled to a proper size on the most recent push in that region and was rejecting SSO requests. Flux in action!
Even a split-second glance at the Flux interface is enough to show us the health of the system. Without reading any numbers or searching for any particular signal, we instantly know by the color and motion of the elements on the screen whether the service is running properly. Of course if something is really wrong with the service, it will be highly visible. More interesting to us, we start to get a feeling when things are right in the system even before the disturbance is quantifiable.
Stay Tuned
This blog post is part of a series. In the next post on Flux, we will look at two layers that are deeper than the regional view, and talk specifically about the implementation. If you have thoughts on experiential tools like this or how to advance the state of the art in this field, we’d love to hear your feedback. Feel free to reach out to traffic@netflix.com.
— Traffic Team at Netflix
Luke Kosewski, Jeremy Tatelman, Justin Reynolds, Casey Rosenthal
See Also:Sen. Luther Strange Luther Johnson StrangeDomestic influence campaigns borrow from Russia’s playbook Overnight Defense: Senate bucks Trump with Yemen war vote, resolution calling crown prince'responsible' for Khashoggi killing | House briefing on Saudi Arabia fails to move needle | Inhofe casts doubt on Space Force Five things to watch in Mississippi Senate race MORE (R-Ala.) on Monday likened Roy Moore, his opponent in the Alabama Senate race, to former Missouri Rep. Todd Akin.
"There are a lot of people that think my opponent would be a Todd Akin, an anchor around the neck of the party for the next couple years," Strange said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
"I have to say, knowing him, that's probably a valid concern — it really is."
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Akin, a Republican, sparked controversy in 2012 for his comments on rape.
If it's "legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down," Akin said at the time.
He lost his Senate bid to Sen. Claire McCaskill Claire Conner McCaskillCORRECTED: Hawley used a state-owned car for campaign travel as AG: report Poll: 33% of Kentucky voters approve of McConnell McCaskill: Lindsey Graham 'has lost his mind' MORE (D-Mo.) after his remarks gained national attention.
Strange, who is backed by President Trump, also told the Examiner that Moore has a "Democrat record" on the Alabama Supreme Court.
"He's got the liberal record in terms of rule of law," Strange said.
"It's really ironic that some conservatives are siding with my opponent, who really has no conservative accomplishments. What has he actually done for the conservative movement?"
Trump during a radio interview Monday said a GOP primary win by Moore would open the door to a Democratic general election win.
“Ray will have a hard time. If Luther wins, the Democrats will hardly fight. If Ray wins, [Democrats] will pour in $30 million," he said, repeatedly referring to Moore by the wrong name.
He reiterated that Moore will have a hard time getting elected against a Democrat.
"Against Luther they won't even fight," he said.
The primary is in its final hours as voters get ready to head to the polls Tuesday. The general election is Dec. 12.AFTER more than five years of negotiations, representatives from 12 countries in Asia and the Americas finally struck a deal today on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious and contentious free-trade pact. It is the biggest and deepest multilateral trade deal in years, encompassing countries that account for 40% of the world’s economy. But it might prove even more important than that if it succeeds in its ambition to “define the rules of the road” for trade in Asia, as Michael Froman, America’s lead negotiator, put it.
Mr Froman’s office estimates that TPP will see more than 18,000 tariffs on American products reduced to zero. But tariffs, which have already been greatly reduced among TPP’s members, are not the most touted bit of the treaty. More important are the minimum standards for the protection of intellectual property, workers and the environment. All parties will be compelled to follow the International Labour Organisation’s basic principles on workers’ rights, for example. By the same token, countries that do not live up to the deal’s environmental rules can be pursued through the same dispute-settlement mechanism that will be used to adjudicate commercial grievances. There are even rules barring countries from favouring state-owned enterprises—a big step for the likes of Malaysia and Vietnam.
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Two leaders will be particularly pleased to see a deal done. For Barack Obama, TPP represents the first (and possibly only) lasting evidence of his administration’s “pivot” towards Asia. It shows America’s continued commitment to the region, and its unwillingness to cede primacy to China. China’s success in recruiting American allies as founding members of its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank earlier this year seems to have prompted America to redouble its efforts to square TPP away.
Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, sees in TPP a chance to help the “third arrow” of his plan for economic revitalisation hit its mark. Big interest groups such as Japan’s farmers will no longer be quite so cosseted. Meanwhile, Mr Abe hopes that the promise of greater market access for Japanese exporters, at a time when the yen is relatively weak, will generate faster economic growth. In particular, TPP should boost trade between America and Japan—something to celebrate, since the pair are the world’s biggest and third-biggest economies.
The stakes are lower for a group of other rich members—Australia, Canada, New Zealand—each of which nonetheless fought to extract concessions from America. Australia succeeded in trimming the period of protection from generic imitators that America demanded for biologic drugs from 12 years to eight; Canada preserved its quota system for various agricultural products, allowing only limited duty-free imports; New Zealand won greater access for its dairy exports.
The full implications of the deal are not yet known, however, since TPP has been negotiated under a thick blanket of secrecy. This was intended to make it easier for the signatories to offer concessions without being pilloried at home. But it has stoked the anxieties of industry groups on both sides of the Pacific. It will be weeks before the agreement’s 30 chapters are translated and published in full.
Moreover, lawmakers in the 12 participating countries must now approve the agreement. This should be straightforward in places like Japan, where the ruling party has a commanding majority. But Canada faces a knife-edge election on 19th October. One of the three main parties is campaigning against TPP, arguing that it will kill farm jobs.
The biggest row will be in America, where Congress has 90 days to review the deal before putting it to an up-or-down vote, with no amendments. Although Republicans, traditionally the party of free trade, have a majority in both houses of Congress, they are divided on TPP’s merits. Donald Trump, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination next year, has described it as “an attack on America’s business”. Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic presidential contender, has also refused to endorse the deal, albeit not quite so flamboyantly.
Such opposition is ill-advised. The slowing of the Chinese economy and a tepid global recovery from the financial crisis have led to a long-term slowdown in world trade. Indeed by some measures, trade is actually declining. This is worrying because trade remains the most reliable way for poor countries to become richer. TPP would undoubtedly help spur it, especially for the poorer members of the club. Moreover, TPP’s members claim that they are open to other countries joining the deal. That holds out the prospect of TPP not only freeing trade, but also of instituting a more predictable, rules- based business environment, even in places currently excluded from the deal. Its biggest failing—that it does not include China—could evaporate, if TPP’s members have the courage to push on.The video will start in 8 Cancel
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Footage captured at the Calbuco volcano eruption in Chile has caused controversy - after viewers spotted a 'UFO' in the sky among the plumes of dust and ash.
The unidentified flying object appears to hover in mid-air to the left of the eruption for a few seconds, flashing against the ash filled sky.
Moments later, the mysterious object disappeared.
The clip was uploaded to YouTube on April 23 by Ana Luisa Cid and has already clocked up more than 200,000 views.
Ana wrote: "Luminous object near the plume, captured on 22 April 2015.
"Some believe it may be a drone or a police helicopter.
(Image: YouTube)
"What is striking, in my opinion, is that the object remained static, then vanished."
Calbuco, like 90% of all volcanoes, lies within the “Ring of Fire”, where tectonic plates converge along the edges of the Pacific Ocean.
The plates are rock slabs which make up Earth’s surface, floating on a layer of molten rock under the crust.
Eruptions happen when gas dissolves under pressure within magma, until it cannot be contained.
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Calbuco had lay dormant for 40 years but dramatically erupted into life - the first on Wednesday afternoon followed by a second powerful blast.
Mr Rothery said: “When then tectonic plates move it creates gases which then bubbles to the surface sparking the eruption.
“It’s a bit like shaking a can of beer and when you pull the tab, it foams up.”
The Calbuco volcano is one of the most active in Chile but its eruption took officials in the area by surprise.
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Alejandro Verges, an emergency director for the region, said Calbuco had not been under any special form of observation.
People in the nearby town of Ensenada were ordered to evacuate their homes. Schools in the area were also evacuated and flights cancelled.
The nearby city of Puerto Montt, gateway to the popular Patagonia region, was been blanketed in a cloud of ash as traffic jams grew and petrol stations jammed.
The town of Puerto Varas was also under a state of alert and neighbouring Argentina ordered emergency procedures in place for the city of Bariloche.
(Image: Getty)
Puerto Varas Mayor Gervoy Paredes said residents were “very, very frightened”.
One woman said:“ I have never seen this before. It scares you in the beginning. You start to wonder what is going to happen to you.
“ Everyone starts to think about gathering water and I don’t know what.
Interior Minister Rodrigo Penailillo called on people affected to “remain calm and stay informed”.
Scientists estimate that more than 260,000 people have died in the past 300 years from volcanic eruptions.
About 1,900 volcanoes are considered to be active and likely to erupt again.A wrongful-death lawsuit filed Monday claims that actor Jim Carrey supplied his late girlfriend with the powerful prescription drugs she used to commit suicide.
Cathriona White, 30, was found dead in a Sherman Oaks, California, residence in September 2015. The lawsuit, filed by her husband, Mark Burton, in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleges that Carrey used a fake name and “his immense wealth and celebrity status to illegally obtain and distribute highly addictive and, in this case deadly, controlled substances.”
Burton, through the lawsuit, also alleges Carrey supplied White with prescription drugs despite knowing she was “prone to depression” and had previous suicide attempts.
Jim Carey said in a statement Monday he “will not tolerate this heartless attempt to exploit me or the woman I loved.”
“It would be easy for me to get in a back room with this man’s lawyer and make this go away, but there are some moments in life when you have to stand up and defend your honour against the evil in this world,” Carrey said in a statement.
Shortly after White’s death, reports emerged that White was still married but had been estranged from her husband.
Burton attorney Michael Avenatti told The Washington Post that White and Burton had been married since January 2013, but the lawyer declined to comment on the nature of their relationship at the time of her death “because it distracts from what this case is really about, which is Mr. Carrey’s conduct.”
The lawsuit alleges Carrey violated California’s Drug Dealer Liability Act, which allows people to file civil lawsuits against suppliers for harm caused by illegal drug use, and seeks unspecified damages. An autopsy showed White “had taken her own life by overdosing on a lethal amount of prescription drugs,” including Ambien, Propranolol and Percocet, all of which Carrey got using the alias “Arthur King,” according to the lawsuit.
Shortly after White’s death, Carrey said in a statement that he was “shocked and deeply saddened by the passing of my sweet Cathriona. She was a truly kind and delicate Irish flower, too sensitive for this soil, to whom loving and being loved was all that sparkled.”
The actor attended White’s funeral, and a photo published by People shows him helping to carry her casket.
But the lawsuit, which seeks burial and funeral expenses, claims that Carrey offered to help pay for the funeral (a story line that surfaced in TMZ) and never did.
White, an Irish makeup artist, had been romantically linked with Carrey on and off since 2012.
Details from her autopsy were reported by various outlets this summer, including what drugs were found in her system and a note she had written to Carrey. At the time, the actor publicly lamented the release of her autopsy information.
On Monday, Carrey said in a statement that White’s “troubles were born long before I met her and sadly her tragic end was beyond anyone’s control. I really hope that some day soon people will stop trying to profit from this and let her rest in peace.”During a Q&A session at today's shareholder meeting held at Apple's Cupertino campus, Apple CEO Tim Cook reassured investors that Apple is still very much focused on its professional customers and has plans to "do more" in the pro area."You will see us do more in the pro area," Cook said. "The pro area is very important to us. The creative area is very important to us in particular."Cook's comments were directed towards the Mac, Apple Watch, services, and iPad, but may reassure those who are worried that Apple is abandoning its desktop Mac lineup, especially the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro has not been updated since December of 2013, going more than 1,100 days without a refresh.Other desktop Macs have also gone more than a year without an update. The iMac last saw a refresh in October of 2015, more than 500 days ago, while the Mac mini was last updated in October of 2014, over 860 days ago."Don't think something we've done or something that we're doing that isn't visible yet is a signal that our priorities are elsewhere," Cook also told investors.There have been no hints that a Mac mini or Mac Pro refresh is on the horizon, but Apple is rumored to be planning to introduce new iMacs in 2017, perhaps as early as March. Future iMacs are expected to be updated with USB-C ports and AMD graphics chips.At the meeting, Cook was also questioned about a potential convergence between the Mac and iPad lines, in the form of a touchscreen Mac. While Cook said he didn't want to comment on future product plans, he again reiterated that he sees the iPad and the Mac as two separate product lines that serve different purposes."Expect us to do more and more where people will view it as a laptop replacement, but not a Mac replacement - the Mac does so much more," he said. "To merge these worlds, you would lose the simplicity of one, and the power of the other."Much of the rest of the shareholder meeting consisted of voting on several proposals and reiterating information that was previously shared during Apple's January earnings call. While no shareholder proposals passed - including those calling for increased diversity and more transparency about donations - Apple reelected its board of directors, approved board compensation, and approved Ernst and Young as the company's accounting firm.Despite border closures, flight bans, cordoning off the sick (and healthy), and rubber (and live) bullets and tear gas on 'protesters'; the world's worst outbreak of Ebola just keeps spreading, now to a sixth African nation. Just day after Congo (5th nation) reported cases of Ebola, as The BBC reports, Senegal's health minister confirmed the first case of Ebola in his nation yesterday and Bloomberg confirms 20 more people are "under surveillance." Meanwhile, in Guinea a Red Cross official said riots had broken out in the nation's 2nd largest city over rumors that health workers had infected people with the virus; and Nigerians are protesting plans to build isolation units in some local clinics. "contained"
Senegal becomes the 6th African nation with Ebola after Congo, Nigeria, Guinea, Sierra-Leone, and Liberia
As The BBC reports, Senegal had tried to block this...
Senegal had previously closed its border with Guinea in an attempt to halt the spread of Ebola, but the frontier is porous. It had also banned flights and ships from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone - the three worst-hit countries.
But...
*EBOLA-INFECTED MAN ENTERED SENEGAL BY CAR FROM GUINEA: MINISTER
Awa Marie Coll Seck told reporters on Friday that a young man from Guinea had travelled to Senegal despite having been infected with the virus.
The man was immediately placed in quarantine, she added.
For now he is'stable'...
*EBOLA CASE IN SENEGAL IS STABLE, NO FEVER, MAY RECOVER
But...
*ABOUT 20 PEOPLE UNDER SURVEILLANCE FOR EBOLA: SENEGAL MINISTER
And...
*SENEGAL WILL REQUEST EBOLA DRUG VIA WORLD HEALTH ORG.: MINISTER
* * *
In Guinea, a 24-hour curfew has been imposed in the second city, Nzerekore, because of a riot after the main market was sprayed with disinfectant in an attempt to halt the spread of the virus.
The exact cause of the riot is not clear - some people reportedly feared the spray would spread Ebola, while other chanted: "Ebola is a lie". Police responded by firing tear gas. "A rumor, which was totally false, spread that we had sprayed the market in order to transmit the virus to locals," Traore said. "People revolted and resorted to violence, prompting soldiers to intervene." The city is the capital of the Forest Region, where the Ebola epidemic has its epicentre - near the town of Gueckedou. However the BBC's Alhassan Sillah in Guinea says the town has miraculously remained free of Ebola so far.
And Nigerians are not happy...
In Nigeria, meanwhile, some have pushed back against government plans to build isolation units in their neighborhoods, even saying they would sooner burn Ebola centers down than allow them to operate. In the northern city of Kaduna, hundreds of people on Wednesday protested plans to convert sections of a local clinic into an Ebola treatment center. Many carried signs that said: "No Ebola in our hospital."
* * *
Much worse than expected and is crushing Africa's GDP...We are beyond happy to announce that we'll be releasing our entire collection of off-centered brews to beer lovers in Missouri, expanding our distribution footprint to 34 markets! It's been a long time coming and we're stoked to be heading to the Show-Me State!
There's one Dogfish fan that has gone above and beyond in his pursuit of bringing our beers to Missouri, launching a daily, five-year Twitter campaign with one goal in mind, bringing off-centered ales to his home state. In 2012, Dogfish super-fan and all around super-guy, Skylar Wallace, embarked on a tweet-a-day crusade! He would post a daily Twitter update to our page or about his devotion to Dogfish in an effort to show love and loyalty to his beloved, off-centered brewery, and hopefully convince us to begin distributing in the state. After more than 1600 tweets and daily #DFB2KC (Dogfish Beer to Kansas City) posts, the mission was realized.
“I am so happy that you guys are finally coming to Missouri,” says Skylar. “Sam and his incredible passion for Dogfish beer took root in me, and I owe my love of craft beer to him - I couldn’t get past the contagious passion he showed towards beer and wanted to try and be a part of it in any way I could.” Skylar and Sam met in Kansas City in 2014 and the two hit it off, sharing stories of craft beer love.
“I wanted to give Skylar a Dogfish shirt when we met but I didn’t have a spare, so |
, the results translate past Facebook. According to Van Der Heide, the results can be applied to all other social networking websites. However, an interesting development comes when looking at how job applicants can be judged by their profile picture. With that in mind, job seekers must know that profile pictures— particularly abnormal ones— will bring more attention to their profiles.
"If the photograph fits that image, people have little reason to question his or her judgments about this person’s characteristics," Van Der Heide said.
Reach BusinessNewsDaily staff writer David Mielach at Dmielach@techmedianetwork.com. Follow him on Twitter @D_M89.The stuff of nightmares has hit the streets of Bakersfield, where police say they’re fielding reports from members of the public freaked out by clowns standing in public holding machetes and baseball bats.
One teen was arrested on suspicion of annoying a minor after taking the prank too far. Police say he dressed as a clown and chased other teens, albeit without a weapon, leaving one of them “visibly shaken.”
The prankster allegedly admitted to copying the likeness of the “Wasco Clown” — so named for the small San Joaquin Valley town — although with one key difference.
In Wasco, the clown is apparently part of a husband and wife art project, photos of which have gone viral on social media. (A similar image went viral around the world in the form of the Northampton clown in Britain.)
Click here to read the full story on LATimes.com.Ryan X Charles, the founder of the Yours Network on August 22 reported that the media platform that is based on blockchain technology will be changing from litecoin to bitcoin cash. Keeping in mind that the group just moved from the bitcoin cash to litecoin because it was not able to process micro-transactions.
Less Micropayments and Better Results
The rewarding social media platform, that offers payment incentives in return for articles with picture, stories, audio and so on, has just been decided that will be going completely on-chain with the bitcoin cash protocol.
This information was announced by R. X Charles two months after the Yours Network was soft launched even that initially bitcoin’s protocols were used but the micro-transaction fees were not worth for their project. Instead, moved to Litecoin so the fees for the network would lower and the users would have a better experience during the social network utilization. Finally, Charles moved the whole project bitcoin cash chain as it will:
“allow all the product experiments we’ve been dreaming of. We’re going to be the biggest company on bitcoin cash in three weeks,”
Less Code Complications
After being asked/interviewed by news.bitcoin.com why the reason of the change would be, Charles stated:
“Litecoin has fees of about five cents and no plan to scale on-chain, litecoin will eventually face the same problem as bitcoin.” We spent over a year developing a trustless payment channel network similar to the Lightning Network except it’s not dependent on Segwit. We’ve realized that we can dramatically reduce our code complexity by going on-chain with bitcoin cash.”
When it comes to the time-frame as how long it will take for everything to be implanted Ryan X Charles replied:
“You will see it a lot sooner than three weeks – In addition to keeping the platform on-chain, the developer explains that the Yours protocol can reduce its code size by at least 10x. We were able to archive our micro-payments system – we don’t currently need it on BCC. We can broadcast our transactions on-chain with low fees, even just one cent”
On the other side, for the next Segwit on November the founder believes and hopes that everything will be turning out good.
“We wish them the best of luck. Unfortunately, bitcoin fees are too expensive for us, even with payment channels, because the cost of onboarding and offboarding users is too high,” Charles adds.
Read Also:
– For more Cryptocurrency market related Updates and News Follow us on our Facebook and Twitterpages.The student protests that have swept through Claremont McKenna College (CMC) over the past few days—and the ensuing fallout—have made us disappointed in many of those involved.
First, former Dean Mary Spellman. We are sorry that your career had to end this way, as the email in contention was a clear case of good intentions being overlooked because of poor phrasing. However, we are disappointed in you as well. We are disappointed that you allowed a group of angry students to bully you into resignation. We are disappointed that you taught Claremont students that reacting with emotion and anger will force the administration to act. We are disappointed that when two students chose to go on a hunger strike until you resigned, you didn’t simply say, “so what?” If they want to starve themselves, that’s fine—you don’t owe them your job. We are disappointed that you and President Chodosh put up with students yelling and swearing at you for an hour. You could have made this a productive dialogue, but instead you humored the students and allowed them to get caught up in the furor.
Above all, we are disappointed that you and President Chodosh weren’t brave enough to come to the defense of a student who was told she was “derailing” because her opinions regarding racism didn’t align with those of the mob around her. Nor were you brave enough to point out that these protesters were perfectly happy to use this student to further their own agenda, but turned on her as soon as they realized she wasn’t supporting their narrative. These protesters were asking you to protect your students, but you didn’t even defend the one who needed to be protected right in front of you.
Second, President Chodosh. We were disappointed to see you idly stand by and watch students berate, curse at, and attack Dean Spellman for being a “racist.” For someone who preaches about “leadership” and “personal and social responsibility,” your actions are particularly disappointing. You let your colleague, someone who has been helping your administration for the past three years and the college for six years, be publicly mocked and humiliated. Why? Because you were afraid. You were afraid that students would also mock and humiliate you if you defended Dean Spellman, so you let her be thrown under the bus. You were so afraid that it only took you five minutes to flip-flop on their demand for a temporary “safe space” on campus. Your fear-driven action ( or lack thereof) only further reinforced the fear among the student body to speak out against this movement. We needed your leadership more than ever this week, and you failed us miserably.
Third, ASCMC President Will Su. As the representative of CMC’s entire student body, we are disappointed in you for the manner in which you called for the resignation of junior class president Kris Brackmann and for so quickly caving in to the demands of a few students without consulting the student body as a whole. If you truly cared about representing all of CMC’s interests, you would have at the very least solicited opinions from outside of the movement and your Executive Board. You have shut down any room for debate among the student body with your full endorsement of this movement and its demands, failing to give concerned students an opportunity to speak. We are disappointed that you did not allow for any time for reflection before making your quick executive decisions to announce a student-wide endorsement of this movement and to grant these students a temporary “safe space” in the ASCMC offices.
To our fellow Claremont students, we are disappointed in you as well. We are ashamed of you for trying to end someone’s career over a poorly worded email. This is not a political statement––this is a person’s livelihood that you so carelessly sought to destroy. We are disappointed that you chose to scream and swear at your administrators. That is not how adults solve problems, and your behavior reflects poorly on all of us here in Claremont. This is not who we are and this is not how we conduct ourselves, but this is the image of us that has now reached the national stage.
We are disappointed in your demands. If you want to take a class in “ethnic, racial, and sexuality theory,” feel free to take one, but don’t force such an ideologically driven course on all CMC students. If the dearth of such courses at CMC bothers you, maybe you should have chosen a different school. If students chose to attend Caltech and then complained about the lack of literature classes, that’s on them. And though it wouldn’t hurt to have a more diverse faculty, the demand that CMC increase the number of minority faculty members either rests on the assumption that CMC has a history of discriminating against qualified professors of color, or, more realistically, it advocates for the hiring of less qualified faculty based simply on the fact that they belong to marginalized groups. A hiring practice of this sort would not benefit any CMC students, yourselves included.
We are disappointed in the fact that your movement has successfully managed to convince its members that anyone who dissents does so not for intelligent reasons, but due to moral failure or maliciousness. We are disappointed that you’ve used phrases like “silence is violence” to not only demonize those who oppose you, but all who are not actively supporting you. We are most disappointed, however, in the rhetoric surrounding “safe spaces.” College is the last place that should be a safe space. We come here to learn about views that differ from our own, and if we aren’t made to feel uncomfortable by these ideas, then perhaps we aren’t venturing far enough outside of our comfort zone. We would be doing ourselves a disservice to ignore viewpoints solely on the grounds that they may make us uncomfortable, and we would not be preparing ourselves to cope well with adversity in the future. Dealing with ideas that make us uncomfortable is an important part of growing as students and as people, and your ideas will inhibit opportunities for that growth.
We are adults, and we need to be mature enough to take ownership of and responsibility for our feelings, rather than demanding that those around us cater to our individual needs. The hypocrisy of advocating for “safe spaces” while creating an incredibly unsafe space for President Chodosh, former Dean Spellman, the student who was “derailing,” and the news media representatives who were verbally abused unfortunately seemed to soar over many of your heads.
Lastly, we are disappointed in students like ourselves, who were scared into silence. We are not racist for having different opinions. We are not immoral because we don’t buy the flawed rhetoric of a spiteful movement. We are not evil because we don’t want this movement to tear across our campuses completely unchecked.
We are no longer afraid to be voices of dissent.
_____________BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) – A slim majority of the respondents to a reader poll on Ma'an's Arabic-language news site said sending Palestinian firefighters to help battle Israel's fire was "disgraceful."
Firefighters from more than 16 countries helped to extinguish the blaze, the worst in Israel's history, which broke out on Dec. 2 and spread through the Carmel forest for four days.
Of 48,870 readers who responded to the 7-day poll, 50.3 percent (24,524) described Palestinians' participation as a disgrace, but 48.7 percent (23,761) said sending Palestinian firefighters to help was civilized and a humanitarian duty.
Palestinian civil defense crews were dispatched to Israel to bolster the country's woefully inadequate fire service.
Bethlehem's civil defense chief Ibrahim Ayish, whose crews were sent to Israel, said the orders to help came from President Mahmoud Abbas that he was "proud to participate in the humanitarian work of firefighting."
"We're working alongside the Israeli team, which knows the area very well," he said at the time. "We were received respectfully. After all, we're dealing with a humanitarian crisis which knows no borders. Neither walls nor checkpoints will stop us."
According to a statement from Abbas' office, the president received a phone call from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanking him for his assistance.
The death toll from the forest fire rose to 43 on Saturday as another prison guard died of his injuries, the Israeli news site Ynet reported.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
UPDATE: Snowbird's Oktoberfest will have beer.
The Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control unanimously voted to approve the event Tuesday morning.
Also, a package liquor agency has been approved for the Snowbird resort.
When an area is too small to warrant a state store, private and corporate groups contract with the state to open a liquor store.
SALT LAKE CITY -- State lawmakers grilled Utah's liquor control agency over its rules and policies that could lead to "Oktoberfest without beer."
In a hearing before the Utah State Legislature's Administrative Rules Committee on Monday, lawmakers questioned why the Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission was scrutinizing who gets so-called "single event permits," generating international headlines.
"The commission seems to bore in on issues which are not particularly law enforcement-related, but manage to turn Utah into the laughing stock of the world," said Sen. Jim Dabakis, D-Salt Lake City.
FOX 13 first reported in May that the DABC was scrutinizing how it hands out single-event permits for festivals and other events. Liquor agency commissioners were looking at whether the events being held really were community events, or just money-makers for the business hosting them.
Snowbird, which sought a permit for its annual "BrewFest," raised concerns that it could doom their wildly popular Oktoberfest. Snowbird submitted their applications for Oktoberfest on Thursday, Petilos told FOX 13. The full commission was expected to vote on it later this month.
Appearing before lawmakers on Monday, DABC Commissioner John Nielsen said they were reviewing their rules, to comply with what the Utah State Legislature intended.
"Sometimes those rules create more confusion than they do help," he said.
DABC Commissioners planned to review their policies on granting or denying single-event permits beginning Tuesday. The Utah State Legislature may also become involved during the next session.
"I think what we've been moving towards, legislatively, and putting into action over the past number of years is to create more hospitality and not hostility," said Senate Minority Leader Gene Davis, D-Salt Lake City.
DABC Director Sal Petilos told the committee they follow the rules and statutes passed by the legislature. Lawmakers pressed him on what had changed to prompt such scrutiny.
"Given the history of DABC, I wanted to make sure we were in compliance," he said, referring to a series of scandals that rocked the agency in previous years.
Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Sandy, said the situation created a "perfect storm" of bad publicity for the state. He urged the DABC to consult with the legislature about intent.
"That's just a word of advice from a Monday-morning quarterback," he said. "As you look at rewriting the rule to avoid this international attention to 'Utah as a place you don't want to vacation,' if you would give us feedback as a legislature on things to make your job easier to accomplish things."
Throughout the hour-long hearing, DABC staffers insisted they were acting on what the legislature passed and intended, with lawmakers countering that they were frustrated with headlines mocking Utah's liquor laws.
Sen. Mark Madsen, R-Saratoga Springs, made a bold statement by suggesting it was time Utah got out of the liquor control business.
"Every time government embarks on a social engineering quest, there are always consequences," he said.
Other lawmakers did not appear to share his sentiment.
"That's best left for another argument," Sen. Stephenson replied.
See the list of single event/temporary beer permits approved and denied by the DABC since May 2014:Whoever came up with the brilliant idea of saving room for dessert must have hailed from Vancouver. As the West Coast city continues to cement its position as the country’s vegan mecca—okay, so as a resident, I’m a little biased—one can’t help but think it might be the sweet delicacies following every show-stopping culinary triumph that keeps elevating Vancouver’s veg restaurants from noteworthy to knockout. To celebrate the rainy city’s glowing (and growing) vegan cuisine scene, here’s a brilliant baker’s dozen (in no particular order): 13 of Vancouver’s best and brightest vegan mains and their sinfully delicious confectionary conclusions. What could possibly be better than following up a bold veg dinner with a delicate and decadent dessert? Absolutely nothing.
1. Loving Hut’s BBQ Onion Ring Cheese Burger and High Crow Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookie
In fall 2011, this vegan comfort-food cart burst onto the scene and had omnivore bloggers fooled by its mile-high sandwiches dripping in signature sauces. While the Crispy Chick’n Burger is a favorite, the BBQ Onion Ring Burger is easily Vancouver’s definitive veggie burger. Expect a veggie patty topped with tangy-sweet barbecue and ketchup sauce, onion rings, and all the regular burger fixings smothered in cheese sauce and served up on a fluffy bun. The only way to follow this belt-busting burger is with a sweet and simple gluten-free chocolate chip cookie carried right at the cart, courtesy of High Crow Gluten-Free Foods. The cookie’s doughy texture has fresh-out-of-the-oven appeal, and the taste is bang-on classic chocolate chip.
2. Organic Lives Pad Thai and Heavenly Apple Pie
The raw food restaurant has such a devoted following that it started a line of pantry foods, but by and large, the fresh organic eats in its Granville street location are what bring in Vancouverites searching for healthy, raw noshes that still pack a flavorful punch. The Pad Thai combines fresh Young Thai coconut meat from the company’s partner farms with kelp noodles, fresh herbs, and perfectly-chosen spices in a sauce inspired by its life-changing coconut water. The only way to get past the loss of having just finished this amazing dish is to follow it with the Heavenly Apple Pie. The crust is composed of delicately layered, paper-thin apple slices dusted with just the right amount of sweet-enhancing spices, achieving a flaky effect many thought impossible in raw cooking.
3. Wallflower Modern Diner’s Mac ‘n Cheesey and Vegan Crème Brûlée
It’s no wonder People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals named Wallflower Modern Diner’s Vegan Mac ‘n Cheesey among their top five best vegan macaroni and cheese dishes. Paired with a refreshing green salad, the homey dish combines perfectly cooked pasta in a creamy sauce with a generous topping of vegan cheese. And while crème brûlée may seem like an overwhelming follow-up, the classic torched treat comes up light at Wallflower.
4. Gorilla Food’s Ital Veggie Pizza and Dark Raw Chocolate Fudge
Proof that raw vegan pizza doesn’t have to come on a cracker-like crust, the Ital Veggie Pizza starts with a substantial base made of sprouted seeds, buckwheat, carrot, and flax and layers sundried tomato herb sauce under tenderized kale and the café’s walnut cheese crumble. This is the raw version of deep dish, and it delivers. As does the house made Dark Raw Chocolate Fudge, which has chocoholics lingering around the dessert counter daily.
5. Indigo Foods Ukrainian Perogies and Raw Chocolate Fondue
This tiny, mostly raw establishment with Ukrainian roots packs incredible flavors into every single dish. While the Zaatar Crackers have a zesty spice unlike any other, the Perogies just can’t be beat. With dough so thin you can see the filling through it, and a plate accented with smoked mushrooms and drizzled with garlic cream sauce, both the mashed potato and sauerkraut varieties are so stellar a combo plate is highly recommended. As is a second visit, so proper attention can be paid to the glory that is the Raw Chocolate Fondue. One of the dip-able sides is raw, dairy-free ice-cream truffle centers. Need I say more?
6. The Naam’s Naam Dragon Bowl and Dutch Apple-Cranberry Pie
Vancouver’s oldest natural foods restaurant may have been around since 1968, but that doesn’t mean the dishes are getting old. The namesake macrobiotic Dragon Bowl is a heaping dish of the most delectable steamed veggies dressed in peanut sauce and the establishment’s famous miso gravy. A slice of the sweet yet tart Dutch Apple-Cranberry Pie is the ultimate cozy conclusion to a heartwarming meal.
7. Bandidas Taqueria’s Connie’s Burrito and Two-Bite Vegan Brownie
As if it weren’t enough that standout menu items such as the Connie can be given a vegan shakedown, the unconventional flavors of the Bandidas menu are complimented with dessert-chalkboard regular the Two-Bite Vegan Brownie. First, Connie has devoted diners lining up for more than an hour. Ground walnuts, apple salsa, Daiya cheese, and roasted red pepper sauce round out this robust choice with a base of purple cabbage and pinto beans. Get it baked and follow with the aforementioned brownies if you want to stay on speaking terms with the VN staff.
8. Nuba’s Le Petit Feast and Vegan Baklava
Vegan options abound at the Lebanese-style restaurant, but the Le Petit Feast sharing platter tops the list. Featuring hummus bursting with flavor, a deliciously herby taboulleh salad, creamy baba ganooj, and homemade pickles, the dish comes with warm pita and pairs perfectly with the Najib’s Special (a crusted cauliflower dish) and Garden Falafel. Following the entrées with a round of Lebanese Pastries is an intelligent choice, especially given that this second sharing plate features Vegan Baklava!
9. The Juice Truck’s Apron Juice and Raw Chai Brownie
As fresh as you can get, the Juice Truck parks in Vancouver’s historic Gastown and has residents and tourists alike clamoring for a taste of the Apron Juice, a seriously enticing combination of pineapple pressed with orange, spinach, mint, lemon, coconut water, aloe vera, and himalayan rock salt. Bam! Mind and taste buds blown! A juice this good can only be followed by a splendor such as the Raw Chai Brownie. Dates mingle with raw cacao powder, hazelnut, coconut oil, ground flax seed, and maple syrup, while vanilla and chai spices create a warm and subtle spice.
10. The Foundation’s Satay Salad and My Sugar Pie
The Vancouver hangout sits unassuming on Main Street, quietly hoarding a plethora of dumbfounding lunch and dinner dishes. Genius in its simplicity, the Satay Salad assembles simple components of “mixed-up” greens, broccoli, and braised tofu in a warm, organic peanut sauce. Passing up a chance to follow it with the Quebec-inspired My Sugar Pie would be a big, big mistake—especially for sugar hounds.
11. The Acorn’s Zucchini Main and Peanut Dessert
Newly opened The Acorn is taking Vancouver’s veggie scene by storm. With food that rivals some of the best vegan fine dining out there, its best to make it a three-course evening. The Kale Salad is easily the best vegan Caesar in the whole city, thanks to touches like smoked paprika croutons and crispy capers, and must be followed with the Zucchini main. The superb veggie receives a tagliatelle treatment and a dressing of cashew rosé sauce, transforming a little squash into a plate worthy of true pasta lovers. Not to be outdone, the Peanut dessert is swift surrender to chocolate-peanut bliss. Chocolate-peanut terrine, berries, and coconut whip converge with raspberry coulis and lemon thyme on a little plate of heaven.
12. East is East’s Silk Route Feast Tasting Menu and Chocolate Pudding
The best way to start a trip to the silk route is to accept a complimentary cup of East is East’s warm and spicy vegan chai tea. Sip, enjoy, and choose two (bottomless) selections for the Silk Route Feast tasting menu: a warm cup of dhal soup and accompanying green salad paired with boulani, roti, and Afghan and coconut rice. The Alu Gobi and Thai Tofu options are not to be missed. The vegan Chocolate Pudding will cool any lingering heat, while offering a subtle reminder that you haven’t actually left Vancouver.
13. Edible Flours Donuts and Custom-Built Cake with Peanut Butter Icing
OK, so the adorable confectionary only offers dessert options, but who can say no to doughnuts for dinner? The regular or gluten-free chocolate and vanilla pastries are chocolate dipped or topped with a sweet raspberry, classic maple, or dreamy vanilla glaze. Lastly, take the cake and order a custom creation of chocolate hazelnut with fresh fruit filling and the not-to-be-missed finale, peanut butter icing on your way home. Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it too?
Photo via acornrestaurant.caby Ahmed Humayun
We are overwhelmed by choices and decisions in our integrated, interdependent, information-rich world. We often find it difficult to identify what is important, to solve or even ameliorate pressing problems. We may live in a time of unsurpassed abundance – at least, in the advanced, industrialized regions of the world – but we are unequipped to deal with the implications of unprecedented choice. Thanks to the Internet and social media, vast rivers of information course through laptops and tablets and smartphones, constantly threatening to drown us. In this type of world, how should we – as individuals, professionals, and nations – focus on the relevant information, attack the right problems, generate creative alternatives, and make effective decisions?
In Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World, Donald Sull, a senior lecturer at MIT, and Kathleen Eisenhardt, a professor at Stanford's School of Engineering, locate the answer in ‘simple rules'. Their starting point is the work of Warren Weaver, an early 20th century leader in the science of complexity who categorized the stages of scientific eras as a progression through simple, uncertain, and complex problems. ‘Simple' problems can be addressed through powerful formulas that relate a few variables, such as force = mass x acceleration, while in ‘uncertain' problems, probability and statistics are used to predict the average behavior of large numbers of things.
This leaves untouched the third and final class of problem – the ‘complex' problem, which dominates the era in which we now live. As Sull and Eisenhardt write: ‘Scientists can predict the path of two billiard balls with precision, and the average behavior of two million gas particles. But what about the messy middle ground, where twenty or thirty components interact with one another in unexpected ways?' It is this middle ground, the terrain of the complex problem, that simple rules can help navigate. Instead of throwing complex solutions at complex problems, the best response is simplicity.
What are ‘simple rules'? You sort of know them when you see them, though Sull and Eisenhardt identify the general principles that appear to apply across many of these cases. Successful simple rules are few in number, customized to a particular context, applied to a well defined activity or decision, and offer just the right mix between guidance and discretion. When it comes to collective behavior, simple rules are easier to remember and implement, especially when we are not at our best. We are most in need of rules to optimize effort when we are weak, not when we are strong.
Sull and Eisenhardt carve up the universe of rules into decisions and processes. Decision rules structure choices, and include boundary rules (what should you choose when confronted by multiple alternatives?), prioritization rules (how should you sort and rank options?), and stopping rules (when should you stop doing something?). Process rules include how-to-rules, such as coordination rules (how should you guide interactions among members of a system?) and timing rules (when should you take action?
Sull and Eisenhardt argue by example, distilling a vast number of intriguing facts, case studies, and anecdotes from a wide range of industries and disciplines that illustrate the characteristics of effective simple rules. They identify the operation of simple rules in butterfly mating strategies, product strategies in the robotics industry, strategies to deal with insomnia, effective dietary decisions, improving online dating hit rates, bail decisions in the U.S. judicial system, the success of comedian Tina Fey, and the design of commuter-rail networks in Tokyo.
In one example of a boundary rule, Sull and Eisenhardt show that burglars disregard a wide range of potential considerations in choosing to target a house, such as the presence of a security system or tough locks. Instead, they focus on shying away from homes with cars parked outside, ‘the single most reliable predictor of occupancy.' In another example that demonstrates a prioritization rule, they point out that ancient Romans had to contend with a vast, conflicting legal code that had accreted over hundreds of years of empire. But in 426 AD, rules on the use of historical judicial opinions were specified. The first rule confined citations of past precedent to the five most eminent jurists in Roman history, with four follow on rules about what to do if those judges agreed, disagreed, were split, and so on.
Sull and Eisenhardt then trace out how effective simple rules can be developed and when these rules should be broken. They maintain that these rules have as much applicability to individual problems as to group problems, to business strategy as much as to self improvement. Indeed, one can easily see the utility in using the principles of simple rules to structure a wide range of problems.
Simple rules work because they aren't as simple as they seem. It takes a considerable amount of effort to develop simple rules inductively, based on experimentation, adaptation, and learning from the experiences of others. The success of simple rules derives from deeper reasons not immediately apparent, such as their capacity to compress insight and capture correlated information. (For example, a simple rule used by an American entrepreneur to plan his international market expansion strategy is to pick English speaking markets. It turns out this rule is ‘actually a proxy for several other variables that were related to successful growth'). And simple rules often outperform complicated models, which work well when there is a lot of data and the underlying causal relationships are understood, but are less effective when these conditions are lacking.
Sull and Einhardt have written a fascinating, thought provoking book. In one sense, their notion of simple rules is just another one way of reemphasizing the importance of effective problem structuring, whether it comes to the making of decisions or the erection of processes to execute tasks. In order to be even minimally efficient, we all rely on such heuristics, consciously or otherwise, in navigating our complex world. Their contribution is to take what is often implicit and make it explicit, by defining the characteristics of simple rules and identifying a range of brainstorming procedures that can help us derive and implement them.
***
While Sull and Einhardt cover an enormous amount of territory in discussing the applications of simple rules, one key area of human life is conspicuous for its relative absence: politics and government. At the outset, they argue that the unique importance of simple rules derives from their effectiveness at solving complex, unprecedented global problems – they refer to the 2008 financial crisis, climate change, the transformation of huge sectors of the economy such as health care, and the integration of the European Union. In one sense, few things resemble a complex system more than the structure, incentives, and operations of large entities like the U.S. government and its interlocking relationships with a global network of governments and organizations. Indeed, the complex problems Sull and Einhardt rightfully warn us about, are all ones in which governments, individually and collectively, will have to play a role, perhaps the most important role.
Yet, they rarely cite instances of successful, simple rules in this domain. One exception is a reference to the U.S. Defense Department's research and development arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It invests in scientific research using the simple rules of enhancing ‘fundamental scientific understanding' that also has ‘a practical use' and boasts a remarkable track record of innovation, despite relatively limited funding and staff.
Otherwise, when governments make an appearance in the text, they are typically offered up as an example of what not to do. Take the labyrinthine US tax code. Despite its extraordinary length (Sull and Eisenhardt would say, because of it), and an army of tax professionals whose sole function is to decipher its provisions, the tax code invariably generates inconsistent and arbitrary tax outcomes.
It may be that government policies are less likely to furnish examples of simple rules because government institutions are simply inherently more inefficient and less geared towards optimization than industry or science. Maybe governments desperately need simple rules but are not set up to generate and implement them.
Or, perhaps, there is a more fundamental ambiguity about how simple rules apply in government and politics. Perhaps decisions concerning the public or national interest are fundamentally different than those concerning the private interest. Perhaps simple rules are much harder to generate when there are fundamentally conflicting notions of ultimate value. We know that the purpose of business is profit, but what is the purpose of government? It depends on who you speak to, and it depends on your vision of society.
In the United States, if you are a liberal, you might say the purpose of government is the preservation and expansion of a welfare state; if you are a conservative, the defense of liberty; and if you are a libertarian, non-interference in the exercise of liberty. Of course, each of these statements would be deeply contested among the different factions within each of these groups as well. And then consider expanding our view to the rest of the world, the cacophony of different cultures, societies, and governments, articulating their own distinct, fractured visions of the world. It may be that simple rules presuppose shared values. Perhaps, some problems are far too complex for simple rules.In 2015 the Welsh Government consulted with the general public on the possibility of reforming access to the countryside – and a campaign by OpenMTB and Cycling UK saw more than 4,000 cyclists send messages of support for increased access, a stunning result considering there were fewer than 5,800 responses in total.
The Welsh Government clearly took notice of these results, because it came back this year with a remarkably forward-looking set of proposals which would simplify the rights-of-way system in the country, eliminating the distinction between footpaths and bridleways. The new “single-status” system would allow cyclists and horse riders to use the vast majority of current footpaths. Read on to find out how you can help make this happen.
Consultation is already under way on these proposals, so it‘s now crunch time for outdoors access. OpenMTB has supported Cycling UK’s detailed official response to the consultation – and we need as many people as possible to respond individually to the Welsh Government to encourage it to see the proposals through.
The response form will give you the chance to read and personalise the suggested email. We’d suggest adding your own reasons for access rules being changed – and also mentioning if you enjoy other outdoors pursuits as well as cycling.
OpenMTB committee member Tom Hutton was involved with the initial Trails for Wales campaign – and he has answered a few questions on the subject…
Hi Tom, people might recognise your name from your guidebooks or your route guides in MBR magazine, but would you like to tell us a little bit more about yourself and what you do?
I split my time between writing and photography and running a small mountain bike holiday and guiding business – running trips in Wales, the Lake District, The Peak District and the Scottish Highlands. I guess I have made it a mission to try and show as any MTBers as possible that there is life beyond the trail centres.
So the Welsh Government’s initial consultation on access came in the second half of 2015, pretty much two years ago now. OpenMTB must have been very new then. How did the Trails for Wales campaign come about and what was the thinking behind it?
The WG launched a green paper that really did make increased access for MTBs look a possibility. We realised that we needed to do something and do it quickly if our voices were to be heard. And we really felt that the WG didn’t have a handle on just how big mountain biking in Wales is. We formed a little sub-group within OpenMTB, had a few meetings and got stuck in really. Credit should really go to Kie Foster who did 99 per cent of the hard work, both preparing our very detailed response to the consultation and also aligning ourselves with Cycling UK (CTC at the time), and gaining their support for the campaign, which enabled us to have a professional web presence for the campaign responses. We were pretty made-up to get the support of British Cycling and Welsh Cycling too.
There were more than 4,000 individual responses made by cyclists as a result of the campaign, which was more than two thirds of the overall respondents. Do you think the Welsh Gov was surprised about that? Were you surprised?
I think the WG was flabbergasted – and also very pleased that they had tangible evidence that there really was an appetite for change. I personally wasn’t that surprised – I think we had a good idea of just how many MTBers ride in Wales. But I was extremely pleased that so many responded and stood up to be counted – a definite first for mountain biking in the UK.
So you must ride in Wales a lot for work and for pleasure, what are the main benefits you anticipate from increasing access in the country?
I do ride in Wales a lot, yes, and for me personally, the benefits of increased access would be increased trails to write about and to guide on. But more important will be the benefits to visitors to Wales or Welsh visitors to new areas of Wales. At the moment, local riders usually know where the best trails are, but visitors to an area need to rely on magazine or guidebook routes, or an actual guide, in both cases the current situation restricts what they would read about or be shown. Wales would punch a lot harder as a mountain bike destination if all its best trails were available for everybody to ride. And obviously this will bring people and much-needed revenue to some of the more remote rural areas…
The proposals the WG is consulting on now look very sensible, do you think there’s a general appetite for this kind of change in Wales?
I do, I think they can see how the current system is just no longer fit for purpose, and this is an opportunity to improve things, to make it easier to understand and less burdensome to administer. At the same time, it will help increase tourism, encourage more local people to ride, which should have a positive effect on obesity and mental health, and make it safer and easier for cyclists to get around.
How have you seen attitudes to MTBers change out in the Welsh countryside in recent years? Has there been the same softening I’ve noticed in England?
On the whole, I think attitudes to MTBing in Wales are quite positive – we have a small population and a lot of space. But there are those that still don’t like bikes in the hills, and there are still MTBers who don’t help the situation. Hopefully a successful outcome to the consultation will see everybody working hard to share the trails to the benefit all of us.
To keep up to date with UK MTB advocacy matters, please follow us on social media using the links at the side of the page. |
California.
Once upon a time, California students of all backgrounds were taught traditional American values of hard work and patriotism. For a remembrance of those bygone days, see Victor Davis Hanson’s The Civic Education America Needs.
Back then, people believed in assimilation, where foreign people were welcomed to this nation in exchange for their accepting American values. Now citizens are supposed to be happy in a balkanized country of separate ethnic tribes, even though the diversity ideology magnifies conflicts.
According to recent changes, state students will get even more diversity propaganda as a result of a big rewrite of educational diversity standards. Apparently not enough high school graduates aspire to careers as community organizers.
Interestingly, the Sacramento Bee story included a photo of farm organizer Cesar Chavez as a diversity icon, even though he actively promoted immigration enforcement to help his legal workers. That fact has been effectively submerged in the media’s black hole of inconvenient history.
Dolores Huerta, vice president of the National Farm Workers Association, and Cesar Chavez, the association’s general director, are seen in November 1965. Carl Crawford Sacramento Bee file
After 10 years, thousands of public comments and contentious debates, the California Department of Education has rewritten the history curriculum for California’s more than 6.2 million public school students.
The new History-Social Science Framework for grades K-12 was adopted by the state school board on July 14. It reflects the struggles and progress of LGBT Americans in the United States and California. It also contains more detail on Latino history, along with the role Filipinos played in both World War II and the United Farm Workers movement.
It includes sections on the impact of the missions on California Indians and the challenges faced by Chinese and Japanese immigrants, including the Asian Exclusion Act of 1882 and the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II.
California’s Hmong history isn’t included, but books by Hmong authors are recommended. The story of Americans with disabilities is also addressed. There’s a much deeper discussion of African American history, relying on slave narratives and firsthand accounts of rebellions and nonviolent protests during the Civil Rights movement.
Nearly every major ethnic group in California has been given a voice in the 900-page rewrite, which is expected to show up in textbooks by 2018.
“We want students to understand that California and this country developed in part because of people like them,” said Tom Adams, deputy superintendent for instruction and learning in the California Department of Education. “At the same time, it’s never been a smooth story of progress. It’s one in which people have had to struggle for equality.”
Once the new standards make their way into textbooks, their impact could be felt nationwide. California is the largest textbook market in the nation, Adams said.
The new curriculum aims to teach students to think critically about key historical events, said Adams, who has been working on the new framework since 2009, along with retired Berkeley professor Onkar Bindra, a Sacramento Sikh.
“We’re not going to tell them how to think on each issue,” Adams said. “Along with being more inclusive and diverse, we expect students to think like a historian or social scientist. We expect them to look at the original words and documents of the time to analytically read them, understand them and make their own judgments.”
Each chapter of the proposed history books will feature key questions for students to ponder. For example, 11th grade students will be asked, “Did the civil rights movement succeed? How did the war in Vietnam affect movements for equality at home?” Students can also consider the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing about 200,000 Japanese, to end World War II.
Duane Campbell, a professor emeritus at Sacramento State who taught students how to be social studies teachers for 35 years, had a hand in reshaping the Latino portion of the new framework. “I’ve been working on this for 25 years,” said Campbell. He fought for an expanded telling of California’s Latino history that now includes information about the forced deportation of Mexican immigrants in the 1930s. It also highlights the role played by Filipino labor leader Larry Itliong in inspiring Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta to join the table grape strike of 1965.
Only 17 states determine textbooks for the entire state, while the rest allow local school districts to decide, Campbell said. Opinions on what needs to be taught vary widely from place to place, and from group to group.
“Texas has been fighting this for a year and will have its own recommendations, which are very different,” Campbell said.
The Texas Board of Education rejected the inclusion of Huerta – the co-founder of the UFW and a former UC regent who has seven schools in Texas named after her. Geraldine Miller, a Texas board of education member from Dallas, told the San Antonio Express-News that Huerta, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, “did not exemplify good citizenship.”
In California, the Legislature got involved in the curriculum rewrite. Lawmakers mandated inclusion of LGBT history, for instance, along with the Armenian genocide, Adams said.
School districts will likely be able to order new books for K-8 classrooms by November 2017, after a team of reviewers looks them over to ensure they include the new content.
“Many of the books that schools use are well over 10 years old. The history-social science adoption was 2005,” Adams said. “The new books aren’t mandatory, but they are state supported, and districts look to us for guidance on these issues.”
It’s up to each school district to decide how high schools will teach the new framework, Adams added. The state produces a list to help districts select materials for K-8, but there is no such list for grades 9-12. The districts must tell the public how they plan to implement the new framework, however.
California’s process of adopting the new standards produced some heated debates. Thousands of people commented online and through email.
“People are passionate about the way they are portrayed in history,” State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson said in a release when the standards were adopted.
One dispute centered on how to tell the story of South Asia. Hindu Americans successfully pressed for the region to be called “ancient India” for purposes of the sixth grade curriculum, even though it includes other modern day countries such as Pakistan and Nepal.
Korean Americans lobbied for a section on “comfort women,” the thousands of girls and women from Korea, China and the Philippines forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army before and during World War II. For the first time, textbooks are also directed to include the story of Dalip Singh Saund, a California Sikh who in 1957 became the first Asian American to serve in Congress.
SIDEBAR
REWRITING HISTORY
Examples of the new public school curriculum for history and social studies:
Mexican history: The story of Mexico and the Mexican revolution appears in seventh and 10th grades. In 11th grade, students learn about the Chicano civil rights movement, including the 1968 walkout by approximately 15,000 high school students in East Los Angeles.
LGBT history: In second grade, students will study the stories of a wide variety of families – including those with lesbian, gay or transgender parents or children. In 11th grade, students learn how activists began to confront police when they raided gay bars and cafes in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and most famously at the Stonewall Inn in New York City in 1969.
African American history: In fifth grade, students read literature such as “To Be a Slave,” by Julius Lester and “Many Thousand Gone” by Virginia Hamilton, covering many aspects of the institution of slavery. They can imagine, discuss, and write about how these young men and women from Africa may have felt, stolen from their families, transported across the ocean in a brutal voyage, known as the Middle Passage.Many fans believe that Sami Khedira is a flawed piece of merchandise. Here is a central midfielder that can't dribble like Iniesta, can't take free-kicks like Pirlo, doesn't burst into the box the way Lampard did in his heyday and can't pass like Xavi or Xabi. He is the opposite of a headline-grabber.
Some players seem beyond scrutiny and statistics. Khedira, meanwhile, is the type who supporters latch onto as the butt of their frustrations because they daren't criticise certain others. He's an easy target and will continue to be plagued by the naysayers until he leaves Madrid. It comes with his territory.
Though not outstanding in any area of the game, the midfield jack-of-all-trades makes a big contribution overall. Ancelotti is the latest in a series of coaches to have considered him a key player. He flies under the radar, but his absence is felt when he's missing. Several clubs will surely set their sights on him come the January transfer window.
It is odd that a Germany regular should so consistently find himself in the firing line in Madrid. Perhaps he will be appreciated better when he's gone. Doubtless his replacement will be more glamorous; whether he performs as well remains to be seen.Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, made clear early on that intends to ask Sessions about some of former FBI director James Comey’s explosive testimony last week.
In particular, Warner pointed to Comey’s statement, made under oath, that Trump asked the attorney general to leave the Oval Office so he could speak alone with Comey. According to Comey, Trump then asked him to let the investigation into Michael Flynn go, something Trump denied during a news conference.
“We will need to hear from you about how you reviewed — how you viewed the president’s request and whether you thought it was appropriate,” Warner said during his opening remarks. Pointing to other reports in the media, he added: “We will also want to know if you are aware of any attempts by the president to enlist leaders in the intelligence community to undermine this very same Russia investigation.”
Warner said other “disturbing points stood out” during Comey’s testimony last week, pointing to the question of why Sessions recused himself from the Russia probe but was involved in firing the FBI director.
In addition, Warner pointed out that Trump has resisted the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election, saying that he hopes to hear what Sessions is doing to protect the country’s democratic processes.
Warner also invoked Sessions’s comment, during his confirmation hearing, that he did not have communications with Russians, which turned out to be untrue, as Sessions twice met with the Russian ambassador. Warner also raised the specter of a rumored third meeting between Sessions and the ambassador in Washington.
Noting that Sessions was “much more than a mere surrogate” for Trump during the presidential campaign, Warner said he believed Sessions would have “insights” about Trump associates the committee wants to interview in the future.
Warner called Sessions’s testimony “just the beginning of our interaction with you and your department,” and said he hoped the attorney general would cooperate with the committee down the line.What’s So Funny ‘bout Peace, Love & Basic Income?
Saul of Hearts Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 1, 2016
Basic income has been getting a lot of attention in the news lately. It seems like every day there’s a new think piece or article on the topic.
On Thursday, The Boston Globe announced that “Robots Will Take Your Job” — the same day The New York Times declared that “The Robots Are Coming For Wall Street.” The sudden uptick in attention is promising.
But one thing has been troubling me about a few of the pieces I’ve read: a certain un-seriousness about the topic, a kind of off-hand disregard, not unlike the way that journalists talk about, say, the porn industry.
In a Buzzfeed article, Cora Lewis describes it as a “Marxist social policy” that goes by several different names (“the cutest being ‘mincome’”):
“The idea … is a kind of Soylent for economics, a synthetic miracle cure-all for poverty, manufactured by the same method and minds that tackled hunger by making a hipper, nerdier version of nutritional shakes.”
Really? Basic income is so unpalatable that it’s pretty much Soylent?
In Business Insider, Biz Carson starts it off this way:
“Tim Draper is known for having crazy ideas and for funding them. He’s put forth plans to divide California into six states. He’s also backed giant companies like Tesla that have big visions to change the worlds in crazy ways…. Onstage at the Startup Grind conference in Redwood City, California on Tuesday, Draper put forth a new idea: let’s give everyone $15,000.”
The idea of a basic income—which is on the table in several countries — is as “crazy” as a plan to split up California?
This isn’t a fringe idea, folks. This isn’t speculation about some far-off future. This is already happening. In Switzerland this June, voters will consider whether to implement a basic income of 2,500 francs per month.
Finland is working on its own basic income experiment, and now Ontario, Canada is planning a pilot program within the next year.
And yet we still get articles like this one:
It’s true that Silicon Valley’s interest in the topic deserves some skepticism. In The Guardian, Evgeny Morozov asks whether the tech titans could ever be trusted to do basic income right, or whether it’s just part of a plan to get everyone driving for Uber. But a “cult of bros [and] brahmins”?
Lauren Smiley writes that, if you’re a “basic income bro,”
You can namecheck Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon and Edward Snowden and MLK, Jr., as other, higher-profile basic income bros, lending historical gravitas and across-the-aisle solidarity to your club.
as though citing the background of a political platform is a mere talking point designed to — what? get you laid? elected? retweeted?
There’s nothing wrong with pointing out the hypocrisies of a given activist or economic group — something Smiley did brilliantly in her piece The Shut-In Economy — but the ridicule here seems misplaced.
Although Smiley describes this as a “cultural study” rather than a “basic income policy story,” it’s a bit of both. And the context in which journalists present matters of public policy — satirically or not — influences the debate. Implying that basic income is an abstract philosophical cause that only “crazy,” “Marxist,” “bros” believe in perpetuates that myth, and shuts out the voices of others who would benefit from the policy.
In a response at Medium, eHuman Dawn writes:
As a housewife I see UBI as a means to begin to acknowledge the work of life, caring for others, art and ourselves as well as the Earth. I can’t imagine if I had an income for the hours of work I’ve done raising children the past sixteen years. I left programming to do what I thought was right for my kids, and I don’t think the world owes me anything. What I do think is we owe each other the trust and confidence that is behind a BI society — that we all deserve life and caring for one another is our purpose as a community.
It’s fair to point out that the basic income conversation has, thus far, been dominated by privileged white men. But one could just as easily describe basic income as a policy devised by utopian feminist sci-fi writers like Starhawk and Ursula K. LeGuin. On her blog, Starhawk writes:
[T]he system I came up with for the world of The Fifth Sacred Thing…would be my preference: everyone has a basic, guaranteed income, that represents your fair share of common resources and the wealth of the past. Everyone then gets work credits for whatever work you do, including housework and caring for children or the elderly. If you’re an artist or a healer or someone who’s work doesn’t lend itself to counting hours, you get a stipend. And if people really like what you do, they give you gifts. Ah, how happy I’d be living in that world!
U. K. LeGuin described a similar society in her 1974 novel The Dispossessed:
“[Y]ou think that the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit…. [But] people like to do things. They like to do them well. People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them…. After all, work is done for the work’s sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life.”
More recently, in a speech at the National Book Awards, she declared:
“I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope….We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art — the art of words.”
Seriously, journalists — if you’re happy with the way things are, then keep on with the laughter. Otherwise, let’s start taking basic income seriously.
It can’t get here soon enough.
****
Do you agree that a universal basic income is the best step to a fair and equitable economy? Please hit Recommend and share on social media, and consider supporting my future writing with a Patreon pledge!New list: These 20 clubs draw biggest crowds 31.08.2016 18:18 source: StadiumDB.com
Only six countries have any representation in this ranking. Here is the elite list of clubs that manage to draw 46,000 people or more every single game!
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Tomorrow we’ll give you the complete 10+ Ranking for the past season (unfortunately later than we hoped), but first here’s the very top of European football. In our Lists section you’ll find the ranking of Top 20 European Clubs’ Attendances. The list will remain there for good, updated after every season.
This year’s edition, based on data from 2015/16 league campaigns, sees relatively few changes. The threshold of joining the elite group of Europe’s most followed clubs is slightly higher than before, at almost 46,000 people per game. There are still no representatives from Scotland as this country's best clubs are ranked just below.
One major surprise is the growth at Benfica which reached the top 20 for the first time since we’ve ran the list in early 2010s. Domination of the safe-standing German terraces comes as absolutely no surprise, just as the faithfulness of fans, even those seeing their clubs relegated (like Newcastle or VfB Stuttgart).
Return of Rangers to the Scottish Premiership should bring a change for the better in Scotland, but at the same time we might see competition growing as well. Just in England West Ham and Liverpool will surely reach stable 50,000+ with their new/upgraded stadia, which will make it harder to reach the European top 20 and might see the only French club gone in a year. After all, PSG cannot expand Parc des Princes even though they could clearly fill further 15,000!
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves with next season. For now please enjoy the new list of Top 20 Highest European Clubs Attendances and look out for new lists being added on a weekly basis from now on!The Chiefs, 2-14 last year, are too far away from competitiveness to make the playoffs this season. Just like the Colts (2-14 in 2011) or Vikings (3-13) were too far away a year ago. Or the Dolphins (1-15) were before 2007. Or the Saints (3-13) were before 2006. Or, for that matter, the Chiefs (4-12) were before 2010.
You get the idea. Teams are supposed to rebuild from a truly awful season in a slow, linear fashion: a few wins the following year, one or two more the subsequent season, and then the burst into a 10-win contender during the third season. The post-winless Lions went that route, but most teams don’t. They improve in fits and starts, often when you least expect them to. Since 2002, when the league moved to its current divisional setup, 36 percent of teams that finished with a 4-12 record or worse in a given season followed that performance with a.500 or better campaign. The average 4-12 or worse team over that time frame has improved by an average of 3.6 wins the following season. Bad teams often get better fast. These Chiefs seem very likely to be a team that will approach.500 this season, and there are reasons to dream about an even higher ceiling in Kansas City.
The 2012 Chiefs weren’t unlucky in the traditional ways that I talk about luck in these sorts of pieces. They had the Pythagorean expectation of a 2.6-win team and went 2-3 in games decided by one touchdown or less. They played a league-average schedule and were 22nd in Adjusted Games Lost, the Football Outsiders injury metric, suggesting they were just a little less healthy than league average. Those are the statistical indicators of a bad football team that played down to its level of performance.
There are other subtle indicators that suggest the Chiefs actually were very unlucky. They recovered just 33.3 percent of fumbles that hit the ground in their games, the third-lowest rate in the NFL. Fumble data is available from TeamRankings through 2003, and before 2012, just six other teams had recovered less than 35 percent of the fumbles in their games over that time span. The following year, those six teams recovered an average of 53.7 percent of their fumbles. Kansas City had more giveaways and fewer takeaways than any other team in football on a per-drive basis last year, tying them with the Eagles for the worst turnover margin in football.
Turnover margin doesn’t stick from year to year. The 17 previous teams that had at least 20 more giveaways than takeaways since 1989 collectively had what comes close to a league-average turnover margin — minus-1.9 — the following year. And there are tangible reasons to think that the Chiefs will be better. They’ll likely force more fumbles and surely recover more of the ones that hit the ground in their games, which should eliminate a few giveaways and add a few takeaways in itself. They’ve also added a quarterback who specializes in avoiding turnovers.
Alex Smith isn’t a fantastic quarterback, even if his numbers in a closely coached system in San Francisco from 2012 suggest that he was playing like one. Having your running game average six yards per carry makes it awfully easy to pass. In comparing Smith to the combination of Matt Cassel and Brady Quinn, though, Smith looks like a superstar. This is one of Bill Simmons’s favorite indicators of a possible leaping team: upgrading your quarterback from replacement-level to league-average. Replacement-level in this context means a quarterback who plays about as well as a street free agent available for the league minimum might in the same context.
The Kansas City quarterbacks were just about that bad: They were last in the league in interception percentage, third worst in yards per attempt, sixth worst in completion percentage, and next to last in passer rating. When they faced third downs in two-touchdown situations and passed, the Chiefs succeeded just 25.4 percent of the time, with only the Cardinals playing worse. Once Quinn took over for good in Week 11, the Chiefs converted just 16.1 percent of third downs in that type of situation. The Cardinals were somehow lower, at 13.6 percent, but nobody else in football was below 27 percent.
That’s how Smith can help without having to be a superstar. If he can extend two more drives per game with third-down conversions — getting the Chiefs closer to league-average — that’s an improvement in scoring and in field position for the defense if the Chiefs do eventually punt. Cassel and Quinn combined for 20 picks last year, and that was in a shockingly conservative system with the consistently execrable Brian Daboll at the helm.
Smith will get to work with new Chiefs head coach Andy Reid, whose quarterbacks (notably Donovan McNabb, A.J. Feeley, Kevin Kolb, and Michael Vick) have each looked significantly better while they were under Reid’s tutelage than they have in other stops around the league. It remains to be seen whether Reid will try to build a conservative offense around Smith, as Jim Harbaugh did in San Francisco, but the comments of offensive coordinator Doug Pederson should suggest a lot. Pederson called Smith “the best [quarterback] in the league” last week, and reports from Chiefs camp have suggested a Reidesque emphasis on the passing game, but one actually challenging Smith to be aggressive and make throws downfield. There was even a several-day stretch at camp in which the team exclusively worked on passing plays at the expense of running plays.
The Chiefs should also be better in the red zone, where they were truly dreadful last year. Just 27 percent of Chiefs possessions that made it to the red zone produced a touchdown, the lowest rate in the league by a staggering margin. Arizona was in next-to-last place, but at 40 percent, they were closer to 18th-place Minnesota than they were to last. The 27 percent figure is the worst since at least 2003, the point at which TeamRankings no longer holds red zone data, and it’s one of just four times over that stretch when a team managed to fall under 30 percent.
The good news is that red zone performance from year to year can be pretty random. The 2006 Raiders responded to their under-30 season by scoring touchdowns on 60 percent of their red zone possessions the following year, while the 2005 Cardinals and Browns each got up past 46 percent, only a few points below the league average of 52 percent. I realize it’s weird to suggest that somehow employing Andy Reid could produce a marked improvement in a team’s red zone performance, but the Eagles actually scored touchdowns on 52 percent of their red zone tries from 2003 to 2012. The Chiefs will almost surely be in the low 40 just by sheer regression to the mean, and if they can hit league-average, the improvement could be drastic. That alone could add 40 points to their scoring total.
Kansas City’s defense wasn’t quite as awful as its offense last year, but it was still pretty bad despite somehow sending three players (Tamba Hali, Derrick Johnson, and alternate Brandon Flowers) to the Pro Bowl. It should also be better this year. Last year, the secondary fell apart after Brandon Carr left for Dallas, as replacement Stanford Routt quickly lost favor and was released halfway through his first season with the team. This year’s additions should find it difficult to be any worse. Former Dolphins cornerback Sean Smith was one of the most underrated starters in football over the past two seasons, and at 26, he should still have a little bit of improvement in him over his three-year deal. The team also brought in ex-Falcons starter Dunta Robinson, who will contribute as a nickelback and possibly see a few snaps at safety by the end of the year. The perpetually disappointing Glenn Dorsey was replaced by Mike DeVito, who is familiar with the system of new defensive coordinator Bob Sutton from their time with the Jets, and they have a burgeoning star in outside linebacker Justin Houston, who had a team-high 10 sacks last year. Dontari Poe has looked like a devastating nose tackle in camp after making one of the most difficult sacrifices imaginable for a Kansas City resident: giving up barbecue. They aren’t deep on defense, but the starting 11 could be one of the 10 most talented units in football.
They should also enjoy a relatively easy schedule. The AFC West isn’t exactly the league’s toughest division, and the Chiefs also get to play the NFC East and the league’s worst division, the AFC South. By virtue of finishing in last place, they’ll finish their slate against the Bills and Browns. Their schedule is very comfortable to start: Before their Week 10 bye, they’ll play the Jaguars, Titans, Raiders, Browns, and Bills. They get the Eagles in Week 3, when Philly still might be struggling to figure out the Chip Kelly scheme, and host their three toughest games against the Cowboys, Giants, and Texans. They could be the surprise team of the league through 10 weeks.
Of course, morphing from 2-14 into a competitive team is really tough. I’ve named a lot of things that should bounce back or play up for the Chiefs, but bounce-back is a vague concept. If the Chiefs improve from league-worst in a bunch of categories to only below-average, that might help them improve to just 5-11 or 6-10. If they get from league-worst to league-average across the board, they could jump up to 8-8. And if they have a season in which many of the things that went wrong for them last year actually go right and improve to above-average, as was the case for last year’s Vikings and Redskins, they could very well be the team that jumps up to 10-6 and claims an unlikely playoff berth in a wide-open AFC wild-card race. It might seem too soon, but history tells us that there’s no such thing as too soon.Play 01:13 Play 01:13 Bangladesh offers Australia extra security
Australia's tour of Bangladesh appears increasingly in danger of being cancelled, with Cricket Australia's security team on their way home to brief players and the board following a series of meetings in Bangladesh over the past two days.
CA's head of security Sean Carroll, team security manager Frank Dimasi and team manager Gavin Dovey have held meetings with Australian and Bangladeshi officials after the squad's scheduled departure was postponed at the weekend. Their trip followed a new travel warning from Australia's government that: "There is reliable information to suggest that militants may be planning to target Australian interests in Bangladesh."
Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade had contacted CA directly on Friday to inform them of the updated travel advice. On Monday, the United Kingdom government also updated its travel advice for UK citizens to state that: "Militants may be targeting western interests in Bangladesh in late September; UK officials have been advised to limit attendance at events where westerners may gather."
News agencies have also reported that an Italian charity worker was shot dead in Dhaka's diplomatic zone on Monday evening, and both Reuters and AFP reported that an online statement in the name of Islamic State had claimed responsibility for the attack.
ESPNcricinfo understands the BCB was caught off guard by the departure of Dimasi and Dovey from Bangladesh on Tuesday - the Bangladesh board had expected the two officials to remain in the country until the Australian team arrived. Both CA and the BCB have, over the past two days, expressed their strong desire for the two-Test series to go ahead, though CA's chief executive James Sutherland said on Sunday that the safety and security of their players and staff was "the absolute priority".
"There has been no change to our position on the matter," a CA spokesman said on Tuesday. "Following yesterday's meetings, our head of security, team manager and team security manager are on their way home from Bangladesh for further meetings with the Department of Foreign Affairs and to brief our board, management and players on the situation."
The BCB on Monday expressed its confidence that the series would go ahead as scheduled, and also named a squad for the first Test in Chittagong. The first Test is scheduled to start on October 9, with the second Test due to begin in Dhaka on October 17.
Brydon Coverdale is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo. @brydoncoverdale
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.David Rosenberg is back on housing, and has an interesting non-Case Shiller chart to show you:
Home prices: There remains a glut of at least two years supply on the market when the'shadow' foreclosed housing inventory data are included in the calculation and home prices on average have 10-15% downside before fully mean reverting with respect to residential rents and wage income. This is the canary in the coalmine when it comes to wealth, confidence, spending — and writedowns (the market is expecting write-ups this year) in the banking sector. The big surprise will be the renewed turndown in the closely-watched Case-Shiller (CS) index of home prices, which in the past two months has slowed to an average gain of +0.25% after 1%+ advances in July-August, which gave beta-hungry investors more reason to add risk to their portfolios. But the CS series is a three-month average and for all we know, the renewed price declines we expect to see may already be occurring now. Note that two home price series are already back in decline for two straight months — LoanPerformance and Radar Logic. This is key for any sector that remotely touches the housing industry from the homebuilders, to the financials, to the consumer discretionary group.
Don't miss: David Rosenberg's key themes for 2010 -- >Ever wonder what’s on the mind of today’s most notable people? Well, don’t miss our unbelievable roundup of the best and most talked about quotes of the day:
"Nothing cheers me up quite like seeing a deer nibbling on the valve of a helium tank and accidentally inflating itself to the size of a small sedan. As it floats up and away into the sky, never to be seen again, flailing its little deer limbs, I cannot help but feel eternally grateful that this deer is on its way up to heaven to go meet God, instead of being stuck in my terrible backyard."
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—Forest Whitaker
On the world's beauty
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"Bun, lettuce, bun, lettuce, bun, lettuce, bun, lettuce, ketchup, lettuce, bun—in that order. Served ice cold."
—Wolfgang Puck
On the perfect burger
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"When I was a young kid, my dream was to go on The Price Is Right and win a car. Well, I never won that car, but I am the host of the show, so I guess you could say my life is a complete failure."
—Drew Carey
On following your dreamsNarendra Modi pays tribute to Rajnarain Singh, one of the victims of the recent serial bomb blasts, at Singh’s home in Patna. PTI
n Intelligence Bureau note has alerted the Central government about specific threats to the life of BJP's Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, from terrorist elements such as Dawood Ibrahim and Yaqoob Khan, aka Rasool "Party", one of the absconding accused in the murder of former Gujarat Home Minister Haren Pandya. The alert, a copy of which is available with The Sunday Guardian, notes the several ways by which these two, as well as terrorist outfits such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), Hizbul Mujahideen (Huji) and Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) are planning to eliminate Modi.
The IB note talks about a recent meeting held between Dawood Ibrahim and officers of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence, in which the gangster-turned-terrorist was "tasked to restart activities in India and also target Shri Narendra Modi". This is the first time that Dawood, accused of orchestrating the 1993 Mumbai blasts, has been engaged to neutralise such a high-value target inside India.
The IB note is based on data gleaned from various Central intelligence agencies that intercepted phone calls and messages between terror outfits such as JeM, LeT and SIMI among others. The note talks about how these terror outfits are coordinating among themselves to achieve their target.
According to the note, Rasool "Party" is planning to carry out the assassination using a rocket launcher or by ramming an explosive-laden vehicle into Modi's convoy. The note reads, "Route... should be given utmost importance aside from covering and sanitizing all such places from where a rocket launcher can be used for this attack on the route".
The note then adds that "one Shahid alias Bilal" another absconder accused having links with fellow Hyderabadi Rasool "Party", "has informed an unidentified associate in Saudi Arabia that he was in favour of carrying out a suicide attack as against a remote-controlled IED (indigenous explosive device) attack on the Chief Minister of Gujarat". This is because such an attack "would act as a 'Major Motivator' for others".
The IB note then mentions another intelligence input received from "Central Security Agencies" saying that "a Hizbul Mujahideen operative active in Muzaffarabad (in Pakistan occupied Kashmir) is to undertake subversive activities in India. During discussion (HuM leader) Shahryar expressed that he is also in favour of targeting anti-Muslim leaders such as Shri Narendra Modi."
The IB note goes on to say that some "Islamic Fundamentalists based in Saudi Arabia" are planning to pull off a suicide mission by infiltrating the police. "According to an input, (an) LeT operator had obtained POLICE UNIFORMS and has recruited some Indian Security Officials to gain entry for the attack which may be in the shape of a suicide mission to assassinate Modi and kill as many bystanders as possible," says the note.
The note also says that SIMI activists arrested by the Madhya Pradesh police have confessed to raising a women's suicide mission squad. These "Shaheen Force" is being raised primarily to target Narendra Modi.
The note highlights that SIMI members are "networking with LeT, HUJI and JeM".
Narendra Modi, apparently also "figures prominently" on the "hit list of CPI (Maoist)" cadre.
Earlier this month, the BJP's demand for increased security to Narendra Modi saw a fresh slugfest between the main Opposition and the ruling Congress. The BJP sought heightened security cover for Modi in light of the serial bomb blasts at his rally in Patna last month. The party reportedly demanded for "foolproof security" to Modi and alleged that the Patna blasts were meant to "liquidate the party leadership".
Former BJP chief, and party MP Venkaiah Naidu, said, "People do not trust the Central government will act in a responsible manner. It works only for the welfare of one family. Instead of acting on biases, the Centre must act in accordance with the threat perception."
Communist Party of India (CPI) leader D. Raja said, "I definitely believe that the Home Ministry will take note of the threat alerts and view them with all seriousness".
Congress spokesperson Meem Afzal's remark after the Patna blasts that "Now, he (Modi) wants to look like the Prime Minister without becoming one" drew the BJP's ire.
The Centre had made it clear that there was little scope for an upgrade as the BJP's prime ministerial candidate already enjoyed the highest "Z-plus |
that made $1.7 billion in 2009 alone, up from only $133 million eight years earlier.
As the Texas wine industry has flourished, it's brought with it a host of issues — including occasionally deceptive marketing practices, overreliance on chemical correction of "bad" grapes in the cellar and a propensity among Texas grape growers to focus too much on grape varieties that don't thrive in Texas. But that's not to say it's all plonk. It's in an awkward phase, a series of growing pains that serious Texas winemakers are eager to leave behind as they stretch toward a better future.
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The unforgiving Texas climate, marked by late-spring freezes and arid, brimstone summers, can't sustain grape growing like California's Napa Valley, which lies at the peak of one of the most fertile and productive farming corridors in the world and enjoys the consistently mild weather and cool summer evenings necessary to deliver fruit with freshness and healthy acidity.
In a "bad vintage" like the disastrous 2011 harvest, plagued by drought and extreme temperatures, says Gabe Parker, director at-large of the Texas Wine & Grape Growers Association, "less than 50 percent of the wine bottled in Texas is grown here." In a "good vintage" like the 2010 bumper crop, "more than 50 percent of the fruit is grown in Texas," he adds.
Is that the best that Texas can do? In a state known for its self-reliance and its unabashed homegrown pride, do citizens realize that even in the best-case scenario, only half of the wine in their glass was raised by Texas farmers? Few are aware of federal regulation that allows bottlers to label their products as Texas wine regardless of its source, as long as "For Sale in Texas Only" is included in the fine print.
In typical Texan style, we like to drink what we make: Nearly all of the wine bottled in Texas is consumed here as well, even if it's not grown here. That's one of the reasons national wine writers like New York-based Alice Feiring, when asked to comment on Texas wines, don't have much to say on the subject: "I really haven't tasted enough wines in Texas to make any sort of educated assessment," says Feiring, "except that conventional grapes are really not the way to go."
It's the same argument Raymond Haak makes when he talks about the Blanc du Bois that's the crux of his vineyard's success. But although the grape thrives here, many Texas wineries would still rather focus on the basics: Cabernets, Chardonnays, Pinot Noirs — in other words, wines that are familiar to the average wine drinker but that are nearly impossible to grow here. And when those grapes fail, the wineries turn to California to supplement their meager yield.
"It's a very difficult grape to grow, Cabernet is. It's a very labor-intensive grape. Having said that, I've tasted some very decent Cabernets from Texas," says Haak. But just as quickly he adds: "Were they as decent as those from Napa? I don't think so."
Haak reserves even less praise for other varietals."We're in a warm state and we're trying to grow Pinot Noir?" he laughs. "Come on."
"I'm gonna get shot at by my colleagues, but...I've tasted Texas Pinot Noirs. And some of it is pretty good. But as I said earlier, we can't make 'pretty good.' If you want to make a Pinot Noir, you'd better be ready to compete worldwide. And I think we're handicapped severely if we don't choose the varietals that match the terroir."
The biggest problem, Haak says, is that people both in and outside of Texas experienced our initial forays into winemaking and formed their opinions — most of them poor — early on. "We had some pretty bad to mediocre wines, and a lot of folks tasted them, trying to be local to Texas products," he says. "Now we've gotten better, but folks have memories like elephants. That's what we're trying to overcome."
"For us to continue to grow and be successful," Haak says — for Texas to attract the attention of the national and international wine communities — "we can't be just good winemakers. We've gotta be great winemakers. Mediocrity is not going to get it done. There's already too many me-too wines in the world."
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Although grapes have always grown in Texas, as they have in much of the world, the first commercially successful wineries began in earnest in the late 1970s. That's when the Sandy Land Grape Growers Association was established in 1974 by Clint McPherson, Robert Reed and Roy Mitchell. A year later, both Lubbock and Fredericksburg were already beginning to be known as Texas wine centers — and the two towns still are to this day, acting as de facto capitals of the High Plains AVA and the Hill Country AVA, respectively.
Before that, the Val Verde Winery in Del Rio — established by an Italian immigrant, Frank Qualia, in 1883 — thrived until Pierce's Disease wiped out a significant portion of the vines. In a prescient move, the winery converted its crops to LeNoir — another disease-resistant grape that grows well in Texas — and, as a result, endured even through the testing times of Prohibition. Today it's managed by Qualia's grandson, the third generation to carry on Frank Qualia's legacy.
But though stories such as Val Verde's may make it seem so, there's nothing particularly romantic about starting a winery. It's just business.
"You put an acre of vines in the ground, it's close to $15,000 an acre," says Fritz Westover, the viticulture extension program specialist for the Texas Gulf Coast Region of the Texas AgriLife Extension Service. "With a commercial vineyard, you're not even breaking even until year six or seven, best-case scenario — not something for the weary."
One of Westover's roles with the Extension Service is running workshops for prospective winegrowers — half of whom, he says, leave the workshops after the lunch break. "It's way more work than they thought it would be and way more expensive up front. You have to buy the land and the tractor and drill a well and put up deer fencing." And that's before the grapes are even planted.
From there, Westover says, prepare for a life of hard, labor-intensive work to grow a crop that will eventually yield a decent batch of wine. "You physically have to touch each vine six or seven times in the growing season — and you're talking about 800 vines per acre, with 50 acres total." It's easy to see why hobbyists can get turned off by a decidedly unbucolic retirement spent babying acre after acre of temperamental vines.
And yet it's these very hobbyists who've started the touristy vineyards and wineries that dot the rolling hills west of Austin. On a pretty spring day, you'll find the vineyards filled with wine lovers who have driven down the winding roads punctuated with billboards inviting them to "sit, relax and enjoy," luring them in with a taste of "Tuscany in Texas."
On a picturesque corridor of U.S. Highway 290, the winery tasting rooms are rivaled only by the occasional fruit stand, antique store and barbecue shack: The Hill Country "Texas Wine Trail" has become the epicenter of the state's billion-dollar wine industry despite the fact that our leading wineries and top growing sites — in terms of both quality and quantity — lie a six-hour drive to the north near Lubbock. Serious winemakers call these Hill Country wines "novelty wines," even though many of the growers behind the wineries have been in the business for generations.
One of the most recent operations to set up shop here is the Four Point O "winery," a smart, modern-style venue and a joint venture between Brennan Vineyards, Lost Oak Winery and McPherson Cellars — the same family that helped launch the Texas viticulture industry in the 1970s.
"We want there to be a second Napa in Texas," says Sylvia McPherson, her teeth gleaming in the warm and fuzzy welcome video that greets visitors in the opulent private dining room set apart from the sleek tasting bar. And there is a second Napa in Texas. Sort of. If you consider the fact that most of the wines coming out of these wineries were made with California-grown fruit.
Kim McPherson, one of the state's most beloved and respected winemakers and a son of one of the industry's founders, painfully concedes: "In 2011, only about 20 percent of my [flagship] viognier was sourced from Texas vineyards," with the balance from California. "When your wine is sold in supermarkets and your distributors expect you to deliver the wine every year, there's no other way."
And in the case of our state's largest winemaker, Ste. Genevieve, producer of under-$10, "supermarket-friendly" wines, only a "drop in the bucket" comes from Texas farms, says French-born wine expert Benedict Rhyne.
But in a twist, says Rhyne, not all of it comes from California — some of it comes from as far away as Spain and Chile, equally arid growing regions that Texas should be looking to in order to learn how to grow and make better wine, not purchase grapes on the cheap to blend here into bad table wine.
Although Mark Hyman, vice president of sales and marketing for Llano Estacado — producer of two under-$20 Chardonnays — declined on two occasions to reveal the percentage of out-of-state fruit bottled by the company, a leading industry insider (who spoke on condition of anonymity) estimates that up to 90 percent of the winery's overall production is sourced beyond the Texas border.
Llano Estacado also produces a superb "reserve" Tempranillo made from 100 percent High Plains fruit. At around $20 retail, the label represents one of the state's best efforts in terms of its drinkability, varietal typicity and price-quality ratio. But when you must consistently deliver "approximately 168,000 cases a year at present, making us the largest premium winery in the state," as Hyman wrote in an e-mail, you simply have to look beyond Texas when it comes to the bottom line.
Although the Extension Service's Westover would disagree — saying diplomatically that "each region has its own unique aspects" — Bobby Cox, recently installed president of the Texas Wine & Grape Growers Association, puts it succinctly: "Ninety-nine percent of Texas is unsuited to [fine wine] grape growing."
The challenge lies not only in identifying the right spots (Westover estimates that only 25 percent of the sites he inspects for potential winegrowers are suitable), but also in identifying the right varietals to grow here. In places like Chile and Spain, those grapes are Tempranillo and Mourvèdre — grapes that will grow well here if only big wineries would stop focusing on better-known but far less suitable Chardonnays and Cabernets. This kind of whittling down of varietals is something that other countries (and even U.S. states) have done for years.
"The French planted every kind of variety that they could find hundreds of years ago," says Raymond Haak. "The answer to the question, 'How do you sculpt an elephant out of a one-ton block of granite?' is very easy: You just chip away everything that's not elephant. That's what you do with wine.
"You take away everything that's not producing great wines — and that's what the French did, and they look like geniuses now. It just took 'em a couple hundred years to get there."
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Texas doesn't have a couple hundred years to get there, though, with wine consumption becoming increasingly popular both in the U.S. and around the world. If we want to compete on an international level, Texas needs to grow different varietals and better grapes. Better grapes means less chemical correction in the cellars after the fact — adding tartaric acid, for example, to reduce the flabbiness in wines that comes from the heat burning off grapes' acidity on the vine — and more terroir, that ineffable and highly desired sense of tasting the very soil in which a grape was grown.
As it stands now, almost all Texas winemakers chemically correct their wines. "When people ask me whether or not I acidify my wines," said one of the state's leading winemakers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, "I answer by saying, 'This is Texas.'"
Even in the Texas High Plains in the Panhandle, where cooler temperatures make the AVA the top growing area in the state, the grueling summer heat generally makes acidification of wine a foregone conclusion. Except where Lewis Dickson is concerned.
Dickson — an expat Houstonian — runs the La Cruz de Comal winery, where the criminal defense attorney-turned-"natural" winemaker produces "courageous" bottlings, as writer and natural-wine authority Alice Feiring once told a reporter. It's an entirely different world from the days he spent defending such colorful subjects as cross-dressing "millionaire murderer" Robert Durst (accused of killing and dismembering his Galveston neighbor), Texas politician Tom DeLay (now a convicted felon) and some of Houston's leading drug traffickers while at the notorious Houston law firm of DeGuerin & Dickson.
But in 2001, Dickson turned his back on a jet-set lifestyle that included a full-time suite at the Four Seasons hotel in downtown Houston and began growing grapes and making wine in Starzville — an improbable, however beautiful, backdrop for the production of fine wine. Under the tutelage of legendary Sonoma grower and bottler Tony Coturri, a pioneer in natural winemaking in California, Dickson grows grapes without the use of herbicides or pesticides, and he bottles his wines without the application of pharmaceutical yeasts, acidification or sulfuring — an approach virtually unthinkable for the vast majority of Texas winemakers who employ these techniques liberally.
Although the "natural wine" movement lacks any official doctrine and is splintered into often combative factions, "natural" winemakers are united in their rejection of commercial — as opposed to naturally occurring "ambient" — yeast, acidification and the addition of any other chemicals that will shape the flavor profile and mouthfeel of the wine. And while modern winemaking is virtually impossible without the use of sulfur dioxide (in racking and bottling), natural winemakers strive to use sulfur sparingly. In Dickson's case, he racks and bottles with no sulfur whatsoever. (Sulfur is commonly employed whenever wine is exposed to oxygen before bottling in order to prevent unwanted oxidation and the formation of bacteria that can spoil wine.)
It's the leading Texas wineries that are now finally shifting from the Napa model of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot (traditionally grown in the coastal climate of Bordeaux), and Chardonnay (most famously grown in the cool climate of Burgundy) toward Mediterranean varieties like Italian Vermentino and Aglianico (as in the case of Duchman Family Winery) and grapes grown traditionally in Spain and the Rhône Valley of France (as in the case of McPherson and Becker).
But Dickson attributes his ability to make additive-free wines to the fact that he grows cultivars well suited to the challenges of Texas winemaking.
For his flagship white wine, he uses Blanc du Bois, the same grape as Raymond Haak. It's a hybrid created by University of Florida researchers and first used for commercial wine production in 1987, developed with the intention of providing a variety resistant to Pierce's Disease (Xylella fastidiosa) and its carrier, the glassy-winged sharpshooter, which represent a potentially devastating plague native to the southeastern U.S. Its berries are naturally high in acidity, allowing Dickson to maintain healthy acidity levels in the wine without acidification despite the oppressive heat of the Texas summer.
For a new monovarietal red he plans to release in the future, he will use Black Spanish, a variety grown in Texas since 1889 that's naturally high in acidity and naturally resistant to Pierce's Disease, possibly as the result of spontaneous genetic mutation. The high level of naturally occurring acidity in the must pressed from these grapes, notes Dickson, not only makes it possible to forgo acidification, it also acts as a natural preservative, thus allowing him to bottle without the use of sulfur.
But Dickson's extreme approach to viticulture means that his wines are expensive — around $35 to $40 a bottle retail. And he's not alone in this problem. The few really excellent wines in Texas tend to be somewhat pricey — and that's an issue Texas will continue to struggle with for at least the next decade.
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Beyond Dickson's approach, there are other ways to deliver quality in Texas wine without the crutch of acidification — and without the associated costs that are ultimately passed down to the consumer.
Bronx-born Sicilian-American Paul Bonarrigo, who sources much of the fruit for his Messina Hof winery from the High Plains, has his vineyard managers pick the grapes earlier than most growers. As a result, they are still high in acidity, although low in sugar. For his Texas-grown Chenin Blanc and his Riesling, for example, he arrests fermentation through the use of sophisticated microfilters that remove the active yeast, thus retaining enough sugar to produce "semisweet" expressions of the raw material.
Bonarrigo is one of the industry's most colorful characters, a brilliant marketer who credits the millennial generation's taste for wine and a burgeoning locavore movement for the wild success of his labels. His semisweet wines are highly popular with consumers in Texas (the fourth-largest in wine consumption in the U.S., says industry chronicler Russ Kane, author of a 2011 narrative guide to the wines of Texas, The Wine-Slinger Chronicles). Even Houston wine legend Bear Dalton, longtime fine wine buyer for Spec's, is a devoted fan of the Messina Riesling and its so-called "Port" and "Sherry."
But beyond our state's borders, where semisweet wines are considered a relic of the past and where wine enthusiasts increasingly favor dry, food-friendly wines, do wine experts and the wine-industry media take our wines seriously? And in a globalized world where wine lovers have access to immense value in fine wine thanks to the widespread availability of wines from Spain, Italy, France, Germany and the many wine-producing countries in the New World, where price-quality ratio is virtually unbeatable, are Texas winemakers exploiting Texans' love of homegrown (or at least home-bottled) alcohol while delivering highly manipulated products often sourced from other wine-growing regions but labeled as "Texas wine"? Perhaps now, but that's not how the future of Texas wines is shaping up; we can be fooled for only so long.
In the meantime, making semisweet wines is one way to keep costs down and interest in Texas wines high. But when you're talking about making the kinds of wines found at Duchman Family Wineries — where its critically acclaimed Vermentino and Aglianico have taken the Texas wine world by storm — making inexpensive wine gets a lot more difficult. That's because you get what you pay for. (Disclosure: Co-author Jeremy Parzen writes for the Duchman Web site's blog; he did not interview anyone associated with the winery for the purposes of this story.)
"We at Duchman have focused on varietals that maybe people don't recognize or know how to pronounce but grow well here," says Dave Reilly, head winemaker for the Hill Country vineyard owned by Houston celebrity cardiologist Stan Duchman. "We don't make wines that people have heard of, but that people enjoy. Texas is not a Cabernet state, or a Merlot or a Chardonnay. What we realized is that the consumer is chomping at the bit to try something new — they're willing to try something better."
That something better costs more — up to $40 or $50 a bottle — mostly because Duchman, like Becker Vineyards, works with the best growers in the state to produce their grapes and rarely purchases less expensive grapes from California or South America, where workers in places like Chile and Argentina are paid only $8 a day to harvest grapes. Instead, Reilly and his predecessor at Duchman — the recently deceased and greatly admired Mark Penna — took risks on varietals like "Dolcetto, Trebbiano, Vermentino that weren't at all commercially planted if at all in Texas."
But it's not all adventurous winemakers, says Reilly: "I also credit the growers like the Binghams who'll go out on a limb and take a risk. It's been great for their business and for ours. There are more and more Texas wineries going after them to grow their grapes." And as more Texas wineries purchase better-suited grapes, simple economics means that more growers will step up to supply the wineries, and the cost of these expensive grapes — and our expensive wines — will gradually go down.
Until then, Reilly says, the game is on to make better wines than anyone else — no more "me-too wines" but wines like the Blanc du Bois from Haak Vineyards or the Port from Messina Hof that showcase our natural climate and terrain. And that means learning from California's viticulture practices, not simply importing its grapes.
"The only thing we can do is take the Napa approach," says Reilly. "Make a product that's better than everybody else's so that we can justify the cost. Sure, our wines cost more than those from Argentina, but ours are better. And the price per ton will come down as more and more people want to live the dream and move out and plant a vineyard."
And one day, says Reilly, "the quality will matter" to consumers as much as the fact that the wine is from Texas. He already sees that changing attitude in the people who visit the Duchman estate, which sprawls across the rambling, shrubby hills southwest of Austin. "The consumer now is not just buying because it's Texas," Reilly says. "They're going to find the one that they like and only buy that one.
"The quality producers will continue to rise, and others will have to rise to the occasion or get out of the game. A rising tide raises all ships."
katharine.shilcutt@houstonpress.comLike almost anywhere else in the world, Indian bookstores tend to place national bestsellers at the entrance, enticing readers as they walk in. Foreigners might be surprised to discover the book very often featured among that coveted selection is none other than Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. One of the biggest publishing companies in India distributing the book has seen sales of it steadily increasing annually.
More than a dozen editions of Mein Kampf have circulated through India, translated into various languages such as Hindi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Tamil and Bengali. The English edition distributed by publishing house Jaico sold more than a hundred thousand copies between 2003 and 2010.
"The initial print run of 2,000 copies in 2003 sold out immediately and we knew we had a best-seller on our hands. Since then the numbers have increased every year to around 15,000 copies until last year when we sold 10,000 copies over a six-month period in our Delhi shops," R. H. Sharma, Jaico's chief editor, told the Telegraph in 2009, at which point his publishing company was reprinting the book twice annually to keep up with demand.
The ebook version has been topping the charts, surpassing hardcopy sales and becoming a bestseller online in 2014. Right now, for a mere 76 cents USD, you can purchase the Kindle version of Mein Kampf, which sits at Amazon India's 11th bestselling book.
While a lack of official numbers and piracy issues mean these figures are likely an underrepresentation of the manifesto's prevalence, suffice to say that the book and its author's popularity have been on a steady rise in the world's second biggest country.
The fanfare in India extends beyond the written word. In 2011, capitalizing on the figure's popularity, the Indian film industry produced a film entitled Dear Friend Hitler, also known as Gandhi to Hitler. The IMDb synopsis reads, "Adolf Hitler assists India in its freedom struggle against the British, while Mohandas Gandhi writes to him to end violence." The reviews were not good, but the film exists nonetheless.
An ice cream cone company tried its hand at profiting from Hitler's fame, too, by naming their product after him. News of these cones broke in early June, with media outlets branding it "Hitler ice cream." From Bollywood to ice cream, it would appear the dictator has a compelling attraction throughout the country.
So, why is this all happening? It stems from a number of factors, some of which date back decades. One of India's most beloved politicians and freedom fighters, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, who was president of the mainstream party Indian National Congress and helped lead the struggle for independence against the British, befriended Hitler in the 1940s. While his leftwing ideology was at odds with Hitler's, Bose made the political miscalculation of seeing Hitler as an ally just because they shared a common enemy in the Brits.
"Remember that Bose is still an iconic leader about whom no wrong can be uttered, yet he openly hobnobbed with Hitler for his nationalist purposes," Jayati Ghosh, a social activist and economics professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, told Mic. "Netaji is so venerated, you cannot say anything against him. He can do no wrong."
This love of Hitler is further reinforced by a resistance to social progression. "There's the aspiring middle class, the bourgeoisie, the petit bourgeoisie," Ghosh explained, of which she estimates there are approximately 250 million. "And that group doesn't like the chaotic facets of Indian society. Things like lower [Hindu] castes demanding rights, gay parades, women campaigning for gender equality, things that are upsetting the traditional order of things." Indians resisting these changes have a profound desire for strong leadership, particularly of a kind which centers around conformity.
This desire for conformity also explains the rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, a right-wing, fiercely nationalistic party that believes India should be a Hindu state only, to the exclusion of religious minorities, such as Muslims or Sikhs. Modi, for example, is largely regarded as responsible for the 2002 Gujurat riots, the state in which he was chief minister at the time, which saw thousands of Muslims murdered by Hindus.
An integral part of this Hindu nationalist movement is the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or "National Volunteer Organization"), a nongovernmental volunteer group and the world's largest NGO.
"Dependence has always been there. Sixty per cent of the BJP's people have a Sangh [RSS] background, are connected to it... It is a mentor, a fatherly figure. Ultimately, we listen to what the Sangh says," Devendra Fadnavis, a BJP chief minister, told the Hindu in 2013.
The RSS is impressively pervasive across such a large country and with their presence comes their ideology. As Aryans originated in northern India and ancient Iran, certain elements of Nazism are in harmony with RSS ideology.
"The RSS has never disowned Hitler, they also love all this Aryan stuff, so it's natural happy hunting ground for Hitler," Ghosh told Mic, also contending that the organization is exploiting the BJP's majority to spread rapidly. "Of course, they need to have their own reading material aside from the traditional Hindu texts; they need some international material to seem more politically credible, so Mein Kampf is perfect for that."
Prime Minister Modi has never condemned Hitler either. "And for someone who talks so much, incessantly tweeting all the time, his silence on critical issues is remarkable," says Ghosh.
Whitewashing history. The BJP and RSS have led the charge to rewrite history in school curriculums so it is more closely aligned with their ideology. New schoolbooks are being issued and some children in Gujarat are being taught the first airplane was invented in ancient India, flown by the Hindu god Lord Ram.
"The move to infuse right-wing ideology in mainstream curriculum has been started by printing books with a religious bias using taxpayers' money," Gaurang Jani, a professor of sociology at Gujarat University, told Al Jazeera in 2014.
The way history is being rewritten at every level, from schools to political rhetoric, suggests India's love affair with Hitler will not be a passing fad. In fact, understanding why he remains a cultural icon suggests Mein Kampf will become an inextricable part of the country's social and cultural fabric. The book is wildly popular among Indian business students, for example, as it is seen as a success story of hard work and determination.
Outside of religious scripture, the book has become a textual centerpiece of sorts for the newest breed of Hindu nationalism. "Their [RSS] tentacles are getting very deep, starting at a school level. And the way history is whitewashed is deeply damaging," warns Ghosh.
When kids in a Mumbai school were tasked with writing down which historical figures they admire, 9 out of 25 wrote Hitler, according to the Daily Beast. Admittedly, this is a small sample size, but it does appear to be indicative of larger trends. When asked why, one of the 10th-grade students replied: "He was a fantastic orator. He loved his country; he was a great patriot. He gave back to Germany a sense of pride they had lost after the Treaty of Versailles."
When the teacher pushed on the matter of Hitler's fascistic tendencies and mass murders, the students were ready to defend the Führer. "Oh, yes, that was bad," they said. "But you know what, some of them were traitors."The walkway leading from the metro stop at Behesht-e Zahra Cemetary to the entrance of the mausoleum housing Ayatollah Khomeini’s remains is reserved for government officials and foreign dignitaries on Dah-e Fajr. On 1 February, the anniversary of Khomeini’s return from exile to victorious revolutionary crowds in Iran is annually observed by government officials and foreign dignitaries. This year, the procession somberly filed along a narrow, manmade river before delving down into a labyrinth of cool, dark hallways underground area with grey walls.
A few young Basij members and police officers politely check everyone’s clothes before giving around 50 disciples permission to enter the foyer leading to the shrine, where two older men and a woman wearing a chador are clasping tightly to the iron grid surrounding Khomeini’s sarcophagus, praying silently.
One of the walls features a huge image of Khomeini, his son Mostafa Khomeini, and Iran’s current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. In front of it, a group of 15 clerics from Iraq pose for selfies.
“We’ve come many times before, “ says Bagher, one of the clerics. “I’ve loved the Imam since childhood. In 1982, my father took us out of Iraq and to Iran. He was close to the Islamic political movement that coalesced around Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, and Khomeini and Iran took us in as refugees. I’ll never forget him. He is the leader of all of us. It’s been nine years since I returned to Iraq, and now I teach from many of the Imam’s books at the seminary.”
Bagher expresses surprise at how few visitors have come to pay their respects.”In my opinion, the Iranian people do not sufficiently appreciate their leader and his revolution. Maybe it is a matter of political differences and the Imam just gets the blame. I follow the political happenings in Iran, and as far as I know, the reformists and even [Green Movement leader] Mir Hossein Mousavi have always defended the Imam. The people shouldn’t leave his resting place empty like this. History and Islam both owe a great debt to him.”
Apathy and confusion about the meaning of the Iranian revolution is a common sentiment among the city’s population. On the left side of the mausoleum, a few men have stretched out on the floor and are fast asleep. Akbar, 35 years old, says he overnights at the mausoleum when the nearby South Terminal bus station becomes too crowded.
I ask him whether he knows what today is. He stretches out, staring at the ceiling. “The return of the Imam,” he says. “They promote it so much that you can’t possibly forget about it. But if they don’t advertise on TV every few minutes or cover the streets with posters, people are so busy with their own problems that they’re liable to forget all about it.
“I don’t mean to say that that would necessarily be a good thing. It’s just the truth. No one remembers the revolution or Imam Khomeini anymore. He was a good man on a righteous path, but the revolution died with him. There is no help for disenfranchised people anymore. And when we thought we had Ahmadinejad on our side, he turned out to be the king of crooks. Who has time to think about the revolution or the Imam with all that’s going on?”
It takes eighty minutes on the metro to travel from the southern end of the line at Behesht-e-Zahra, where Khomeini’s mausoleum stands, to the northernmost point at Tajrish. Travellers passing through get a glimpse of some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods during the last seven stops, peaking into the staunchly religious former village of Shahr-e Rey and the cluttered, smoggy streets near Shush Square.
The upper-class neighborhood near Tajrish houses another symbol of the revolution - the former home of Mohammad Reza Shah at Sa’dabad Palace. Open to the public for an entrance fee of 2000 tomans ($.60), the lavish estate and surrounding museums are intended to depict the royal family’s squandering and lavishness before the revolution. But the message seems out of out of place in a part of town where real estate sells at 40,000,000 per square meter ($1,400).
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Palace employees replace the portrait of the Shah with Ayatollah Khomeini’s at the Niavaran Palace in Tehran on 16 Feb 1979 Photograph: Alain Dejean/Alain DeJean/Sygma/Corbis
There are more visitors here than at Khomeini’s tomb. Most are female university students who have come here on a Dah-e Fajr field trip. Classmates Sara and Yasaman stand in front of a statue of Reza Shah. The statue has been all but completely destroyed, and only the late Pahlavi monarch’s boots remain.
“Every regime that falls gets this treatment from the next regime....In my opinion, if the original leaders of the revolution had been more democratic, things would be brighter now,” says Sara.
“The regime has politicized history to such a degree that no one reads history anymore. Just look here, how empty the museum is. People don’t care enough to come see how our shah’s life 50 years ago was. It’s cool!” adds Yasaman.
“The shah and Khomeini have both been forgotten,” Sara says, nodding her head in agreement. “This is a bad sign; you would think they lived a thousand years ago. People are so caught up in politics and just surviving that they don’t have any time to remember this stuff. Of course it’s common wisdom to spout off that the shah’s time was much better; in fact the phrase ‘the shah’s time’ has lost all meaning. It’s just a way to slight the current regime.”
“I’m sure that during Mohammad Reza Shah’s day, they were saying, ‘Man, Reza Shah - those were the good old days!’ and in Reza Shah’s day they were saying, ‘Man, the Qajars - those were the days!’,” Sara continues. “The regime has made such a big fuss over certain parts of our history that people have forgotten both the shah and Khomeini, and both of them exemplify our contemporary history.”The Emmy winning British actress is fresh off her acclaimed turn on 'Mad Men.'
Julia Ormond is teaming up with two of Hollywood's most famous leading men for her next TV gig.
The Emmy winner has signed on to star in Ben Affleck and Matt Damon's Syfy pilot, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
Incorporated is an espionage thriller that takes place in a future in which companies have unlimited power. It tells the story of executive Ben Larson (Reign's Sean Teale), who must change his identity in order to infiltrate a cutthroat corporate world to save the woman he loves. In the process, he takes on the entire system — with deadly consequences.
Ormond, fresh off her acclaimed turn on Mad Men, will play Ben's mother-in-law, Elizabeth, a whip-smart, powerful top executive who enjoys the perks of her job, but also is trapped in a ruthless system that demands results.
Ormond joins a cast that also includes Once Upon a Time's Georgina Haig as Ben's wife and Elizabeth's daughter, Laura, as well as Eddie Ramos (Teen Wolf).
Incorporated marks Affleck and Damon's first scripted cable project. The duo will executive produce via their Pearl Street Films banner. Brothers David and Alex Pastor (Self/less, The Last Days) will pen the pilot and direct the CBS Television Studios entry. Ted Humphrey (The Good Wife) will serve as showrunner and executive producer via his overall deal with CBS TVS. Damon, Affleck and Pearl Street president Jennifer Todd will executive produce, and Pearl Street creative executive Margaret Chernin is on board as associate producer.
In addition to her Emmy-nominated performance on Mad Men, Ormond's credits include Witches of East End, Temple Grandin, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Sabrina. She is repped by Gersh, Creative Partners Group and Hirsch Wallerstein.FILE - In this March 28, 2017 file photo a swarm of birds flies past wind turbines just before sunrise in the outskirts of Frankfurt, Germany. A senior EU official says Wednesday, May 31, 2017, the EU and China will reaffirm their commitment to the Paris climate change accord this week, regardless of whether President Donald Trump pulls out of the pact. The official told reporters that the EU and China will also “spell out” how they plan to meet |
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For those equipped with sound systems, our opening sound is the typical ear shattering screech and rumble entering Harvard Station, northbound on the Red Line (we call it the "Dread Line").
This situation is by design given the sharp turn required as a result of poor design, however the intensity can be lessened by proper maintenance - coating tracks with graphite. As this is probably rarely performed, passengers must suffer. We believe noise levels are well above reasonable limits, yet nothing is done to protect passengers or crews.
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MBTA Commuter Rail - Penalties:
The MBTA's new Commuter Rail contractor, MBCR, is subject to the following penalties:
$500 for a rush-hour train that is late
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$2,000 for a canceled rush-hour train.
$500 for each instance where a failure report is posted more than 5 minutes late.
Unfortunately none of these penalties are being imposed by the MBTA, although the T is regularly and proudly announcing that their new contract has these incentives built in.
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Want to bring these and other capabilities to your internet efforts? Write webmaster@badtransit.comImage copyright Other Image caption Conservative candidate David Lloyd was elected the first PCC for Hertfordshire
Suspects should be charged for being kept overnight in police cells, a police and crime commissioner (PCC) has said.
David Lloyd, PCC in Hertfordshire, said the "honest taxpayer" should not be forced to meet the cost.
Instead criminals "should be punished in the pocket", Conservative Mr Lloyd said in an open letter laying out policing proposals.
Hertfordshire Police said it was "working closely" with Mr Lloyd.
Mr Lloyd said he thought "most people" would agree with his plan.
Chase payment
"Putting people up in cells overnight really is a very expensive part of policing and is almost always the fault of the individual," he said.
"I think most people in this country would say [offenders] should pay for it, not the honest taxpayer."
He added that people could also pay for removing and storing vehicles.
Explaining the plan to the BBC, he said: "We need a society where people pay when they do something wrong."
He also called for the assets of criminals to be seized and invested in public services.
Mr Lloyd is preparing his first Police and Crime Plan and said the principle of "offender pays" was at the heart of his strategy for policing in the county.
He said the proposal to charge for overnight stays was just at the consultation stage and he "would have to work out" what to do with people who could not pay.
'Policing effort'
"We will work through whether or not we can then chase them through whichever means is possible," he said.
"We will have to accept there will be some people who can't pay.
"But let's look at how we can make it work rather than those it might not work with."
Mr Lloyd added he would also need to look at what would happen if those arrested and held were found to be innocent.
The Police and Crime Commissioner admitted his idea was "not the finished product" and he needed to check the legality of the proposal but he had had "a lot of very positive coverage so far".
"The feedback I have got so far is that broadly people think this is a good idea," he said.
Andy Bliss, Hertfordshire Chief Constable, said: "We are working in close support to provide operational input as [Mr Lloyd] consults with the public about his ideas for further enhancing the policing effort locally."There's agreement on the Cleveland Browns' two first-round picks in the second mock drafts of ESPN draft analysts Mel Kiper and Todd McShay.
Both agree the Browns will take a quarterback with the first pick (fourth overall) and a receiver with the second pick (26th overall). They both even agree on the receiver.
All of the picks make sense, and it's tough to argue them -- provided you share the belief the Browns pick a quarterback first. I don't. I'd take Clemson receiver Sammy Watkins and at some point I'd take Ohio State running back Carlos Hyde, perhaps in the second round. Kiper and McShay disagree.
Kiper has the Browns taking Louisville quarterback Teddy Bridgewater with the fourth overall selection.
Kiper opines that with Josh Gordon and Jordan Cameron, the Browns have players to help a young quarterback. He calls Bridgewater the guy who "has a lot of traits that translate to early success."
Johnny Manziel is not available in Kiper's draft when the Browns pick. He is in McShay's draft, but McShay has the Browns taking Blake Bortles of Central Florida.
His analysis might not exactly thrill fans, though, as he writes the Browns could wind up with a receiver and could pass on Bortles because he's not the most stout guy. He also has qualifiers about his ability.
"He will not wow scouts with a big-time arm, and, like most young quarterbacks, he can become more consistent with his decision-making," McShay writes. "However, Bortles does have enough arm strength to make all the NFL throws, and unlike many college QBs I study on tape, Bortles sees the entire field, stands strong in the pocket and shows the ability to go through NFL-type progressions."
Kiper and McShay both have the Browns taking Fresno State receiver Davante Adams (6-foot-4 and 228 pounds) with the pick they acquired from Indianapolis for Trent Richardson.
Kiper calls Adams "a strong receiver who will make plays in traffic and beat defenders for the ball on contested throws." McShay calls Adams "a very good complement to Gordon and a nice weapon for Bortles," whom he has the Browns taking first.
Adams is a redshirt sophomore who declared early. He's big and strong but isn't the fastest.
Physically, he resembles Greg Little. But unlike Little, who spent one season at receiver and didn't play his senior year due to NCAA violations, Adams' production in college was impressive. In 2012, he had 102 receptions for 1,312 yards. In 2013, he led the nation in receptions (131), receiving yards (1,719) and touchdowns (24).
Clearly those are some impressive numbers.Pro-life campaigner guilty of hitting sexual health worker with clipboard BelfastTelegraph.co.uk An anti-abortion campaigner has been convicted of assaulting an employee of a sexual health charity as she left an unplanned pregnancy clinic in Belfast. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/prolife-campaigner-guilty-of-hitting-sexual-health-worker-with-clipboard-31356836.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/incoming/article31357363.ece/c4761/AUTOCROP/h342/Moira%20Brennan
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An anti-abortion campaigner has been convicted of assaulting an employee of a sexual health charity as she left an unplanned pregnancy clinic in Belfast.
Moira Brennan, a member of the pro-life campaign group Precious Life, was protesting outside the Family Planning Association (FPA) building when she attacked the woman.
The 46-year-old, from Lisheegan Road in Ballymoney, was fined £400 and ordered to pay her victim £400 in compensation following her conviction for common assault in Belfast Magistrates Court yesterday.
Brennan was protesting outside the FPA building in May last year when she approached her victim and attempted to put graphic anti-abortion leaflets into her handbag. She then hit the woman with a clipboard.
The FPA last night said it welcomed Brennan's conviction.
Mark Breslin, FPA's Northern Ireland director, said that the right to protest is a human right but added that the manner of the protests they see outside their building is unacceptable.
"This offender did not realise that this member of staff worked for FPA and she pursued her down the street, trying to force leaflets into her handbag, and in the end hit her with a clipboard she was carrying. She was left shaken and upset by the assault," said Mr Breslin.
He added: "We share our office building with three other businesses and protesters outside have no idea which office women coming into and out of the building are visiting, or what the purpose of their visit is.
"There is a fundamental difference between the right to peaceful protest - which we respect and defend - and what these people do, which is to block entrances, question women why they are coming into a building, try and force leaflets with offensive imagery and language on to them, and intimidate staff."
Mr Breslin said Brennan's conviction "sends a very clear message that this behaviour will not be tolerated".
Brennan was granted bail to appeal her conviction.
Pro-life campaigners stage regular protests and hand out leaflets outside the FPA building and Marie Stopes private abortion clinic.
Last week Precious Life chief Bernadette Smyth won her appeal against being convicted of harassing a former Marie Stopes clinic director.
The case against Ms Smyth was thrown out after a judge ruled there was insufficient evidence that she pursued a campaign against Dawn Purvis.
Belfast TelegraphJean McNeil is the co-director of the Masters in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia and author of Ice Diaries: An Antarctic Memoir.
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Port Lockroy’s incoming base commander, Elliott, and I stand in our parkas on a rocky outcrop, surrounded by over a hundred Adélie penguins. Penguins—or rather penguin guano—smells like fish and rotten hay, with a fringe of chalk thrown in to dampen its worst effects.
“It’s the ammonia.” Elliott sniffs. “But after a few days we won’t smell it anymore.”
The guano is a pale green, like the mucus of a thick cold. It is smeared across the rocks, making them more slippery than if they were covered with pulverized banana skins. One or two people have already tripped and bashed their knees on the smooth hard stone.
“It’s a relief to smell something for a change.” I don’t say, I can’t believe you’re going to stay here for four months. That wouldn’t be helpful, and besides Elliott looks like someone who knows what he is in for.
Elliott surveys the exposed and isolated point which will be his home for the next four months, along with his two companions, Mike, a mountaineer still on a high from his recent successful ascent of Everest, and Liz the avid birdwatcher from Norwich, who will assume the title of world’s most remote postmistress.
The hut sits at the foot of a towering glacier. Approaching base from the ship, we saw it first as a speck, a tiny beacon painted the colour of cooking chocolate, with blazing red window frames and a tattered Union Jack fluttering on a toothpick flagpole. As we got closer we could see a multitude of small black forms, slick and glistening, like leeches or polyps, lumped all around the hut. These were the penguins, who we spied on through binoculars and who wiggled their behinds and sprayed green goo in response to our arrival.
Lockroy is a lonely place, dwarfed by regal mountains, surrounded by white loaves of hummocked glaciers that spill from them into the sea. The hut itself is like a piece of Lego. My eye is still accustoming itself to the gigantisms of the Antarctic. “I can’t get a fix on the size of things here,” I tell Nils, one of the scientists onboard, when we take a break from hefting boxes.
“It’s a problem of scale, fundamentally,” he says in his precise way. “Everything is too big, and too empty of anything human. It’s just the same as how humans can’t get a fix on the atom, visually—it’s not an issue of belief but of scale.”
During the Second World War, Lockroy was an important communications post, ferreting out the German submarines which slunk across the ice shelf edge. Now it is a live museum. Each austral summer thousands of cruise ship passengers are ferried into Lockroy to visit and buy memorabilia and stamps for postcards that will eventually make their way to their destinations, emblazoned with philatelic penguins and Edwardian heroes.
“They come just after their champagne lunches or bouts in the Jacuzzi. The women wear heels! And what do they find?” Elliott shakes his head. “Three nutters in a hut in the middle of nowhere.”
We had only a few hours to unload four months’ worth of stamps and provisions. Postage stamps turned out to be twice the weight of tinned mushrooms. We struggled on the slippery rocks in our bulky cold weather gear.
Pitching in is the first rule of the Antarctic, unwritten but sternly conveyed in a myriad of ways; almost nothing else about one’s behaviour or demeanour matters. You “muck in,” and with energy, otherwise you will be termed “slack” and risk being shunned—one of the many ways in which collective endeavour is privileged over personal preference in Antarctic society. A month before I might have been working at my day job as an editor sitting at a desk in London fielding manuscripts, but suddenly I’m wearing rigger boots and being winched aboard a cargo tender among seamen, ready to offload four months’ worth of provisions to an Antarctic base.
Once ashore we started emptying the tender, wending through the obstacle course of penguins, who took no notice of us, preferring to loll, squawking, on their stomachs on the pathways up the rocks. They looked like ice curling stones. We must have looked equally bizarre to them as we performed a waddling choreography of weaving and ducking, slipping on the guano, sliding dangerously close, and no one wanted to squish a penguin underfoot.
“We’re ready for our summer. Over,” I heard Elliott say on the radio to Base R. Elliott would report to the Base R communications manager every day, once in the morning and once in the evening, on the “radio scheds.” He grinned—that ecstatic, matchstick smile I would see so many times in the Antarctic, which burned so bright for a moment, before fizzing into a black, dazed awe.
Just as we were readying to head back to the ship the weather closed in. It started to snow, stinging flakes that seared our faces. A wind came barrelling down from the glacier and the sky darkened.
This was the first time I experienced a katabatic wind. The term is derived from the Greek word for descent. Katabatic winds are the only winds on the earth driven by gravity and not by the rotation of the earth. Born high on the ice sheet and pulled down toward sea level by gravity, as they accelerate down the ice cap and glaciers they gain velocity. One moment it’s windless and the next you’re knocked off your feet. These winds regularly flip Antarctic aircraft over like toys.
Captain David came on the radio. On the ship they’d had to take the tender out of the water and put it back on deck. It was rough for it to get through to us. “We might send the RIBs in,” the first officer said on the radio, referring to the Rigid-Hulled Inflatable Boats the British Antarctic Survey used for quick transfers. “That’s what they say but it’s too rough for RIB,” Elliott informed us.
We all huddled in the kitchen. We knew the ship’s officers were thinking about their schedule—we were expected the following day at Vernadksy, the Ukrainian scientific research station down the road, so to speak. We were already behind schedule and Captain David was thinking, no doubt, about the inconvenience of having twenty people stranded at Lockroy, waiting for a change in the weather which may or may not come any time soon.
We went to the window. We couldn’t see the ship. We peered through its snow-encrusted panes, watching as the slabs of glacier were eaten by mist.
“Well, I guess I’d better start cooking dinner for twenty-five,” Elliott said.
Elliott began to tell us a story. Two years before, a French yachtsman had pitched up in Lockroy. He had sailed his yacht across the most treacherous seas in the world. He ignored Elliott’s warnings and went for a walk only a hundred metres from the hut. A moment’s inattention meant he failed to see the tell-tale mint blue seam in the snow. He fell into a crevasse.
“He actually died from head trauma,” Elliott informed us. “We winched him out within minutes. But he wasn’t wearing a helmet and he banged his head. Spring ice is hard.”
The VHF radio crackled to life. We heard the first officer say, “We’re sending in the RIBs.”
We said goodbye to the hut nutters and the penguins. I took one last look at the hut and the glaciers that surround it. They looked benign, like a pristine slope at a ski resort, with their fresh icing of snow. We were in a different realm now, I realized. The dangers of the sea would soon be swapped for those of land. Elliott’s story was a warning. Life was tenuous in the Antarctic, he was telling us, this joking, boisterous horde of polar ingénues. A second’s unawareness could kill us.
That night the three Lockroy staff would cook dinner on a couple of Primus stoves, huddled in the kitchen with their Tilley lamps as the only source of heat. They would bed down fully clothed on hard bunks with cold duvets. On the ship, meanwhile, we would have dinner in our finery, we would drink scotch in the bar as the ship’s doctor, Dan, administered his weekly pub quiz—being the quizmaster is part of the Antarctic doctor’s job description, a stipulation inherited from the days of Shackleton and Scott and their multitalented expedition doctors.
In the RIB we gripped the hard sides of the inflatable as we zipped through the waves. We wore no immersion suits and the third mate was careful not to hit a wave straight on. I was wet, although not soaked. I didn’t feel the cold.
Ahead of us the ship rose and expanded; as we curved underneath its bow its red hull and its superstructure soared overhead, the height of a six-storey building. My heart surged—that was how it felt, a wave, a rush, from inside the muscle itself, a heady brew of thrill and gratitude. I thought of Shackleton’s men, how they must have felt the same passionate admiration for the Endurance, which had conveyed them so faithfully to the bottom of the world, then to watch it be crushed. It would be like having your own heart smashed in a vice of ice.
The winch came down, hooked onto the RIB, and we were levered into the air, whole, and swung onto the aft deck. The ship felt more stable than a planet. It felt like home.In ongoing efforts to size and shape the force to current and future requirements, Air Force officials explained why the service needs to grow to 350,000 active-duty Airmen over the next seven years.
The need to increase the end strength comes from the recognition that the Air Force is out of balance with ongoing and projected global demands for airpower, senior officials explained.
“The risk of manpower shortage is masked and placed on the backs of Airmen,” said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein. “Because if you go back and look at the data and the way we measure readiness, did we taxi? Yes. Did we launch? Yes. Did we make the deployed destination and accomplish the mission? Yes.
“What’s masked is the fact that the shortage of people has fundamentally changed the way we do business in terms of the operational risk day to day.”
If sequestration caps are removed and additional funding becomes available, the Air Force will consider growing to 350,000 active-duty Airmen during the next seven years. The service is currently on track to grow to 321,000 by the end of 2017, and 324,000 in the following years.
The erosion of readiness started decades ago, but has been exacerbated by sequestration and a continuous high operations tempo, explained Air Force officials. Throughout the last 10 years, the Air Force made steep cuts in overall end strength, especially in the combat air forces.
The Air Force has balanced risk across the force while maintaining the agility, flexibility and readiness to engage a full range of contingencies, senior leaders said.
“Additional manning is needed not just to meet air requirements, but to support the joint fight,” Goldfein said. “So when you look through the lens of growth in the United States military, we look through a joint lens and through that lens we see that the Air Force is always a part of every mission. Therefore, you can't have growth in one without growth in the Air Force."
Officials explained the Air Force must continue to grow the force to address key capability gaps and recover and sustain a stronger force for today's missions in the nuclear, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, maintenance and support career fields. It must also continue to resource growing remotely piloted aircraft and cyber mission requirements.
As part of the Fiscal Year 2017 budget request, the service plans to grow the active duty force to approximately 321,000 Airmen by 2018. Additional funding from Congress would be necessary for this growth, but details would have to be prioritized during future budgets submissions, officials said.
While the Air Force acknowledges the demand for more Airmen, officials also commented that it will take time to recruit, access and train additional Airmen.
“This is not something you can do immediately,” Goldfein said. “It’s actually something you’ve got to do over time. This is something we would build over the next seven years in a steady climb.”
Ultimately, the Air Force wants to reduce stress on Airmen and ensure we have enough people to support the joint fight and accomplish the missions the nation requires, said Air Force officials.A new set of specifications that surfaced on the US Patent and Trademark Office’s online database last week reveals that Samsung is taking another shot at applying eye-tracking technology to TVs after its failed attempt to develop a gaze-aware remote, and on a much grander scale. If its efforts bear fruit this time, watching video could get a lot more comfortable.
The software detailed in the filing apparently requires very little setup, automatically learning what it needs to know about the preferences of the viewer through the front-facing camera on their Samsung TV. That includes everything from the distance at which they’re watching to the distance between their eyes and whether or not they’re wearing glasses.
Those parameters are transmitted to a backend cloud service where a customized usage profile is created and then filled over time with data about their viewing habits. After enough information has been gathered, the system is able to identify situations that require adjusting the settings with enough accuracy to safely try and make the necessary tweaks on its own.
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If, for example, the software sees that your eyes are open wider than normal, the brightness of the display will be increased to let you see your show better. And if you’re squinting when the camera detects glare coming from your windows, the brightness will be decreased accordingly. There are also algorithms for identifying whether you’re reading a piece of text – like, say, an ad – as fast as you should be able to.
Where that particular functionality could come even handier than on smart TVs is mobile devices, which Samsung is also targeting with the technology. After all, the smaller the screen, the most vulnerable it is to glare and all the other factors that can making viewing a video or reading an article unnecessarily difficult.
But the convenience of having your settings automatically adjusted for your specific preferences will come at a price. Samsung indicates in its filing that its software will need to continuously track a user in order to gain a proper understanding of their viewing habits, data that ends up transmitted to the cloud in its entirety.
That’s especially alarming given that the system will also collect basic demographic data such as your race and age to identify whether you’re in some special risk of eyesight problems. Samsung will need to give users the option to determine exactly what features to enable and disable if it wants the software to ever find use once it’s released.
[do_widget id=text-6]President Trump is standing at a crossroads as he chooses the next director of the FBI.
Will he choose a loyalist to replace the man he fired, James Comey? Will it be a popular Republican politician, like Sen. John Cornyn John CornynGOP lawmaker says panel to investigate drug company gaming of patent system Senators grill drug execs over high prices Cornyn less popular than Cruz in Texas: poll MORE (Texas)?
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Or will Trump place a high value on a candidate who would be a reassuring voice to an organization reportedly shaken by Comey’s firing?
The Justice Department interviewed eight candidates over the weekend, three of whom are current or former politicians and none of whom have the kind of nonpartisan support that Comey had when former President Barack Obama Barack Hussein ObamaChicago's next mayor will be a black woman Obama portraits brought more than 1 million visitors to National Portrait Gallery in first year With low birth rate, America needs future migrants MORE selected him in 2013.
Trump is reportedly considering other candidates and is vowing to name a new director by the end of the week.
The FBI has a long tradition of safeguarding its political independence — no politician has ever taken the helm of the bureau — and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are concerned that if Trump chooses a politician, he could upend that convention.
Stoking those fears are reports that allies of Comey believe the former director was fired because he refused to pledge his loyalty to the president during a dinner meeting in January.
“My fear is that he will go the politician route, and name someone who will be more loyal to him,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), a frequent Trump critic who is retiring in 2018.
“That’s not what we want in an FBI director. The president has to trust the FBI director, but not have someone be loyal to him. They should be loyal to the Constitution and to the task of the FBI.”
Much of the focus so far has been on whether he will choose Cornyn, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate.
The move could appeal to Cornyn, who is term-limited in his leadership position. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration Senate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Pence meets with Senate GOP for 'robust' discussion on Trump declaration MORE (R-Ky.) is not expected to retire, potentially booting Cornyn out of leadership after 2018.
But even some Republicans aren’t crazy about the idea.
They say that under normal circumstances, Cornyn could be a great choice. But times aren’t normal.
“I think it’s now time to pick somebody that comes from within the ranks or has such a reputation that has no political background at all, that can go into the job on day one,” Sen. Lindsey Graham Lindsey Olin GrahamWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration GOP lawmaker says panel to investigate drug company gaming of patent system Sixteen years later, let's finally heed the call of the 9/11 Commission MORE (R-S.C.) told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“Under normal circumstances,” he said, Cornyn “would be a superb choice.”
Sen. Susan Collins Susan Margaret CollinsWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration Cohen grilled by Senate Intelligence panel Pence meets with Senate GOP for 'robust' discussion on Trump declaration MORE (R-Maine), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, offered a similar view.
“I think the world of John Cornyn, and he would be a great choice in normal times, but we’re not living in normal times,” she told CNN Monday.
While Cornyn is liked among his Republican colleagues — giving him a bloc of powerful allies should he conflict with the White House once at the bureau — he would likely face a rough confirmation process at the hands of frustrated Democrats.
If Republicans stick together, Democrats couldn’t block his confirmation, but they will almost certainly paint him as a political choice.
While he withheld his endorsement until Trump became the GOP’s presumptive nominee for president, from his seat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Cornyn has hewed closely to the administration line in that panel’s investigation into Russian interference in the election.
Rep. Trey Gowdy Harold (Trey) Watson GowdyThe family secret Bruce Ohr told Rod Rosenstein about Russia case Trey Gowdy joins Fox News as a contributor Congress must take the next steps on federal criminal justice reforms MORE (R-S.C.), who was also interviewed over the weekend but has since taken himself out of the running, would have likely sparked an even more intense backlash. The architect of the House investigation into the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, Gowdy is broadly viewed as intensely partisan.
It’s unclear how seriously Trump is considering any of the eight candidates. The president has a long history of floating out numerous names for open positions — some serious, some not.
One political figure on the list might satisfy skeptics: former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.).
Rogers, who held the gavel on the House Intelligence Committee and is a former agent at the bureau, reportedly has a solid reputation inside the J. Edgar Hoover Building as a straight shooter.
But broadly, former officials say, a political choice will not sit well within the bureau.
“I don’t think a politician is the right pick at this moment,” a former bureau official told The Hill. “Especially at this sensitive moment where we’re under so much scrutiny, being accused of bias.”
Asked if any of the eight candidates interviewed over the weekend would satisfy the rank-and-file agents within the bureau, he replied, “I don’t see any in that list.”
The FBI Agents Association (FBIAA) has endorsed Rogers for the second time. The group also supported the Michigan lawmaker in 2013, when Comey won the job. The FBIAA represents 13,000 active and former agents. The bureau employs 35,000 people, and it is unclear how many of the FBIAA’s members are active agents.
Trump could undercut the allegations that the dismissal of Comey was an attempt to stifle the FBI’s investigation of his campaign’s ties to Russia by elevating a current bureau official, some national security experts say.
Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe interviewed over the weekend but may be a long shot to get the job.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley Charles (Chuck) Ernest GrassleyOvernight Health Care: Senators grill drug execs over high prices | Progressive Dems unveil Medicare for all bill | House Dems to subpoena Trump officials over family separations Senate confirms Trump court pick despite missing two 'blue slips' GOP lawmaker says panel to investigate drug company gaming of patent system MORE (R-Iowa) opposes him, citing “political problems.” McCabe is under investigation by the Justice Department inspector general over a donation from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) to McCabe’s wife’s bid for the state legislature.
And McCabe has openly bucked the White House in a testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee after Comey’s dismissal, signaling in no uncertain terms that he remains loyal to the former director.
Adam Lee, the FBI special agent in charge of the Richmond, Va., office, was also interviewed over the weekend.
The remaining four candidates interviewed over the weekend include former Justice Department official Alice Fisher; Michael Garcia, a former U.S. attorney in Manhattan; Fran Townsend, homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush; and U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson.
After the political maelstrom that has engulfed Comey and McCabe, some former officials are dubious that any sufficiently independent candidate will want to take the job.
“I think it’s going to be very hard to find a good FBI director who is willing to operate under the circumstances that we’ve seen this week,” former CIA Director James Woolsey told CNN’s “Fareed Zarkaria GPS” on Sunday.The first press conference for Paulinho as an FC Barcelona saw the versatile midfielder grateful to the Club for his arrival. “It’s a moment of great satisfaction to be here, a dream come true. I want to thank the Board for their efforts that have allowed me to be here today,” said the Brazilian international.
“I am a player who helps in defence but I have played in a more attacking position during my career and I like to be close the opposition area. I will help wherever is needed.”
Paulinho continued: “I promise hard work and I will do everything to help my team mates. It’s a challenge and I will have to face it as best I can with my feet on the ground.”
“The team has a style and I am convinced that I can fit in here. I will do whatever is possible to help my team mates decide matches, they are great players.”
The experience midfielder revealed he is “prepared to play here” whilst at the same time confessing that he prefers to do his talking on the field.19 Sep 2012
A write-up of the 2012 Transition Network conference. The best yet.
Transition folks from around the world gathered last weekend at Battersea Arts Centre for the 6th annual Transition Network conference. In a week when the Arctic ice reached its smallest ever extent, scientists warned that the world’s weather could be on the verge of running amok and it was suggested that Saudi Arabia, always meant to be the ‘swing producer’ on whom the rest of the world could depend for reliable oil supplies, may become a net importer of oil by 2030, the theme of the conference was, appropriately, ‘Building resilience in extraordinary times’. Unlike previous conferences which had spanned two, perhaps three days, this |
appeal as a genre film artifact even outside of that context and it’s a dynamic largely due to its nature as deliberately campy horror.
Seeing Waters’s “cavalcade of perversions” at work so early in his career is valuable both to fans & newcomers alike because it calls attention to the fact that The Dreamlanders were straight up punks in the era of hippies & suburban sprawl. The surf rock soundtrack, beat-up Cadillacs, crossdressing, and leopard print get-ups of Multiple Maniacs construct a rock & roll nightmare incongruous with its then-current counterculture of hippie niceness. This is a playfully mean movie, one crawling with cartoonish rape humor, gleeful violence, and the single most blasphemous use of a prayer rosary imaginable. It’s no wonder that in Divine’s final moments of mania she’s treated like a Godzilla-esque monster complete with fleeing crowds & an armed military response. The world wasn’t quite ready for her particular brand of perversion and her very existence reads on the screen as a criminal act, one amplified by the film’s microfilm-reminiscent opening credits scroll. That shock value even holds power today, somehow, as I’ve never attended a John Waters screening that didn’t inspire at least one walk-out. Even in a film festival environment there were three hurried walk-outs during Multiple Maniacs. I don’t know if that speaks more to Waters’s reputation as The Hairspray Guy, the aggressive specificity of his sense of humor, or his unique ability to push buttons, but it’s honestly kind of incredible that any film from 1970, before the grindhouse heights of drive-in grotesquery, can disgust people into fleeing in horror in 2016, especially one this unabashedly silly.
Waters is obviously an inexperienced filmmaker in Multiple Maniacs. He catches his players wildly out of focus, he wears his influences proudly on his sleeve (including a poster for Russ Meyer’s Vixen!), he relies heavily on details like nudity & (absurdly unrealistic) rape scenarios for easy shock value, etc. However, the film holds up surprisingly well as a proto-punk provocation, maybe even one with wider commercial appeal than the more consistently celebrated Pink Flamingos, due to its genre thrills as an eccentric horror comedy of sorts. I’ll likely have very few more chances to catch one of his films for the very first time in a public audience environment & this one did not disappoint in the slightest. In an ideal world all of Waters’s back catalog would get this careful restoration treatment.
-Brandon Ledet
AdvertisementsOne thing that I've been a huge proponent of on this blog is finding ways that you can create income on the side to help turbo boost your progress towards reaching your financial goals.
I've talked about a lot of ways that I've used generate income to help me reach my financial goals. Among the things I do to make money online:
That's only the tip of the iceberg, however, there are a lot of other things I do. Creating side incomes is a second full time job for me!
Today I thought I'd talk about another thing that I do to generate income online. I create and sell my own e-books! In this post I'll walk through the process of creating an ebook from start to finish, talk about the tools you'll need to use, things you'll need to do to promote it, and how to keep it generating income for months to come.
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Why Publish An E-book?
One question I've heard a few times from people is “Why would I want to create an e-book in addition to creating regular content on my site?”. There are a lot of good reasons to create an e-book. Some of the reasons I came up with:
It's a great way to create incremental income to add to your bottom line. Once it's created, it can continue generating revenue for as long as the information remains relevant.
A great way to share valuable information that you know.
Different medium and another place to build your brand and message.
Having an e-book on your subject matter helps to build your image as an authority in your subject matter.
It's cheaper and easier than publishing a hard copy of your book.
Free e-books are a great bonus to get people signed up for your email lists and site feeds!
There are probably a thousand other reasons to create an e-book, but if you're looking to build an online brand, and you want to find new ways to create income, it's a great way to do it.
For an amazing guide on creating and promoting your e-book, check out this e-book from Pat Flynn that helped me along the way: Ebooks The Smart Way
A lot of people think that creating an e-book isn't something they could do because it would be too expensive to buy the tools they need to make it. Here's the thing though. You can create your e-book using open source and free software, and still have an amazing looking final product. I did! It doesn't have to cost you a dime!
So here are some things that you'll need to create your e-book itself.
Word Processor
To write the content of your e-book you can use just about any word processing software. Seriously. The only proviso is that for the finished product for your e-book you're usually going to want it to be a.pdf formatted file (portable document format). Not all word processing software will allow you to save or export your file as a.pdf. If it doesn't, there are options out there for you to be able to convert your file to a.pdf. It just depends on what program you're using.
Personally I used a free open source software called OpenOffice.org to create my e-book, and it is what I would recommend using. It has everything you need to create the e-book including page styles (so i could create a cover and pages background for all the pages in the e-book), formatting options, linking ability, and of course – it allows you to export your file as a.pdf. Why go through extra conversion steps when you can just use Open Office and export a nice final product?
Image Editing Software
When you're creating your e-book you're most likely going to want to create images to have in the e-book including a cover, header and footer graphics and other images to include in the content to make it more visually interesting. You'll also need an image editing software to create graphics for your landing page that you'll be creating later on in this tutorial, as well as for promotional ad banners you can send to affiliates.
For me choosing a graphics software was easy because I already own Photoshop and have it on my home computer. It's a robust tool that you can do so much with, but it also costs an arm and a leg. It isn't going to be an option for most people. Luckily there are a ton of great free options out there as well. Among the ones I might suggest:
If you want to spend a little bit of money, you can also hire someone to create the graphics for your e-book, and an e-book cover. I know doing graphics isn't for everyone, and if you want a completely professional looking design, you may need to hire it out. Some options I'd recommend:
LogosForWebsites.com: My graphic design site – affordable and you'll get some nice graphics!
Upwork Contractors: Use Upwork to hire a contractor to create graphics for you.
Buy Pre-Made Graphics: Do a google search for the type of graphics you want, and you'll be able to find pre-made graphics you can customize, or software that will automatically create your graphics for you.
Getting Started On Your E-book
Putting together your e-book is going to be a lot of work, I promise you. If you do it the right way, however, it will pay off in the end. So where do we start once you've chosen your tools? Choosing your topic of course!
Choosing a Topic
When you're trying to come up with a topic for your e-book, it's probably best to write about something that you have quite a bit of knowledge on, or something that you can research and pull together information on relatively easily. For me the things I've written e-books about are two of my favorite topics, blogging and personal finance. I'm immersed in these topics daily, and I feel like my knowledge of those topics is pretty good. In addition I had already written on the topics, and was able to recycle some of that information to include in the e-book.
So how do you find what exactly you should write about – and what will be popular with readers? Here are some things I do:
Figure out what's popular on your site : I looked at what articles on my site were the most popular as far as traffic, and as far as comments.
: I looked at what articles on my site were the most popular as far as traffic, and as far as comments. Do a survey: Ask people in a short 3-5 question survey what they'd like to read about and what topics interest them the most.
Ask people in a short 3-5 question survey what they'd like to read about and what topics interest them the most. Think about the typical person you're writing to : Think about the average person who might buy your e-book, and think about what kind of questions they would have, and then answer them.
: Think about the average person who might buy your e-book, and think about what kind of questions they would have, and then answer them. Do an Amazon search on a potential topic: Do an Amazon search once you've figured out a potential topic area, and see what books and topics are the most popular, and have the most comments. Read the reviews of those books to see what people are saying about the topic and what questions were left unanswered. (hat tip to Pat Flynn for this idea).
The keys to choosing your topic is to choose something that will be relatively popular, and write what people want to know, not necessarily about what you want to write about (although it helps to write about something you enjoy). Make sure you write about the topic in an easily understandable way, and don't use a lot of technical jargon or industry language. Keep it accessible for all.
Mind Map Your Topic And Create An Outline
Once you've chosen a topic, it's time to map out your topic (mind mapping) and create an outline for your e-book.
For my first e-book I used a mind-mapping software for the iPod touch and iPhone called InstaViz. Basically, I chose the main topic, and then off of the main topic I did offshoots of subtopics to cover, and then even lower level topics to cover. The screenshot above isn't of my actual mind-map but gives a representation of one. Examples of mind mapping software:
After I completed my mind-map I wrote down a rough outline of my e-book and the topics I wanted to cover, based off of the mind-map.
Set Up Your Document Template
Once you have a topic, and a rough outline of what you want to write, you'll want to prepare to write your actual e-book. To do that you'll want to create your document template within Open Office or other word processor.
To set up my document template I set up the following:
Choose the page size : For an e-book I would normally do it as an 8.5″x11″ or 6″x9″ page, as those sizes will usually look best on most monitors.
: For an e-book I would normally do it as an 8.5″x11″ or 6″x9″ page, as those sizes will usually look best on most monitors. Choose readable fonts : Use a simple font without a lot of embellishment for your e-book. Readability is key, so I'd suggest something simple like Arial or Helvetica.
: Use a simple font without a lot of embellishment for your e-book. Readability is key, so I'd suggest something simple like Arial or Helvetica. Setup a cover page, header and footers : Since i have a graphic design background, I designed my own book cover page graphic, along with headers and footers. When you're in your document, you can set the cover page to have a background image via page styles, and then for the rest of the e-book use a background image that includes your headers/footers.
: Since i have a graphic design background, I designed my own book cover page graphic, along with headers and footers. When you're in your document, you can set the cover page to have a background image via page styles, and then for the rest of the e-book use a background image that includes your headers/footers. Setup headers, sub-headers, bullet points, etc: When you're actually writing your text you'll want to include headers and sub-headers, and usually the formatting of that text will be different from the body of the text. The fonts will be bigger, bold and sometimes in color or with background images. Also setup what your bullet points will look like. Make sure everything fits your theme.
When you're creating your document template, you may want to refer to the documentation for the word processor that you're using. It should have more exhaustive instructions on how to create page styles, setup page backgrounds and modifying page sizes.
Once you've setup all these things in your template, you're ready to start writing.
Writing Your E-book
Writing your e-book is going to take a lot of hard work, and it won't happen in one sitting. You need to set aside time to write, time to have others edit, and time to re-write. I gave myself a deadline of one month to finish the e-book, and made time every night to write in order to finish it on time.
Things To Include In Your E-book
When writing your e-book, there are several things you should try to include within your e-book.
A disclaimer/copyright page : Add one of these in so that people can't use your e-book without your consent and so that you can't be held liable for actions of websites, third parties and companies you might link to within your content.
: Add one of these in so that people can't use your e-book without your consent and so that you can't be held liable for actions of websites, third parties and companies you might link to within your content. Introduction : Introduce your e-book in the preface. Talk about why you wrote the book, how it can help folks, and set the tone for your content.
: Introduce your e-book in the preface. Talk about why you wrote the book, how it can help folks, and set the tone for your content. An about page : Some people suggest including an “about the author” type page where you can connect with your readers and make the e-book more personal. You can also link to other content, sites, social media that you're a part of.
: Some people suggest including an “about the author” type page where you can connect with your readers and make the e-book more personal. You can also link to other content, sites, social media that you're a part of. Include images to make it more interesting : When writing your e-book be sure to include relevant eye-catching images and graphics within the content. Use your own photos and screen captures free stock photo sites, or clip art sites to get good graphics. Don't go overboard, however, because it can affect the size of your final.pdf file negatively.
: When writing your e-book be sure to include relevant eye-catching images and graphics within the content. Use your own photos and screen captures free stock photo sites, or clip art sites to get good graphics. Don't go overboard, however, because it can affect the size of your final.pdf file negatively. Use bullet points and side notes: Break up long pages of text by using not only graphics as mentioned above, but also bullet point lists and text boxes with side notes.
Break up long pages of text by using not only graphics as mentioned above, but also bullet point lists and text boxes with side notes. Use hyperlinks : One of the great things about e-books is that they can be interactive because you can include links to outside content, other posts on your site, and to other affiliate programs. Don't go crazy with links, but if something is relevant, throw a link in there.
: One of the great things about e-books is that they can be interactive because you can include links to outside content, other posts on your site, and to other affiliate programs. Don't go crazy with links, but if something is relevant, throw a link in there. Thank you page: It an be a good idea to include a thank you page on your e-book as well to connect with readers one last time, tell people what the next step is, promote other content or e-books, and remind people to not to share your content that you've worked so hard on. Include a picture if you have one to personalize it.
Things To Remember
There are things you should remember when writing your e-book.
Save often : I can't stress this enough. You need to save your file often. There's nothing worse than having a power outage or or someone trip over a power cord, and losing 1000 words of unsaved writing.
: I can't stress this enough. You need to save your file often. There's nothing worse than having a power outage or or someone trip over a power cord, and losing 1000 words of unsaved writing. Write for your reader, not yourself : Make sure you're writing in a voice that is clear and focused on your reader. Make it easy to understand, and avoid using technical or confusing language unless you have to.
: Make sure you're writing in a voice that is clear and focused on your reader. Make it easy to understand, and avoid using technical or confusing language unless you have to. Schedule time to write: I've found that if I don't force myself to write by giving myself a schedule and a goal, it just won't happen. Schedule a regular time where you can sit down and write.
I've found that if I don't force myself to write by giving myself a schedule and a goal, it just won't happen. Schedule a regular time where you can sit down and write. Export to PDF: when you complete your e-book, remember to export it to a format that most everyone can read,.pdf. If you're using Open Office there is a built in feature that allows you to export to.pdf. For other word processors you may need to have the file converted to.pdf via one of the online converters, or by having someone else convert it for you.
Coming Up With Bonuses To Include
When selling your e-book, it's often helpful to have things that you can bundle with your e-book to make it a more attractive offer. Free bonuses or limited time offers that will get people to act and purchase your e-book… NOW.
Things you can include as bonuses:
Spreadsheets : If it's a e-book on budgets, include a zero based budget spreadsheet!
: If it's a e-book on budgets, include a zero based budget spreadsheet! Checklists : With my e-book I included a couple of checklists to go along with the e-book content, essentially action items they can print out.
: With my e-book I included a couple of checklists to go along with the e-book content, essentially action items they can print out..MP3 files : With my e-book package I put together a.mp3 version of the e-book so people could listen to then e-book on their commute. This one has been pretty popular.
: With my e-book package I put together a.mp3 version of the e-book so people could listen to then e-book on their commute. This one has been pretty popular. Video Interviews Or Tutorials : Adam Baker in his new “Sell Your Crap” e-book package, his premium package includes video interviews with other popular bloggers.
: Adam Baker in his new “Sell Your Crap” e-book package, his premium package includes video interviews with other popular bloggers. Templates : Is the e-book about how to write a blog post? Include a template for writing a blog post.
: Is the e-book about how to write a blog post? Include a template for writing a blog post. Other E-books : Include bonus e-books. In my e-book package I included a bonus ebook with advice on blogging from other successful bloggers.
: Include bonus e-books. In my e-book package I included a bonus ebook with advice on blogging from other successful bloggers. Related Content
As mentioned above, when I put together my e-book package, I added several bonuses. I did a second e-book with solicited advice from other experts in the field, I created 2 checklists that were relevant to the topic, and the most popular – I put together an audio.mp3 version of the e-book. It took a lot of time for me to put all those things together, but in the end I'm convinced those free bonuses helped to sell a lot of e-books.
Creating A Sales Landing Page
After you've created your e-book and put together a package of bonuses, you're ready to create a sales landing page. So what are the components of a successful landing page?
What To Include On Your Landing Page
Present the buyer with a problem : Why is there a need for your e-book, and why would anyone even want to buy it? Ask it in a question, even in your main page title. “Want to start a money making blog, but don't know where to start?”
: Why is there a need for your e-book, and why would anyone even want to buy it? Ask it in a question, even in your main page title. “Want to start a money making blog, but don't know where to start?” Hint at a solution, introduce your product : Hint at what a solution to the problem might look like, and introduce your e-book as said solution. You may even want to include a graphic rendering of your e-book at this point.
: Hint at what a solution to the problem might look like, and introduce your e-book as said solution. You may even want to include a graphic rendering of your e-book at this point. Offer a chance to buy : At this point some people may already be ready to buy. Put your purchase button in there so those people can.
: At this point some people may already be ready to buy. Put your purchase button in there so those people can. Give testimonials : Testimonials from happy users of your e-book product are worth their weight in gold. I sent my e-book to some selected blogger friends and asked if they could write a testmonial in return if they thought it was a worthwhile product.
: Testimonials from happy users of your e-book product are worth their weight in gold. I sent my e-book to some selected blogger friends and asked if they could write a testmonial in return if they thought it was a worthwhile product. Sales video : This isn't something you have to have, but many folks include a sales video on their page with them talking, or talking about the benefits of the product. It can help to build trust.
: This isn't something you have to have, but many folks include a sales video on their page with them talking, or talking about the benefits of the product. It can help to build trust. List the benefits of your e-book package : Tell what the e-book can do for the reader. For example, “the e-book will help you to get your blog earning $100/month within 6 months”.
: Tell what the e-book can do for the reader. For example, “the e-book will help you to get your blog earning $100/month within 6 months”. Make the offer : Offer your e-book, and tell how much it should be worth, and then tell them how much they'll have to pay.
: Offer your e-book, and tell how much it should be worth, and then tell them how much they'll have to pay. Sweeten the deal – list your bonuses : At this point you've told how much the package costs, but you want to sweeten the deal by throwing in something. Along the lines of “buy one magic chopper, get the second absolutely free!”. For mine I threw in some bonus checklists, a bonus e-book and an.mp3 of the e-book.
: At this point you've told how much the package costs, but you want to sweeten the deal by throwing in something. Along the lines of “buy one magic chopper, get the second absolutely free!”. For mine I threw in some bonus checklists, a bonus e-book and an.mp3 of the e-book. Offer a money back guarantee : Offer a money back guarantee if they're not happy with their purchase. I did a 30 day money back guarantee. You know how many I've had to give? Zero.
: Offer a money back guarantee if they're not happy with their purchase. I did a 30 day money back guarantee. You know how many I've had to give? Zero. Give a call to action: Tell the reader exactly what you want them to do – to purchase the e-book. Give them a nice big button graphic that they can click on to buy.
Great Landing Page Resources:
Automating E-book Sales
One thing that is so great about selling an e-book, is that once you've created the e-book package, landing page and other resources, it will basically be passive income if you do it right.
So what can you do to automate the process to the point where it needs little to no intervention from you?
Purchase, Payment and Product Delivery
Here are a couple of good options that I've come across.
E-Junkie : Probably one of the more popular options to use in selling your e-books or other products is E-Junkie. Basically you store your e-book on their servers, put a piece of their code on your sales page, and when people click on the button they will be taken to a secure payment page where they can pay using PayPal, Google Checkout or a variety of other payment options. Once they pay, they are sent an email with a download link for your e-book package. You never have to be involved in the process! Cost? $5/month.
: Probably one of the more popular options to use in selling your e-books or other products is E-Junkie. Basically you store your e-book on their servers, put a piece of their code on your sales page, and when people click on the button they will be taken to a secure payment page where they can pay using PayPal, Google Checkout or a variety of other payment options. Once they pay, they are sent an email with a download link for your e-book package. You never have to be involved in the process! Cost? $5/month. WP eStore Shopping Cart Plugin: I considered using E-Junkie, but I wanted to do an in-house option if possible – something that didn't have monthly fees. I found a WordPress plugin called WP eStore that allows you to sell your own products directly via the WordPress admin interface, and accept payments via PayPal. It allows you to have a hands off approach, just like E-Junkie. When the customer purchases your e-book and pays, they'll be automatically sent an email with a one time use download link. It will keep also keep all your sales stats, follow up emails, coupon codes, product information and more all in one place. No having to go to another website to login and see sales stats. Cost? $39.95 one time fee.
Affiliate Programs
One great way to promote sales of your e-book is to create an affiliate program so that others can promote your product using their own unique affiliate links. If someone purchases the e-book via their affiliate link, they get a cut, usually in the range of 20-50%. It's a great way to help promote your e-book because your affiliates can reach people that you might not have been able to. They have their own email lists, twitter followers and readers that they can reach, that you probably wouldn't have been able to. For my e-book I reached out to a bunch of other bloggers that I knew, offering a free copy of the e-book, and asking them to promote it.
Create a set of banner ads that they can use to promote your product – and of course, make sure to pay your affiliates on time or they won't promote your product.
Some good affiliate program options:
E-Junkie :If you're using E-Junkie as your shopping cart and product delivery platform, it already has an affiliate program built in. Take advantage of it! Cost? Included in the $5/month fee.
:If you're using E-Junkie as your shopping cart and product delivery platform, it already has an affiliate program built in. Take advantage of it! Cost? Included in the $5/month fee. WP Affiliate Platform: I use a plugin that was written by the same author as the shopping cart plugin to run my affiliate program. The great thing about it is that it is built directly into WordPress, and allows me to manage it easily all in one place. Cost? $39.95, or $55 if purchased together with the WP eStore plugin.
Launching Your E-book
When you've got everything setup and ready to go, it's time to start thinking about how you're going to launch your e-book. Here are some things that I did to get some buzz going, and to promote the e-book even before it launched.
Write about it pre-launch : Write about the e-book on your site when writing about related content. Build up to it, even mentioning how many days it is until launch..
: Write about the e-book on your site when writing about related content. Build up to it, even mentioning how many days it is until launch.. Social media buzz: Talk about it on Twitter, Facebook and other social media, even setting up a mailing list for people to get in on launch deals for the e-book.
Once the e-book has launched, you need to keep the buzz going.
Guest post on other popular blogs : Bloggers are always looking for free content. Do a tour of the other blogs writing related content, and include a link or two back to your e-book sales page.
: Bloggers are always looking for free content. Do a tour of the other blogs writing related content, and include a link or two back to your e-book sales page. Offer affiliate payouts: Set up an affiliate program and recruit other bloggers and friends to promote your e-book.
Set up an affiliate program and recruit other bloggers and friends to promote your e-book. Offer to do interviews with affiliates : Do interviews as an expert in the area of your e-book with other bloggers.
: Do interviews as an expert in the area of your e-book with other bloggers. Comment on related forums : Be a regular in a related forum, and put a link to your e-book in your signature.
: Be a regular in a related forum, and put a link to your e-book in your signature. Offer limited time incentives, use coupon codes : During launch week or other times offer coupon codes, or limited time incentives in order to push sales of the e-book.
: During launch week or other times offer coupon codes, or limited time incentives in order to push sales of the e-book. Do mini re-launches for holidays, new versions, etc.: Find any excuse you can to re-launch the book for a holiday, because you've updated the content, or for other reasons. You can do multiple re-launches of the same product!
How Much Can You Make Selling Your E-book?
This is a tough one to answer. You hear the stories of some folks finding a popular niche topic that ends up netting them thousands of dollars a month in e-book sales, while you hear of others who only get a trickle of sales throughout the year. I think my e-book sales have been somewhere in the middle, netting me an extra few hundred dollars here and there. While it's not enough to retire on, it is enough to make a difference to my bottom line. And when you consider that it can continue to earn passive income from month to month, it's a pretty awesome deal!
The costs associated with creating my e-book? $55 for the shopping cart and affiliate plugins, and of course paypal fees. That's it!
Conclusion
Creating an e-book is a long process that takes a lot of hard work. While you may end up pulling out a few hairs in the process, in the end, if you do it right you could end up with a money making asset that will add to your bottom line.
Want to check out a list of some of my favorite e-books? Head on over to the “E-books We Love“ page.CALGARY, Alberta, Jan. 13 (UPI) -- Bisphenol A, more commonly referred to as BPA, is a carbon-based synthetic compound used in the production plastic products, including food containers. Concerns over the compound's potentially harmful effects on human hormones spurred makers of baby bottles to abandon its use, opting instead for supposedly safer bisphenol S.
But a new study suggests bisphenol S may not be a safe alternative. The new research, conducted by scientists at the University of Calgary, found a link between the compound and hyperactivity in zebrafish.
The FDA no longer certifies the safety of BPA for use in products intended for infants -- as a result of market abandonment, not safety concerns -- but the agency has sponsored a number of studies that confirm BPA's safety at the low levels found in some foods. Plastic bottles and the lining in canned food have been shown to leach trace amounts of BPA into the food and liquids they contain.
The latest study out of Canada, however, suggests consumers are smart to be wary of the exposure of infants and children to BPA. The new study found both BPA and its supposedly safer alternative, bisphenol S, to manipulate the proper formation of neurons in embryonic zebrafish, resulting in hormonal imbalances and hyperactivity in the maturing test subjects.
"I was actually very surprised at our results. This was a very, very, very low dose, so I didn't think using a dose this low could have any effect," study author Deborah Kurrasch, a researcher at Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine, said in a press release.
"These findings are important because they support that the prenatal period is a particularly sensitive stage, and reveals previously unexplored avenues of research into how early exposure to chemicals may alter brain development," added co-author and Calgary grad student Cassandra Kinch.
More research is needed to confirm that the chemicals affect human brain development the same way they do zebrafish, the study's authors say. Still, there's mounting evidence, Kurrasch and her colleagues say, that pregnant women and newborns should avoid all kinds of bisphenols.
The findings also shed light on the risks of trusting untested alternatives to potentially harmful chemical compounds.
"A lot of the alternative chemicals have not been adequately tested because they don't have to be," Kurrasch told the Washington Post. "A compound is considered safe (by the Food and Drug Administration) until proven otherwise."TUCSON, Ariz. -- Police in Arizona released video from a dashboard camera showing how a police officer used his cruiser to put an end to a crime spree in February, CBS affiliate KOLD-TV in Tucson reported.
In the video, recorded Feb. 19, an apparent gunshot is heard as suspect Mario Valencia is seen walking down a street in Marana, a town northwest of Tucson.
Then, in a decision that Marana police Chief Terry Rozema says probably saved Valencia's life, Officer Michael Rapiejko drives his cruiser onto the sidewalk and rams Valencia.
According to Marana police, Valencia was fleeing from a Walmart where he had allegedly stolen a rifle. He had already been intercepted by police near a post office, where he pointed the rifle at his head multiple times and threatened suicide before firing the gun in another direction and fleeing.
Police do not know if he was shooting at officers, and no one was hit by the bullet.
The pursuit came to an end outside a self storage facility nearby, where Rapiejko hit the suspect with his cruiser.
"This was a dangerous felon who'd been on a crime spree throughout the morning," Marana Police Sgt. Chris Warren told KOLD-TV in February. "He'd just stolen a weapon, loaded it, was not obeying commands from officers and was walking toward occupied businesses. It's a busy time of morning, a lot of employees at work, a lot getting ready to come out for breaks, he's walking toward those businesses. So we had to take immediate action and make sure he didn't get inside those businesses."
Valencia was taken to University of Arizona Medical Center in serious condition. He stayed there two days before being booked into jail.
Police were investigating whether Valencia was connected to the three earlier incidents in Tucson, including a convenience store robbery, a break-in and fire at a church and a home invasion and car theft.
Officer Rapiejko previously served with the Tucson and New York police departments before joining the Marana police.TORONTO – There was a collective sense of relief Friday morning inside the visitor’s locker room at Air Canada Centre.
Its occupants – the Boston Celtics – had gone through a whirlwind of emotions over the last few days as trade rumors swirled with the nearing of the trade deadline.
Alas, the deadline passed Thursday at 3 p.m. and the C’s made no moves. And the players were perfectly fine with that decision.
“I have trust in (president of basketball operations) Danny Ainge and all the guys in the front office,” Isaiah Thomas said Friday ahead of shootaround before taking on the Toronto Raptors. “That’s what they do on a daily basis so they know if they had a good deal or they didn’t.
“Since I’ve been here we haven’t had a trade so it’s not a surprise. We’ll just roll with the punches and go with what we’ve got in this locker room.”
The Celtics entered the All-Star break last weekend knowing that they may return to a much different looking roster. All pieces remained intact, however, which was comforting to the players.
“It’s nice to see that everybody’s here,” said Avery Bradley, Boston’s longest tenured player. “I’m happy that no one was traded. I think we have a great group of guys that are playing great basketball. And I hope we can continue to play that way because I feel like this could be a special year for us if we all buy into what we’re trying to do as a team.”
Boston’s recent success may be one reason why the front office felt comfortable standing pat at the deadline. The Celtics won nine of 11 games entering the All-Star break and are just three and a half games behind the first-place Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference standings.
Ainge said Thursday that he has great faith in Boston’s current core and is excited to see what it will be capable of accomplishing come playoff time.
“That should motivate everyone to want to work hard and focus on the group of guys that we have and have everyone buy into what we want to do,” Bradley said response to Ainge’s words of confidence. “I’m not saying that everyone hasn’t (bought in), but we just (have to) really focus on execution and playing as hard as we can so we can make a push and |
sea of grass before us and were thrilled to see a Bobolink perched atop a bare branch.
The late afternoon sun bathed the hilltops in a brilliant glow as Bob and I stealthily crept closer to the Bobolink, using small shrubs to conceal our movements. We are lucky that Bobolinks select open fields and meadows of tall grass for their breeding habitat as it makes detection that much easier.
The Bobolink was not content to remain on one perch but constantly moved from tree to tree, all the while singing his merry tune. That is when Bob and I realized that there was more than one male Bobolink in the immediate area. Melodious conversations broke out across the distance between the birds as if sharing information about the intruders in their midst.
Male Bobolinks have very distinctive breeding plumage. With black underparts, greyish white rump and a pale yellow patch on the back of the neck, they are one of the easiest birds to recognize. This colouring makes the birds stand out when performing showy displays for mating purposes.
Given that Bobolinks spend much of their time searching for insects and weed seeds on the ground, Bob and I were lucky that any of the birds were in plain sight. At one point, one of the birds did disappear into the long grass at the brink of one of the hills, but whether or not it was feeding is questionable.
The area was perfect as a nesting site since Bobolinks choose to build their nests on the ground in tall grass or similar vegetation in open areas. Seeing as the one Bobolink kept to the trees around where it later landed, we presumed that its nest was likely already occupied with the female roosting on her eggs. The fledglings usually appear in June and early July.
Bobolinks are members of the blackbird family, but once mating season has passed, the male will assume a dull sparrow-like plumage similar to that of the female, and he will retain that colouring for the remainder of the year. We did not see any females that day giving rise to the thinking that they were sitting on the nests.
Bobolinks are known for their cheerful song which they sing both when perched and also when in slow flight. The delightful, loud, bubbling performance is made up of short gurgling phrases that are very pleasing to the ear. But after breeding season, the melodic song is heard no more and instead is replaced with a simple metallic “pink”.
Towards the end of summer, Bobolinks will rove about in flocks before undertaking their massive migration to Argentina. These birds complete one of the longest annual migrations of any North American songbird with a round trip of almost 20,000 kilometers. That is totally amazing!
After dallying on the crest of a kame hill, overlooking Kettle Lake, for more than an hour, Bob and I finally had to bid the Bobolinks adieu. We were bagged and still had an hour’s drive to get home. But we were more than satisfied with our bird sightings on this one occasion and can hardly wait to return to the park in the near future.
We should note that the Bobolink is on the Endangered Species list in Ontario. For information on efforts to help this grassland bird recover, please visit: Ontario Nature
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Our South African Journey to Kruger National Park
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ON NOVEMBER 29th representatives of countries from around the world will gather in Cancún, Mexico, for the first high-level climate talks since those in Copenhagen last December. The organisers hope the meeting in Mexico, unlike the one in Denmark, will be unshowy but solid, leading to decisions about finance, forestry and technology transfer that will leave the world better placed to do something about global warming. Incremental progress is possible, but continued deadlock is likelier. What is out of reach, as at Copenhagen, is agreement on a plausible programme for keeping climate change in check.
The world warmed by about 0.7°C in the 20th century. Every year in this century has been warmer than all but one in the last (1998, since you ask). If carbon-dioxide levels were magically to stabilise where they are now (almost 390 parts per million, 40% more than before the industrial revolution) the world would probably warm by a further half a degree or so as the ocean, which is slow to change its temperature, caught up. But CO 2 levels continue to rise. Despite 20 years of climate negotiation, the world is still on an emissions trajectory that fits pretty easily into the “business as usual” scenarios drawn up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The Copenhagen accord, a non-binding document which was the best that could be salvaged from the summit, talks of trying to keep the world less than 2°C warmer than in pre-industrial times—a level that is rather arbitrarily seen as the threshold for danger. Many countries have, in signing the accord, promised actions that will or should reduce carbon emissions. In the World Energy Outlook, recently published by the International Energy Agency, an assessment of these promises forms the basis of a “new policies scenario” for the next 25 years (see chart 1). According to the IEA, the scenario puts the world on course to warm by 3.5°C by 2100. For comparison, the difference in global mean temperature between the pre-industrial age and the ice ages was about 6°C.
The IEA also looked at what it might take to hit a two-degree target; the answer, says the agency's chief economist, Fatih Birol, is “too good to be believed”. Every signatory of the Copenhagen accord would have to hit the top of its range of commitments. That would provide a worldwide rate of decarbonisation (reduction in carbon emitted per unit of GDP) twice as large in the decade to come as in the one just past: 2.8% a year, not 1.4%. Mr Birol notes that the highest annual rate on record is 2.5%, in the wake of the first oil shock.
But for the two-degree scenario 2.8% is just the beginning; from 2020 to 2035 the rate of decarbonisation needs to double again, to 5.5%. Though they are unwilling to say it in public, the sheer improbability of such success has led many climate scientists, campaigners and policymakers to conclude that, in the words of Bob Watson, once the head of the IPCC and now the chief scientist at Britain's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, “Two degrees is a wishful dream.”
The fight to limit global warming to easily tolerated levels is thus over. Analysts who have long worked on adaptation to climate change—finding ways to live with scarcer water, higher peak temperatures, higher sea levels and weather patterns at odds with those under which today's settled patterns of farming developed—are starting to see their day in the uncomfortably hot sun. That such measures cannot protect everyone from all harm that climate change may bring does not mean that they should be ignored. On the contrary, they are sorely needed.
Many of these adaptations are the sorts of thing—moving house, improving water supply, sowing different seeds—that people will do for themselves, given a chance. This is one reason why adaptation has not been the subject of public debate in the same way as reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions from industry and deforestation have. But even if a lot of adaptation will end up being done privately, it is also a suitable issue for public policy.
For a start, some forms of adaptation—flood barriers, for instance—are clearly public goods, best supplied through collective action. Adaptation will require redistribution, too. Some people and communities are too poor to adapt on their own; and if emissions caused by the consumption of the rich imposes adaptation costs on the poor, justice demands recompense.
Furthermore, policymakers' neat division of the topic of climate change into mitigation, impact and adaptation is too simplistic. Some means of adaptation can also act as mitigation; a farming technique which helps soil store moisture better may well help it store carbon too. Some forms of adaptation will be hard to distinguish from the sort of impact you would rather avoid. Mass migration is a good way of adapting if the alternative is sitting still and starving; to people who live where the migrants turn up it may look awfully like an unwelcome impact.
Its frequently private and slightly blurry nature is not the only reason why adaptation has been marginalised. The green pressure groups and politicians who have driven the debate on climate change have often been loth to see attention paid to adaptation, on the ground that the more people thought about it, the less motivated they would be to push ahead with emissions reduction. Talking about adaptation was for many years like farting at the dinner table, says an academic who has worked on adaptation over the past decade. Now that the world's appetite for emissions reduction has been revealed to be chronically weak, putting people off dinner is less of a problem.
Another reason for taking adaptation seriously is that it is necessary now. Events such as this year's devastating floods in Pakistan make it obvious that the world has not adapted to the climate it already has, be it man-made or natural. Even if the climate were not changing, there would be two reasons to worry about its capacity to do more harm than before. One is that it varies a lot naturally and the period over which there are good global climate records is short compared with the timescale on which some of that variability plays out. People thus may be ignoring the worst that today's climate can do, let alone tomorrow's. The other is that more lives, livelihoods and property are at risk, even if hazards do not change, as a result of economic development, population growth and migration to coasts and floodplains.
In a late 21st-century world 3°C warmer than the pre-industrial norm, what changes are most marked? Start with the coldest bits. Arctic summer sea ice goes, allowing more shipping and mining, removing a landscape of which indigenous peoples were once an integral part. Permafrost warms up, and infrastructure built on it founders. Most mountain glaciers shrink; some disappear. Winter snows melt more quickly, and the risks of spring floods and summer water shortages on the rivers they feed increase.
Sea level rises, though by how much is hard to say (see chart 2). Some of the rise will be predictable, in that oceans expand as they get warmer. Some, though, will depend on the behaviour of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps, which cannot be predicted with any certainty. Less than half a metre by 2100 would be a lucky break; a metre-plus is possible; more than two is very unlikely, but possible later.
Even as the waters rise, many coasts will be sinking because of the subsidence that follows as cities suck up groundwater. Deltas are doubly damned, since any subsidence is often coupled with a lessened supply of replenishing sediment, which is often trapped upstream by irrigation, hydropower production and flood-control projects. One estimate puts 8.7m more people at risk of flooding in deltas by 2050 if sea level follows current trends.
Tropical cyclones, which account for much of the damage the sea does to the land, may become less frequent. But the share of the most destructive—category 4 and category 5 hurricanes—seems likely to increase. And bigger storms do disproportionately greater damage.
In warmer oceans, coral bleaching triggered by temperature stress will be more common. This is bad for fishing and tourism but not necessarily fatal to all the reefs: bleached reefs may be recolonised by new corals. Reefs may also face damage from ocean acidification, an effect of higher CO 2 levels rather than of warming, as may other ecosystems, though the size of the impacts is uncertain. In warmer oceans nutrients in deeper water will be less easily recycled to the surface, which may lead to lower biological productivity overall.
On land, wet places, such as much of South-East Asia, are likely to get wetter, and dry places, such as much of southern Africa and the south-western United States, drier. In northern climes some land will become more suitable for farming as springs come sooner, whereas in the tropics and subtropics some marginal land will become barely inhabitable. These places may be large sources of migration. Such effects are already visible in, for example, the large part of the population of Côte d'Ivoire who come from Burkina Faso.
Increases in average temperature will be less noticeable than those in extremes. According to a comparison of over 20 climate models, by 2050 the probability of a summer warmer than the warmest yet recorded will be between 10% and 50% in much of the world. By 2090 it will be 90% in many places (see map).
People will also have to contend with unpredictable shifts in weather patterns. Many models say the factors that give rise to the Indian monsoon are likely to weaken. The strength of the rainfall within it, though, is likely to rise, because the air will be warmer, and warmer air can hold more water. No one can say how these two trends will play out. Similar uncertainties dog predictions about the great slopping of warmth back and forth across the Pacific known as El Niño and other climatic oscillations. In general, the closer you want to get to firm statements about what is likely to happen, the less adequate current climate science is revealed to be.
It is tempting to imagine that adaptation decisions might wait for models that can provide greater certainty about what might happen where. This is a forlorn hope. Faster computers and new modelling techniques might well provide more details and finer distinctions. But they will not necessarily be more accurate, or capable of being shown to be so: if different models become more precise and as a result their disagreements grow rather than shrink, which are you going to trust? Decisions about adaptation will be made in conditions of pervasive uncertainty. So the trick will be to find ways of adapting to many possible future climates, not to tailor expectations to one future in particular.
Even then, adaptation can help only up to a point. A 2009 review of the cost of warming to the global economy suggests that as much as two-thirds of the total cannot be offset through investment in adaptation, and will be felt through higher prices, lower growth and misery regardless. But adaptation can still achieve a lot.
The best starting point for adaptation is to be rich. It is not foolproof: not even the rich can buy off all hazards, and rich countries and individuals will make poor decisions. The need to restrict farming with subsidised water in a drier south-western United States does not mean that the political means of doing so will be found before damage is done. But wealth buys information (a lot of people are studying what to do in the south-west) and it opens up options. Resources help people adapt both before the fact, by reducing risks, and after it, by aiding recovery from harm.
Wealth can create hedges against the effects of climate change, even if they are not conceived of as such. Insurance markets are a case in point, though they have flaws: a lack of relevant history makes evolving risks hard to price, and government policies often dampen the signals that would otherwise make people more realistically wary of coasts and floodplains. Public-health systems are another: in better-off countries these did far more to reduce the effects of malaria in the 20th century than warming did to worsen them. Economic development should see improvements in health care that will, in aggregate, swamp the specific infectious-disease threats associated with climate change.
Rich countries can also afford big, expensive projects. Studies suggest that although much of the Netherlands lies below sea level or is at risk of river flooding, the Dutch can view the prospect of a rising sea level with a certain equanimity, at least for their own land. Plans outlined in 2008 to deal with a rise of more than two metres by 2200, as well as increased winter flow along the Rhine and Meuse rivers, put the cost of holding at bay the worst flood expected for 10,000 years at €1 billion-2 billion ($1.5 billion-3 billion) a year for a century. That is easily affordable.
Other rich coastal areas have considered similar commitments. The Marina Barrage offers Singapore some protection against floods, as well as improving its ability to store fresh water. London has its Thames Barrier, first imagined after floods in 1953. The barrier was intended to deal with the worst flood expected over a millennium or more. That period looks more testing now than when the barrier was built, but Britain's Met Office thinks the barrier, combined with other measures, is pretty much fit for purpose for this century.
New York might, in principle, protect itself against a hurricane-driven storm surge on top of a higher sea level with a much more massive set of barriers that could seal the Verrazano Narrows and the smaller spans of Throgs Neck, at the base of Long Island Sound, and the Arthur Kill, west of Staten Island. However, as Matthew Kahn, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, points out in his book, “Climatopolis”, the politics of such huge and hugely costly engineering might prove difficult. New Amsterdam does not have the attitudes of old Amsterdam.
Poor countries will often lack the financial means, technical expertise or political institutions necessary for such endeavours. Yet they are often at increased risk, principally because they are usually more dependent on farming than rich countries, and no other human activity is so intimately bound up with the weather. Crops are sensitive to changes in patterns of rainfall and peak temperature, as well as to average temperature and precipitation; so are the pests and diseases that attack them.
In its 2007 assessment, the IPCC's picture of agriculture in a warmer world was one of two halves. In low latitudes higher temperatures are likely to shorten growing seasons and stress plants in other ways. In high latitudes, if warming is moderate, growing seasons are expected to lengthen and yields to rise, in part because raised CO 2 levels aid photosynthesis.
The IPCC thus sees agriculture as being not too badly affected by 2°C of warming, as long as you stick to global averages. Above that (probably towards the end of the century) things look bad. Some think they look bad well before that. One worry is that a lot of harm may be done if temperatures breach certain thresholds even briefly. A fine-grained analysis of historical data from the United States by Wolfram Schlenker of Columbia University and Michael Roberts of North Carolina State University found such thresholds for maize (corn), soya and cotton, America's largest crops by value. One extremely hot day, their model suggests, can cut annual productivity by 7%. Applying their findings to models of a world with unabated emissions, they found yield declines of 63-82% by the end of the century, with hefty drops even in the relatively clement first half.
This study, like many, made no provision for CO 2 fertilisation. The question of how to do so is vexed. If plants grow in chambers with high concentrations of CO 2, yields rise a lot (which is why tomato farmers and others use CO 2 in their greenhouses). More realistic experiments using carefully contrived sprays of CO 2 upwind of crops show a much lower bonus. Remarkably, experiments like this, which provide the nearest analogues to what the world may be like in a few decades' time, are carried out in only a handful of places. None regularly looks at tropical crops.
Against the uncertainty over thresholds and CO 2 fertilisation must be weighed farmers' ability to adapt to change and improve yields. Despite many warnings of doom, yields of arable crops have grown remarkably in the past half-century. Among other things, this intensification of farming has saved a great deal of wilderness from the plough: to feed today's population with 1960's yields would require an area of extra farmland roughly as big as Russia. In that it avoids deforestation, intensification is one of a number of adaptation strategies which also help mitigation.
Successful adaptation will require not just expanded research into improved crop yields and tolerance of temperature and water scarcity, but also research into new ways of managing pests, improving and conserving soil, cropping patterns and crop-management techniques that add resilience. Such research—and its application—will make it more likely that enough food for 9 billion people can be grown in a three-degrees-hotter world without much of the planet's remaining uncultivated land or pastures coming under the plough.
If yields cannot be improved sufficiently, though, desperation may lead to more wilderness being uprooted or burned. A headlong rush for biofuels might have similar effects. This would be one of those adaptations to climate change that looked a lot like an adverse impact. Faster loss of species is highly likely in many ecosystems as a result of warming; greatly expanding farmlands will make this worse. It will also add to the fundamental problem, as clearing forests releases greenhouse gases.
Even if the world contrives to keep feeding itself without too much ecosystem damage, many of those dependent on agriculture or in poverty could still suffer a great deal. Regional droughts could wreak havoc, with bad ones causing global surges in food prices.
Many of the millions of poor farming households in poor countries, who make up the bulk of the world's agricultural labour force if not its agricultural output, already face more variable weather than farmers in temperate countries do. That and a lack of social safety-nets makes most of them highly risk-averse, which further limits their ability to undertake some adaptation strategies, such as changing crop varieties and planting patterns. They will often prefer surer chances but lower yields. Worse, in bad weather a whole region's crops suffer together.
Here as elsewhere, there is a role for insurance to transfer and spread the risks. Marshall Burke of the University of California, Berkeley, a specialist in climate impacts, argues that the best agricultural-insurance options for developing countries will pay out not when crops fail (which reduces incentives for the farmer) but when specific climatic events occur, such as rainfall of less than a set level. But getting farmers to invest in such schemes, even with small premiums, is hard. It also requires finding reinsurance for the local insurer, because there is a high chance of a lot of claims coming in at once. What's more, actuarial accounts of future climate risk are necessarily speculative and error-prone.
Farmers may be cheered by the thought that food prices are likely to rise. For poor farmers, who spend much of their income on food, this is a mixed blessing, especially if higher frequencies of drought make prices more volatile too. For poor people more generally, it is even worse news.
Even if prices are higher, crops more resilient and insurance more readily available, abandoning the farm may be the way many farmers choose to adapt. It may be prudent even before the fact. Paul Collier, Gordon Conway and Tony Venables, three British development specialists, have suggested that attempts to provide anticipatory help to poor African farmers could be badly overdone. Better to encourage them into cities and to reform labour markets, restrictions on the opening and closing of firms and so forth in ways that will help them earn money.
More than half the world's people live in cities already. Three-quarters or more may do so by mid-century. Encouraging this trend further, at least in some places, may be a useful way of reducing the economy's exposure to climate change. Statistical analyses by Salvador Barrios of the European Union's Joint Research Centre and his colleagues suggest that climate change is already a factor in African urbanisation. A related study shows strong climate effects on sub-Saharan agriculture in Africa not seen elsewhere, which is not perhaps surprising given the huge effect of the 1980s droughts across the Sahel.
A downside to urbanisation is that cities are hotter than the surrounding countryside, creating what meteorologists call “urban heat islands”. But there are ways of dealing with this. More greenery in a city, spread through streets and over roofs, means more cooling as water evaporates from leaves; the bits which are not green can be painted white, to reflect sunlight.
And cities have intrinsic advantages. City dwellers' emissions per person tend to be lower, and the more planners can do to increase population density the better. Protecting a single port city from floods is easier than protecting a similar population spread out along a coastline of fishing villages (though when things go wrong disasters can be correspondingly larger and harder to address). Cities have higher rates of innovation and of developing new businesses, business models and social strategies, formal or informal.
Ideally, there would be opportunities to move to cities in other countries, too; the larger the region in which people can travel, the easier it is to absorb migrants from struggling areas. This is one reason why adaptation is easier for large countries or integrated regions. Within the EU, Greeks and Italians will be better placed to move to cooler climes than inhabitants of similarly sized countries elsewhere.
The cost of all this adaptation is hard to judge—and is another area where adaptation and impact become confused. Melissa Dell of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her colleagues argue that in developing countries GDP growth has been lower in hotter years than in cooler ones. This may carry over into longer-term increases in temperature. The mechanism is obscure: it may simply be that overheated people work less hard. That can be seen either as adaptation or as a worrying impact, slowing down the economic growth which is the surest foundation for other, more positive adaptations.
If climate change does slow poor countries' growth rates, the onus on rich ones to help will be even larger. This was recognised to some extent in the Copenhagen accord, which proposed that $100 billion a year should flow from north to south by 2020, to be split between investments in mitigation and adaptation. But whereas investments in mitigation are fairly easy to understand—build windmills not coal-fired power stations, and so on—those in adaptation are harder to grasp. Action on climate bleeds into more general development measures.
The poorest countries all have wish-lists for adaptation funding, drawn up in the UN climate-convention process of which the Copenhagen and Cancún meetings are part. Money and know-how are essential, but so is example. Rich countries can show, through their own programmes for flood defence, zoning laws, sewerage and so on that adaptation must be part of the mainstream of political and economic life, not an eccentric and marginal idea. Adaptation by and for the poor alone is likely to be poor adaptation.President Donald Trump's threat to end protections for those who entered the U.S. illegally as children could spark a new wave of immigration and asylum requests, some analysts warn.
If that happens, they say, Canada's already stressed systems would come under further pressure and potentially intensify a backlash against newcomers.
About 1.7 million illegal migrants to the United States – the vast majority of them Mexicans – are either registered or qualify for registration under a five-year-old policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA. The program, which Trump wants ended, allows them to obtain work permits and protects them from deportation.
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Ratna Omidvar: Canada must dare to help the 'DREAMers'
If even a fraction of those look north, it would still be a significant number of so-called Dreamers who might try to make Canada home.
Guidy Mamann, an immigration lawyer and policy analyst in Toronto, says he has already started getting calls and emails asking if Canada is an option.
"Now that there is a real question as to whether or not there is a permanent solution for these DACA kids, many of them are going to start to look towards Canada for both legal and possibly illegal entry," Mamann said. "I suspect that we're going to start seeing a real flow at this point because there is so much uncertainty."
Younger Mexicans in the U.S. – those without completed higher education or solid work experience – are unlikely to qualify under Canada's normal immigrant requirements. As a result, some might opt to claim refugee status, a process likely to take several years to play out, even for those whose claims are rejected.
Martha Batiz, an award-winning Mexican-Canadian writer and academic, said Canada would do well to put a system in place to welcome Dreamers, many of whom have grown up in the U.S. and are therefore culturally adapted and speak English as well as Spanish.
Otherwise, she said, they might feel desperate enough to create the kind of risky and uncontrolled influx recently seen with Haitian and African migrants.
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"Canada has to step up," Batiz said. "It would be better to have some system in place, even if it's an imperfect system, so that (Dreamers) can apply legally, and Canada can decide who they are going to welcome."
Latest statistics from the Immigration and Refugee Board show a dramatic increase in asylum requests from Mexicans. In 2016, for example, 242 Mexicans applied for refugee status. Almost three times as many – 660 – such claims were recorded in the first seven months of this year alone.
Part of the increase stems from Canada's decision to lift a visa requirement last December, making it easier for Mexicans to come to Canada and claim asylum here. A spokeswoman said the board did not keep data on how many of the claimants had come from the U.S. Nevertheless, roughly six Mexican refugee claims are turned down for each one deemed founded, figures show.
Other reported figures indicate a surge in detentions of Mexican nationals by Canadian border agents this year. Canada Border Service Agency said it could not immediately respond to a request for further information.
For the moment, at least, Dreamers have some breathing room because Trump has given Congress six months to come up with a plan to deal with them. As a result, Mamann said, the real pressure on Canada is likely to grow as the deadline nears, further straining Canada's immigration and refugee systems, and the goodwill of Canadians.
"If we feel that we are being taken advantage of," Mamann said, "we'll shut the door and that will hurt legitimate refugees."
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The issue is already a political flashpoint.
For example, the Parti Quebecois blamed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's tweet welcoming the world's persecuted people for a torrent of asylum seekers – including thousands of Haitians from the U.S. – into Quebec. PQ Leader Jean-Francois Lisee said last week that many were "victims" of false hope given them by the federal government. On the other hand, Ontario Sen. Ratna Omidvar said this week that Canada should put out the welcome mat for 30,000 Dreamers.[Freedombox-discuss] Announcing FreedomBuddy v0.4: "Good Enough"
Hi folks, after 8 months of development, FreedomBuddy version 0.4 has been released. Proudly, it's being released exactly a year after the initial design process began (President's Day 2012 to President's Day 2013). I'm happy to call this version "stable and useful enough for people other than me to test." https://github.com/nickdaly/freedombuddy In these 8 months, all the changes have been under the hood, with few to no UI changes. We've moved to a three-tier server-client model, to work around existing and to prevent future incompatibilities between server libraries. The FreedomBuddy server enables the FreedomBuddy command line client, which listens for requests from all the other external connectors. This means that adding additional connectors will require zero overhead or cooperation from the FreedomBuddy core, significantly lowering the bar to create connectors to different protocols, overall. I've also put together a quickstart guide that tries to walk the user through a very basic setup process. Please read through it and offer any suggestions that'll make it easier to understand and use. If you're interested in helping me test out a distributed network, please get in touch. Thanks for your time, Nick -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 835 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/attachments/20130218/16c0748d/attachment.pgp>DEPEW, N.Y. -- Some 850 people came out Tuesday to hear former president Bill Clinton speak in the Buffalo area on behalf of his wife, Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
The atmosphere inside Grapevine Banquets was described by Hillary supporters as electric, while outside, there were several protesters and a separate rally for Bernie Sanders, Clinton's primary challenger.
Those who came to hear Bill Clinton speak say having him come to Western New York to campaign for his wife shows how much they value voters in the area.
"The Clintons have always recognized the importance of Western New York to any campaign," said MaryRose Gaughan of Hamburg.
"These past few years, Buffalo, for the first time in my life feels like an up-and-coming city, and this is just like the icing on the cake, a little bit of a solidifier when it comes to the ability to have people of this caliber come." said Jasmine Smith of Buffalo.
Those we spoke with appreciated hearing Hillary Clinton's plans to address issues that matter to them.
"There were a ton of young people in the room, and he talked a lot about student loan debt and the mountain people have to climb when they leave college," said Jason Clement of Buffalo.
"One of the main points he hit was job creation here in Western New York, how he feels that we can bring back industrial work here in Western New York," said Gaughan.
Along with what she wants to do, President Clinton highlighted what his wife has already accomplished, including the impact she's had locally; from helping workers sickened at Bethlehem Steel, to supporting the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station.
"I think it's ultimately important because we're all just human, time goes by, we forget, we need reminders, we need triggers, and what he talked about today were some of the best triggers we could have," said Jearold LaMotte from the City of Tonawanda.
"He went through her entire resume, how affective she was in Arkansas, how wonderful she was as Secretary of State, and most importantly, what a great Senator she was for us. It's clear no other candidate has close to the experience she has," said Karen Greenspan of Williamsville.
As for what will happen in Western New York on primary day?
"This is Hillary country, we've got this," said Clement.|Peter Boettke|
Ronald Coase passed away yesterday at the age of 102. Coase was a productive (and feisty, though always gentlemanly) scholar to the end. In 2012, he published How China Became Capitalist and did a podcast with Russ Roberts for EconTalk on his life, career, and the new book.
As readers here will no doubt know, Coase became a famous economic thinker based on his "Nature of the Firm" (1937) and "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960). While many younger readers will associate Coase with the University of Chicago and what they understand the field of Law and Economics to be, Ronald Coase didn't join the staff at the University of Chicago Law School until 1964. His formative intellectual background was at the London School of Economics in the 1930s, where Hayek loomed as a large intellectual influence (along with Robbins and Arnold Plant). The ideas behind Coase's examination of the nature of the firm, he told us on numerous ocassions, were born in contemplation of Plants discussion of the socialist calculation controversy and his everyday observations of the organization of business activities during his study trip to the US. As he began teaching, he had to present a lecture on the firm and these ideas clicked.
The Coase theorem as laid out in "The Problem of Social Cost" emerged out of his studying of broadcasting rights and the FCC, and it was written and published while Coase was at the University of Virginia, working alongside of James Buchanan and Warren Nutter at the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy. "The Thomas Jefferson Center", James Buchanan wrote in 1958, "strives to carry on the honorable tradition of 'political economy' -- the study of what makes for a 'good society.' Political economists stress the technical economic principles that one must understand in order to assess alternative arrangements for promoting peaceful cooperation and productive specialization among free men." It is this second sentence that I want to emphasize today because Coase's analysis is only properly understood within that context.
As Deirdre McCloskey has famously said: "Something like a dozen people in the world understand that the 'Coase Theorem' is not the Coase Theorem. (I'll adopt the convention of putting quotation marks around the non-Coasean 'Coase Theorem'.) One of this select group is Ronald Coase himself, so I suspect we blessed few are right." My good friend Steve Medema has written most extensively about the substantive content of the Coase theorem, and the professional sociology around the 'Coase Theorem'. See here and here for recent statements by Steve. On things Coase, I would trust Steve more than any other source.
The point of Coase's intellectual exercise was to get economists (and others) to think not of the zero-transaction cost world, but instead about the role that alternative institutions play in ameliorating or exacerbating conflicts in a world of positive transaction costs. It is all about comparative institutional analysis.
One of my favorite passages from Coase actually comes from the FCC paper, where he states:
This "novel theory" (novel with Adam Smith) is, of course, that the allocation of resources should be determined by the forces of the market rather than a result of government decisions. Quite apart from the misallocations which are the result of political pressures, an administrative agency which attempts to perform this function normally carried out by the pricing mechanism operates under two handicaps. First of all, it lacks the precise monetary measure of benefit and cost provides by the market. Second, it cannot, by the nature of things, be in possession of all the relevant information possessed by the managers of every business which uses or might use radio frequencies, to say nothing of the preferences of consumers for the various goods and services in the production of which radio frequencies could be used." (1959, 18)
In my reading, what Coase does in this short passage is lay the ground work for robust political economy by combining the insights from Smith and Hume, Mises and Hayek, and Buchanan and Tullock. Or, as Coase wrote in the closing paragraph of "The Problem of Social Cost":
in choosing between social arrangements within the context of which individual decisions are made, we have to bear |
When it comes to Cuba, a neighbor of ours, our foreign policy actually has a very realistic opportunity of helping further the cause of freedom and liberty on the island. And, in fact, what Cuba offers that China and Vietnam did not is the opportunity to engage with a real and vibrant civil society on the island. And they were not consulted. They were completely ignored and left out of this equation and they rightfully feel betrayed.
SCHIEFFER: All right, well, Senator, thank you so much. We appreciate it.
RUBIO: Thank you.
SCHIEFFER: And now on this very busy morning, we go to Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. He is in Clemson, South Carolina.
Let me just start at the top here and talk a little bit about this situation in New York, Senator Graham. As a Republican, what do you think about this tweet that George Pataki has put out where he basically called out Democrats Eric Holder and the New York mayor for -- and said some of the blood is on their hands? Do you agree with that?
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: I blame the shooter, and nobody else.
SCHIEFFER: All right. Any more to add to that?
GRAHAM: No.
SCHIEFFER: Do you think that's connected to what has happened in these other cases?
GRAHAM: I think that the mayor of New York has probably undercut his cops and the attorney general is trying to walk a fine line.
What happened in Missouri, I understood why the cop had to defend himself. When you see the video in New York, did that man really have to die? But the tone they're setting around the rhetoric regarding the cops incites crazy people. But I blame the shooter.
SCHIEFFER: Now let's talk a little about this Cuban surprise that we got from President Obama to resume relations with Cuba. You were very much against that.
Some people would argue, Senator Graham, that this is a good place for Americans to be selling American products. We sell a lot of grain down there already. We sell medical products under the heading of humanitarian aid.
GRAHAM: Yes.
SCHIEFFER: Why do you think it's such a bad idea to do that?
GRAHAM: Well, North Korea would be great place to sell products. They don't have anything.
When America engages a country, we do so with our moral voice, just not cigars and rum. So, for the last 50 years, Cuba's gone from being an interventionist communist power in Angola to Grenada, to a backwater, poor dictatorship. And without any reason, we have changed our policy.
Look in your vault of CBS News stories in 2013 and 2014 and show me one where Cuba is becoming more democratic. As to what the Congress will do, Bob, if you are being offered the ambassadorship to Cuba, turn it down because you don't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting confirmed.
The Congress is not going to reinforce this policy. There will be no confirmation of an ambassador to Cuba because the Castro brothers are terrible dictators who deserve no new engagement. They deserve to be condemned and isolated.
And when it comes to funding any proposed embassy in Cuba, I'm in charge of all foreign aid, all State Department funding. I will be the chairman of the Foreign Operations Subcommittee. I will do everything I can to limit to size and scope of this embassy, because you are rewarding people who kidnap Americans and who really are still communists in every way.
SCHIEFFER: Senator, do you think that Cuba at this point in time represents a security threat to America?
GRAHAM: Last year, the Cubans were shipping arms to North Korea in violation of the embargo.
Yes. Cuba to me represents everything that threatens us. And who are we? We believe in freedom and democracy. Are we safe when somebody right off our shores practices totalitarian communism in our backyard? They were actively trying to send weapons to North Korea a year ago. Should we be worried about North Korea? Yes. Should we be worried about Cuba? Yes.
But Iran is watching. I can only imagine what the ayatollahs in Iran must be saying to themselves when our president called the North Korean attack on our way of life, not just a movie, vandalism, and when he reaches out to a communist dictatorship that has done nothing to change.
They must be feeling pretty good about their chance to negotiate a deal with America.
SCHIEFFER: What about North Korea? What should the president do now?
GRAHAM: Make it so hard on the North Koreans, they don't want to do this in the future. Reimpose sanctions lifted by President Bush. Put them back on the state sponsor of terrorism list. Put China on notice that it's just not a movie. It's our way of life.
America is not a building with a symbol, but is a way of life, to do commerce, to make a product and receive a profit, to go and see what you would like, to produce something that is edgy. That's what we're about. And they attacked who we are. And when the president calls this an act of vandalism, that just really bothers me greatly. It is an act of terrorism. And I hope he will respond forcefully, because the Iranians are watching everything this man does. When he draws the line in Syria against Assad and nothing happens to Assad -- he's now saying he's contained Putin.
Putin owns the Crimea, has dismembered the Ukraine. And the only reason Putin is suffering is because gas prices have gone down because of OPEC. Nothing we have done has put Putin in a box. And the Iranians are sizing up Obama. And I don't like the way they view him, because I think he has been weakened, indecisive from one end of the planet to the other.
SCHIEFFER: You're not talking about taking military action against North Korea, are you?
GRAHAM: I'm talking about -- well, you can't attack their First Amendment because they don't have one. I doubt if they have many movie theaters.
I'm talking about putting them in a spot in the world where they are diminished beyond where they are today. I'm talking about consulting with China and holding them accountable. Without China, there is no North Korea. Reimposing sanctions. But what's the next attack coming.
Could it be on our power plants? Could it be on our financial services? This is the first act of cyber-warfare that's really gotten a lot of attention. How the president handles this is very important.
SCHIEFFER: You said recently that if the president, if I remember your words, released anybody else from Guantanamo Bay that you thought maybe impeachment was in order.
GRAHAM: I didn't say impeachment. I said there would be a constitutional crisis. And it is coming.
Senator Kelly Ayotte will introduce legislation in 2015 to put a moratorium on all releases from Guantanamo Bay because of a 30 percent recidivism rate. There are all kind of restrictions on transferring prisoners that the president is ignoring.
Rather than closing Guantanamo Bay, he should be filling up the place because terrorism on the march. I, along with Senator McCain, want to outlaw water-boarding. But this president takes every terrorist, reads them the Miranda rights, gives them a lawyer, and holds them for a few days and puts them in a federal court. We can't gather intelligence.
There will be one hell of a fight between the president and Republicans and Democrats in 2015 over Guantanamo Bay.
SCHIEFFER: All right, we have to leave it there, Senator. Thank you so much.
GRAHAM: Merry Christmas. SCHIEFFER: We will be back in a minute with a top Democrat.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SCHIEFFER: And we're back now with Maryland's Democratic Congressman Chris Van Hollen. He was on that plane that went to Cuba last week to return American Alan Gross.
Well, you heard Lindsey Graham. You heard Marco Rubio. I guess I don't even have to ask you a question. Just ask, what is your response to what they said here?
REP. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN (D), MARYLAND: Well, Bob, we heard a lot of rhetorical chest-thumping in a very short period of time, but I don't think it actually advances the goals of American foreign policy, whereas what the president did with respect to Cuba does advance our goals.
We know that the policy of the last 54 years has been a total failure, on its own merits, on own standards, that the idea was that we were going to pressure Cuba in a way that would move the Castro brothers out of power, increase more democracy. In fact, the opposite has happened.
We have isolated the Cuban people, but we have actually reinforced and helped sustain the power of the Castro brothers. So, more engagement directly with the Cuban people, more travel, more trade, more ideas back and forth, that will over time, I think, help loosen things up from the bottom up. This isn't going to happen tomorrow.
And we're not expecting a transformation in the views of the Castro brothers, but more engagement will work better than the policy of the last 54 year.
SCHIEFFER: Well, we heard Fidel Castro's brother. He's already said, well, thanks a lot, America, but we're not changing.
VAN HOLLEN: But the theory behind this was not that the Castro brothers were going to suddenly change their views. That was the theory behind the failed policy of the last 54 years, that by putting pressure on the island, that somehow the Castro brothers would say, hey, we're going to have free elections.
That failed. We have a very different concept here. The idea is more direct communication with the Cuban people will over time create more personal freedom and then over time create conditions for more political freedom. It isn't going to happen overnight.
SCHIEFFER: Well, I think that may be the understatement of the year, if what people in the bureaucracy in the State Department and other places around town have been saying, because, while you can say you're going to do this, and say we now have relations, there are a lot of things that Republicans or those who oppose this can do to block this.
This is going to take some doing. And Congress will be called on to vote on a lot of it. How do you get this done?
VAN HOLLEN: Well, first of all, the measures the president announced the other day can take place immediately.
In other words, he can resume diplomatic relations. We can set up an embassy. We can, of course, increase travel, remittances, more trade in the area of telecommunications, which will help open up Cuban to more communication with the outside world. Those are things the president can do right away.
Now, to confirm an ambassador of course needs Senate ratification, so there could be a debate about that. And, clearly, to lift the embargo would require congressional action. And no one believes that is going to happen in the next couple of weeks or maybe even the next year.
But I do believe that greater engagement with the Cuban people and through the private sector in the Cuban economy, which right now is very small, but we can begin to open it up. That's the way you at least get the conditions for more personal freedom over time. Look, we know the last 54 years didn't work.
(CROSSTALK)
SCHIEFFER: Yes, but if you don't change that embargo, it's not going to -- not much is going to happen here, is there?
VAN HOLLEN: Well, I think a fair amount can happen immediately in terms of more travel, because now people can travel under a general license, more trade, especially in the area of telecommunications.
The banking system -- the banking connections will change, so that will facilitate greater interaction. But, of course, lifting the embargo remains, I think, the long-term goal. That does require congressional action.
SCHIEFFER: All right.
Well, Senator -- I mean, Congressman, we thank you very much.
VAN HOLLEN: Well, thank you.
SCHIEFFER: I know that was quite a trip for you to go down there.
VAN HOLLEN: Well, thank you.
SCHIEFFER: Thank you. Thank you, Congressman.
We will be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SCHIEFFER: And we have got a lot more FACE THE NATION coming up, including my commentary about saying goodbye to an awful year, 2014, plus our CBS News panel. So, stay with us. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SCHIEFFER: Well, some of our stations are leaving us now, but, most of you, we will be right back with part two of FACE THE NATION.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SCHIEFFER: And welcome back to FACE THE NATION. Joining us now as we continue our 66-year tradition at CBS News, the end of the year correspondents' round up.
Jan Crawford is our chief legal correspondent. Margaret Brennan covers the State Department. David Martin, our national security correspondent. On the other side of the table John Dickerson, our political director, Nancy Cordes, our congressional correspondent and Major Garrett, our chief White House correspondent.
Welcome to you all. You don't look like you've been here 66 years. Glad to have you back.
I always say this is one of my favorite things at CBS News and I can remember when I was first at CBS News, hoping they would invite me to be at the table some time. And it was a long time before they did. Let's talk a little bit about -- well, let's just start with North Korea.
Margaret, what are the president's options really when you come down to it?
MARGARET BRENNAN, CBS NEWS STATE DEPARTMENT CORRESPONDENT: This is bad movie about a bad movie that you have in creating this international incident in some ways.
Diplomatically, the tools are limited. Most likely you put North Korea back on a terror blacklist, a list they were taken off of in 2008 by the Bush administration in an effort to keep them going in what ended up to be failed nuclear talks.
And along with that you get more targeted sanctions, directed at leadership. Keep in mind this country is already very much sanctioned to the hilt.
SCHIEFFER: What about beyond that, David?
Can we take some sort of cyber action? There seems clear to me we do have certain capabilities in that area.
DAVID MARTIN, CBS NEWS CORRESPONDENT: The U.S. certainly has a set of capabilities. The question is, do you want to expose those capabilities on such a puny target as the North Korean infrastructure?
You would be giving away more in your techniques of how you conduct these attacks, I think, than you would be gaining. I think most people believe that the most effective thing you can do is go after the leadership bank accounts that are overseas. The Bush administration did that in 2005 and succeeded in freezing the accounts and North Korea very quickly started to change its behavior enough so that the funds got unfrozen.
Now, since then, the leadership has done a better job of hiding bank accounts. But still I think that is the surest way to make North Korea pay a price for what now the president has called not an act of war but just an act of vandalism.
SCHIEFFER: Well, what does that --
MAJOR GARRETT, CBS NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Let me tell you, Bob, at the White House there was this sort of joke -- speaking to David's point about a cyber counterstrike.
We can attack the one North Korean computer. Someone would say, well, yes, the Atari computer.
So that does suggest that the White House doesn't really view that as a productive line of retaliation, to go after them in a cyber way. This financial mechanism is by far much more important.
But I think the other issue, whenever you deal with North Korea you must deal with our conversations ongoing with China. This becomes a front and center issue in everything that we do with China economically, militarily, in climate, every other conversation now, North Korea has injected itself unhelpfully into that conversation. That complicates things for China.
And I will tell you, in the last 12 months, China has been more helpful than not in dealing with our concerns with North Korea. They have to get back in the game.
SCHIEFFER: John Dickerson, a pretty unusual thing for an American president to go after an American company as he went after Sony, saying they just set a bad example.
JOHN DICKERSON, CBS NEWS POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: He was very forceful about that. He said he wished they would have talked to him first, to give him a little presidential guidance on how to handle the issue, how to deal with their theaters.
He said he recognized that the company had its own interests and legal issues but it was very forceful in that press conference he gave at the end of the year, where he kicked off that -- it was sort of emblematic of the entire press conference; he had a lot of theories about a lot of things. He was much looser than we'd seen before. And that was really one of the strongest examples of that, is his strong position.
SCHIEFFER: How did all this go down on the Hill, Nancy? Of course most of Congress was not here when we found it about most of this.
NANCY CORDES, CBS NEWS CORRESPONDENT: They were gone. But the reaction that we heard from lawmakers is, well, we need to do something. What that something is, there is absolutely no consensus. And I think lawmakers will want to know lot more when they come back from the holidays about what the options are before they get behind one strategy or the other.
SCHIEFFER: What street this year going to be like, Jan? JAN CRAWFORD, CBS NEWS CORRESPONDENT: I think I'll leave the predictions until the end. You look back at so much what's surprising in 2014, what is 2015 going to be like when you talk about North Korea, the president and this new posture?
And I agree with you completely, he seems kind of freed now to do some things that he'd been talking about from the beginning, including closing Guantanamo, which I think will be really interesting to see how forceful he is with that.
Every candidate, including going back to George Bush, had said they wanted to close Guantanamo. The president said that was one of the first things he wanted to do when he took office. It's not so easy. And I don't know legally and politically how he could do it. I don't think he can.
SCHIEFFER: Well, you know, Lindsey Graham has been one of those, you heard what Lindsey, Senator Graham said this morning. He said I think we ought to put more people down there.
CRAWFORD: If you look at that, what Senator Graham said to you, that is what you're going to see on the Hill and going into 2016, Democrats -- do you think Democrats are going to get behind the president wanting to send potentially 60 -- I mean, pretty serious terrorists in the United States.
SCHIEFFER: What do you do with them if you close them down?
That's the question. I mean, I'd think --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: -- release about half of them.
GARRETT: And we can't try them, either, because of either contaminated evidence or difficulties in presenting that evidence from a national security or a classified perspective. So there is, as the president has said routinely, a real conundrum here.
Where do you put them, how do you try them, do you hold them forever? And if you do, in what way is that consistent with American judicial values?
BRENNAN: Where you could make progress is on the dozens who have already been cleared for transfer. That's what you saw just this weekend with the four Afghans who did go back to Afghanistan.
And diplomats are working on this furiously, trying to resettle them, find a country who will take those who have been cleared of charges or bring them back to the countries where they were taken from in the first place. And you are going to see large numbers transferred --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I agree with that. But that still leaves about half --
Right. So then it becomes what do you do with those. I think the president will try to argue that it's just too expensive, it's $2 million basically an inmate a year to detain them there versus bringing them here.
But I don't think anybody is going to care. Polls show the American people are overwhelmingly opposed to this going into a presidential election. Democrats are not going to want to be on the -- holding the banner of let's bring some terrorists over here.
SCHIEFFER: Speaking of things that are easier said than done, let's talk about the Cuban surprise here. The president says he's going to reestablish relations with Cuba. Obviously there's going to be considerable opposition from Republicans, but I think Republicans will face some hard choices here.
Here you have the U.S. Chamber of Commerce coming out strongly for this. You have the Texas Business Council. There's no more Republican state right now than the state of Texas.
But all of that grain that we're already selling to Cuba as humanitarian aid, it goes through the port of Corpus Christi, Texas. That is the main embarkation point for aid to Cuba.
I think this is going to be something that is going to be debated and I think it's not going to break on party lines.
CORDES: It will. But I think at the end of the day you still have far more Republicans in the House and the Senate who favor placing restrictions and keeping restrictions on Cuba. You do have Republicans from farm states and maybe more Libertarian leaning Republicans like Rand Paul, who feel that, what we've tried hasn't worked. Let's open things up.
But I still think by and large Republicans think we've got to keep restrictions on Cuba until we see some Democratic action. And most importantly the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, and the new Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, both oppose lifting the trade embargo. And as long as that is the state of play, I don't think you're going to see any votes with it.
SCHIEFFER: Margaret, my sense of it is that this came not only as a surprise to most people in Washington, but to lot of people at the State Department.
BRENNAN: Well, this is a policy that many diplomats would privately support and have for some time, though publicly were unable to.
But you're right, having foreign policy negotiations directed out of the White House, not the State Department, did ruffle a few feathers, that's fair to say.
But I think the way to frame this what's actually changed when you talk to people at the State Department who area now going to be on the front lines of that diplomacy, is slow, it is deliberate, it is quiet. This is not about Americans getting on a U.S. airline and bringing back Cuban cigars to sell. This is going to be about, as you rightly said, the business community. That is who is going to benefit up front.
It's going to take another six months before we look at whether Cuba comes off that terror sponsor list and then you might open up more sanctions being lifted. But this is really going to be about migration issues, smaller scale things than the way this is being framed right now.
SCHIEFFER: David, what did they did think about this over at the Pentagon?
MARTIN: Cuba had long receded as a national security threat. So it's not like an opening to Cuba suddenly releases the Pentagon from some great burden of defending against an attack from Cuba. It was always just a nuisance value. So there was -- it was a favorable development but not a game changer in any way for the Pentagon.
SCHIEFFER: You know what I thought was interesting about the president's end of the year news conference? Not a mention of terrorism. ISIS did not come up once. Syria did not really come up. Did immigration come up? I'm trying to remember. I don't think it did. It was mostly about Cuba. It was mostly about...
CORDES: And the irony is...
SCHIEFFER:... North Korea.
CORDES:... these big issues came up right at the end of the year, so they kind of dominated the discussion. But I think in the new year, you know, North Korea and even possibly Cuba are going to kind of recede because you have got really pressing issues.
You know, the president is going to want authorization of military force to go against ISIS, that is going to be a huge debate. They're going to be talking about Iran. These are the foreign policy issues that are going to dominate.
GARRETT: And, of course, the president wanted to put a bow, literally, on the economic year for the United States of America. He feels very, very good about that. One truism about that, however, is that the economy improved and Washington had nothing to do with it other than getting out of the way, OK?
None of the president's big domestic initiatives that he proposed in the State of the Union Address got across the finish line, and yet the economy improved. Washington basically didn't scare anybody with the threat of government shutdown or a default, and the economy, using its own means, its own moxie and its own energy, created economic growth and jobs.
And that's a telltale signal, I think, to policymakers in Washington, about what you can and can't do, and the limits of your own aspiration. DICKERSON: So the funny thing will be is, how do they take in that lesson? Because you could see a way in which an improved economy means more money, more revenue coming in, which means you want to have the fight over scarcity and the way we've had it over the last several years, which could encourage more mischief, more efforts to try and actually get some things done.
If the lesson of the last couple of -- of this year is, don't get in the way, they are still all going to be pushing to try to get in the way. And the president will be trying to keep the economy -- you know, his legacy now so tied to that economic upswing as it continues.
(CROSSTALK)
SCHIEFFER: Excuse me, let's -- I have to clear my throat. So we're going to take a little break here and we'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SCHIEFFER: Back now with our CBS News correspondents roundtable.
Jan Crawford, what is going to happen on the court? Is Justice Ginsburg going to retire?
CRAWFORD: Well, I think we have to take her at her word. She says she's not. She's 81 years old. She recently had a stent put in. But she was, you know, four or five days later right back on the bench. She's an active questioner. And she has made clear that she's not going to give President Obama his third nomination.
She said pretty bluntly, who would be better than me?
(LAUGHTER)
CRAWFORD: And from a liberal perspective, I think she's right, particularly with Republicans going in to take over Senate.
So I think President Obama probably has got to be content with making two nominations to the Supreme Court. The interesting question is, the next president. I mean, obviously the Supreme Court is a president's most lasting legacy.
I mean, they're up there for generations affecting American law and life long after a president has left town. In the next president's first term four justices will be in their 80s. So that would give next president a real opportunity to shape the direction of the Supreme Court.
President Obama didn't change the direction of the court. He replaced two liberals with two liberals. But if a conservative or liberal were to retire and the president were of a different ideology, it could turn the direction of that court, which now, of course, is 5- 4 conservative.
SCHIEFFER: Let's talk about Capitol Hill, Nancy Cordes. Who is going to be the leader in the Senate? Will it be Mitch McConnell or will it be Ted Cruz?
CORDES: I think it will be Mitch McConnell. I mean, Ted Cruz can still make all kinds of mischief, but I think his influence has waned. I think some of his fellow Republicans feel that in 2014 he went too far a few times.
In fact, just last week he had to apologize to his fellow Republicans because he tried a maneuver that ended up making them stay in town through the weekend, and you know members of Congress like nothing less than having to stick around here, especially at the holidays.
So I think leader McConnell, the first thing he will do, as he has said, is put Keystone pipeline up for a vote. It has already passed the House and is likely to pass the Senate. And then the big question will be, does the president veto it?
And then I think you'll see a series of jobs bills. Republicans want to rack up some early wins so they'll look to pass some bills that they think can get some Democratic support as well, things like making it easier for veterans to transition in to the civilian workforce, things like restoring the 40-hour work week threshold in Obamacare.
They feel that lot of people have been put onto part-time work because companies are trying to evade that threshold in Obamacare. And so they want to restore that. They think can get some Democratic support for that as well.
SCHIEFFER: And what about the State Department, what will be John Kerry's main priorities? What would he like to leave of his legacy if there would be such a thing?
BRENNAN: I don't know if I could speak for him except for, he really believes in pushing diplomacy on Middle East peace, that is going to be quite difficult until after March when you see those Israeli elections.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has been a difficult ally for this administration, and a difficult ally in the peace process here. And you see the Palestinian position weakening. Mahmoud Abbas doesn't have lot to provide to his people at this point.
SCHIEFFER: Do you think there is any chance there will be an agreement on nuclear matters with Iran?
BRENNAN: I believe that you will by March get a clear read on what is going to be possible. And the hope is really an extension of what we've got. This freeze, partial freeze, and partial sanctions relief is really believed to be a solid deal, as you heard the president defending earlier this morning as well.
SCHIEFFER: And, David, at the Pentagon.
MARTIN: Well, you've still got two wars going. You've got the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and you've got the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
U.S. has flown more than 1,300 airstrikes since August against ISIS targets. And just last week the commander of the operation there said it would take three more years just to get Iraqi army up and equipped and ready to retake all of the ground that has been lost. And that's not saying anything about what goes on in Syria. That's just -- that's Iraq first.
SCHIEFFER: David, let me ask you a question that I've often thought about, and maybe -- I don't know if I know the answer to this or not, but I'd like to get your take on it. You know, we talk about how long it takes to train an Iraqi. In World War II, you know, we sent kids to officer candidate school and we had what they called "90- day wonders."
Three months, they sent them off. They spent less time than that training enlisted people. Why is it that it seems to take so long now?
MARTIN: The difference was in World War II those young men had a reason to fight for their country. The government of Iraq has not given many of the young men in that army reason...
SCHIEFFER: That's the best answer I've heard.
John, 2016, what happens?
DICKERSON: Well, it has started already. I think you're going to have two debates inside both parties. The Democrats are having a big debate in their party about the difference between effective leadership and who really speaks for the party. And the Republicans, you talked about it with McConnell and Cruz, the fight between who is going to try and get things done through the system of Washington, and who speaks for the real principles of the party.
What has been unanswered is what Americans want. In the last election only 22 percent thought the next generation would be better than this one. That used to be the definition of the American dream.
SCHIEFFER: And yet only 37 percent of those people voted.
DICKERSON: Well, there's that. And then you've got the nearly 70 percent who say they think the economic system is tilted towards the wealthy. Those two questions, those two issues are not being scratched by the politicians. And that's going to -- those people are out there looking for answers, and these debates within the parties may or may not speak to those needs.
SCHIEFFER: And so do you think Jeb Bush is automatically the front runner?
DICKERSON: He's a front runner if you can be a front runner with 14 percent. There are a lot of people running. He's got the name that everybody knows.
What's interesting about Jeb Bush is he's running as -- even though everybody knows the name -- he's running as a bomb thrower. He's saying that traditional way Republicans have run presidential campaigns are messed up. And I'm going to run a different kind of campaign, that's a really hard thing to do but he's going to try to do it.
SCHIEFFER: And Hillary Clinton will be the nominee of the Democrats?
DICKERSON: If she chooses to run, she'll almost certainly be the nominee. The question for her what is her campaign about?
SCHIEFFER: All right. Prediction time -- Jan Crawford.
CRAWFORD: I'm going to predict that my beloved Alabama Crimson Tide is going to beat a tough and talented Ohio State team on New Year's Day.
(CROSSTALK)
SCHIEFFER: -- now that they don't have to play TCU.
(LAUGHTER)
CRAWFORD: I have to say, (INAUDIBLE), sorry we won't be able to place a bet. We're going to win our 16th national championship over Oregon and Florida State.
SCHIEFFER: David?
MARTIN: The U.S. military will succeed in killing Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS. But it won't make much difference.
BRENNAN: Cracks in the coalition against ISIS are a growing frustration among our Arab allies, that there's not a strategy, just a vague vision for Syria. And keep in mind you still have at least two Americans being held there and three Americans being held in Iran. So hostages and how to handle that is going to continue to be an issue for this president.
CORDES: You're going to have Republicans consider a variety of strategies to dismantle major parts of ObamaCare and then you'll probably see them pass a border security bill aimed at going after what the president did on his own on immigration.
GARRETT: President Obama will talk in the State of the Union and push in the early part of next year for trade promotion authority as a prelude to a trade deal with 12 nations in Asia. He will incite the wrath of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and enjoy it and work with Republican to get it done.
DICKERSON: Republicans will rally around a governor who will be their nominee in 2016 after complaining about a president who was only in the Senate for one year had no executive experience. They're not going to do the same thing.
SCHIEFFER: All right. Well, I want to thank all of you. I want to thank you for being here I'll be right back with some personal thoughts about leaving 2014 behind and you all are a captive audience; you all have to stay and listen.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SCHIEFFER: Finally a little holiday poem.
Holidays hurry; come fast as you can. I'm done with this year, it's all I can stand. Yes, I'm one who thought I'd seen it all. But this was as bad as I can recall. Is it any wonder in a year that's so screwy that topic A in D.C. is a Seth Rogen movie? Some red lines got crossed; the V.A., what a mess. Putin popped off, add that to the stress. The job front got better, not many noticed. But if something went wrong, they blamed it on POTUS. The poor guy got slammed for many a sin; every time he played golf, something else would fall in. The White House forgot to lock the front door. No wonder that guy dropped in to explore. Congress found new ways to dawdle and diddle. If this town caught fire, they'd reach for a fiddle. Mitch the McConnell, just look at him beam, running the Senate, living his dream. But as he figured out, part two of this news is spending more time with his bestie, Ted Cruz. Still, count our blessings; hey, we did survive and who knows what will come of the Cuban surprise. So Merry Christmas all 'round and I wish you good night. But just put this old year way, way out of sight.
Back in a minute.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SCHIEFFER: Thanks, everybody, and we'll see you next week right here on FACE THE NATION.
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